10 Weird Ways Authors Make Millions

99% of authors believe their job is to sell books. Instead, it's something much more fundamental. As an author, your job is to grow an audience of readers who share an interest in the stories you create. On the surface, this might not seem too different, but this changes everything in publishing. Instead of the story First Model of Publishing today, I will show you what the Readers first model for publishing looks like. Thousands of authors already doing it, whether they realize it or not, and they are growing their readerships faster and making more money than ever. Readers first publishing means going beyond the book to grow your business. It means getting creative, playing to your strengths, and most of all, rewriting the rules of publishing to help you and your story stand out. Following are 10 weird ways to that authors are doing just that and making millions let's get into it so the first weird way authors are making millions is through card games. Weird, but actually incredibly cool. Sky Warren is one example of an author who's created romance versus the world. I'll link to this and all the other resources I mention in the description below. And what I love about this is this game is specifically for spicy romance book lovers. So Sky Warren writes spicy books. Now she's creating a card game for readers who like spicy books. All of a sudden she is something else. It's very tangential to what she's doing that she's able to market and that she's able to bring readers into her world. And the deck seems like it's done really well. It has some great reviews and I haven't played it yet, but part of me is tempted to play it and I don't even read spicy books. Now I want to give another example so you can really see how this card game thing isn't just a one off thing, but actually the creating games specifically for readers who would be interested in books like yours is certainly a way to go beyond the book and put your readers first. And Holly Black is the next example. She this incredible Kickstarter for enemies and lovers and oh my God, it's based on her Cruel Print series. It's so cool. The cards are really pretty. It's a very in depth game and a lot of readers liked it. Over 8,000 people backed it on Kickstarter and on the launch of the Kickstarter In November of 2024 it made $650,000 revenue just from one Kickstarter launch. Insane. So when you go beyond the book there's just so many interesting opportunities. And this is just two examples of card games. But I want to Move on to our second weird way that authors are making millions. And this is through story Letters. This is so cool. Story letters are letters sent through the mail usually every other week or once a month. And they'll each be parts to a story that you might receive over a year, over a few months, or maybe even over multiple years. And as you receive those letters, the story unfolds and you read the next letter and the next letter and continue getting more of the story. Literally, I'm talking fiscal letters shipped off in an envelope, put a stamp on it, mail to your reader's home, and they get it in their mailbox. And these stories are unique because they really are only able to be told through letters. They shift the stories that we do know, the genres that we love, romance, historical fiction, and make it so that the letter story is now this new, really incredible thing to stand out and get the attention of readers. There's a lot of examples, dozens of people doing this successfully. But I wanted to pick out two. One is Flower Letters. Flower Letters is a pretty robust site. They've been doing this for a while and they really emphasize entirely that this is a new type of story. Getting that story letter mail being the really crucial thing here. And they have a few different genres. They have fantasy, Regency romance, World War II romance. Most of it has to do with romance and incorporating some other sub genre into it. And it's a really cool company. And the other one is from a great friend of mine and someone who you'll hear more and more on the podcast. In fact, he'll be on next week is David for Guts who created Scaremail and he's a multi seven figure author from this now. And it's horror letters. It's literally letters in the mail and a horror story told through the mail. This different packaging of a story attracts new readers, really helps these stories stand out, and as a result grows the readership way more than they would if they were just selling books. Now, story letters don't work for every genre. And same thing with court games as well. It depends on your strengths, what you're interested in, and how you're able to brand it and really make something unique. So as you hear these weird ways authors are making money, some of them might be weird for you, and some of them might be amazing for you. I'm gonna move on to our third one, and this is really consulting, coaching and anything related to education on top of your fictional stories. And you might be thinking there's no way authors are doing this in the nonfiction world. We see a lot of people doing this, and it's a great model. You create content that educates someone on something they're looking to learn more about. Maybe it's business, maybe it's health. And then you could create a program or coaching that helps them through that more. And you might be thinking, how can I do this with fiction? And for some authors, they're really creating an authority and building credibility in a space through their fiction stories. Science fiction, which I write, is a particular genre that has a lot of authors doing this where they'll be writing about new technologies, they'll be writing maybe about biotech or artificial intelligence and how that impacts the future in a specific way. And they're doing a lot of research, they're learning a lot. They're really teaching their readers through fiction. It's really cool. And what ends up happening is those readers end up wanting to dive deeper with them, and many of them end up doing consulting. Neal Stephenson famously has done this where he's consulted for many Fortune 500 companies on really where they're going in the future and future building for them. You have Elliot Pepper, who is an amazing author. He's one of my favorites. And he also consults regularly for technology companies. And it's a really cool relationship because these authors are getting to now get paid, learn more about things that they're going to be writing about in their future stories anyways. So it's a really cool model, and it's one that particularly works well if you're building unique credibility through the information that you're sharing in your stories. And it's not unique just to science fiction authors. Imagine many thriller authors you can be consulting for different detective agencies, different people who are looking to think about, ooh, like, how do different guns work? How do different weapons work? That can be really good for thriller authors. You have survival authors and people writing things like romance and thinking about second chance romance, relationships, all the things that you can provide advice on. So it depends, again, the genre that you're writing, where your credibility is, and where your readers are going to trust you to provide that deeper level of insight. But you can build a business around that and actually stand out from that, where you're able to make more of your money from doing these things beyond the books, but also grow your readership through it, too, because there might be some people who just come to you for these extra services and then find out about your books, which happens all the time. Now, the fourth weird way that authors are making millions in their books is not actually a specific monetization model. Everything I listed before was a different way to actually create a unique product or service that makes money. And this is less about that, but instead about creating a unique experience to market yourself better. And what I'm calling this is a unique content tilt. So there's a few examples of what you could do here, and I'll give you one off the bat, which is visual book summaries. I'm going to link down to someone who's done this below. It works really well for nonfiction, but they basically combine their skill for reading and their skill for creating images and graphs. And now summed up famous nonfiction books in a few minutes for people who might not have the time to read the full book. And that's a pretty cool thing. And they've gotten a lot of people to read them from it and from there. Now that you build that audience, right, readers first, you're able to create a business around that. They can then sell their own nonfiction book. They could maybe bundle these up into a paid service where they have where you can get access to a hundred premium visual summaries of books. And what's amazing is that visual book summaries are just the beginning here. We're thinking about creating a unique content tilt. It really just comes down to combining two unique skills or interests you have into one. And this could mean creating, like a unique edge on creating content. Like maybe if you love travel and you travel often, you're able to travel to different settings related to your genre. So you're able to show readers fantasy places in real life, because there are some pretty fantastical places in the real world where different things have been filmed. Maybe you're able to show different technology in real life. If you're writing science fiction. Maybe you're able to highlight content around taking different weapons or different scenes and action scenes and books and breaking them down, right? Things that would interest readers, that would get them engaged, and that also highlights your expertise and another skill you have. But it goes even deeper than this. And I want to recommend one of my favorite books. It's called the Anatomy of Genres by John Truby. And this book really dives deep into how you can create your unique content, your unique tilt, by actually innovating with genre inside of your stories. The book itself goes through all the different major genres, all different tropes, and different kind of psychological reasons readers actually experience these stories. And then it gives a ton of examples of how stories have mixed and matched these genres to actually create breakout blockbuster stories. Whether in film or books. And I think there's just so much opportunity for authors to be able to mix and match and really innovate on what genre looks like, because so many of the breakout hits are actually going beyond what we think of as our existing market of books and innovating and noticing different gaps in the market to actually create something unique and awesome that helps you stand out. So hopefully this is helpful. You don't need to stand out by creating a new product or by packaging your book differently. Instead, you can create a really unique story, but that already builds on these known genre conventions, and then use that as the thing that makes your book stand out when you're marketing. So the next thing you can do is underutilized attention markets. What I mean by this is when you have a lot of competition on a particular platform or channel for a specific type of content or specific kinds of books, it's more competitive. It's hard to stand out. So authors kind of arbitrage this and they notice where in the market things are shifting and where there's maybe less attention or underutilized attention, and then actually use those resources or tap into those resources to grow their audience easier. So, again, thinking readers first here, when we're thinking story first, it's very tough to actually think about, okay, I have this great story I wanna write now. Where does it go? Or here's the market for it. But now we're thinking way more grandly. Where do specific readers have an easy in? Where are we able to reach them much easier than other authors? Where can we notice a gap in the market and fill that? Through our marketing. Not just our story, but through our marketing. And there's really three main ways to do this. The first is taking attention that already exists but is underutilized in terms of actually sharing with them stories and books. So examples of this could be another author who has a mailing list of thousands of readers, and they're only sharing their own books when they publish them a couple times a year. But those readers, they've got their inboxes there, they trust these authors. They'd be open to hearing more books in those relationships. And really, we call this book swapping. It can be really interesting to actually tap into that attention and share your book with those readers. It goes beyond just author swaps, though. It's influencer collaborations, it's podcasts that not only are just for books, but might tangentially be related to books or tangentially related to topics that are covered in your books. And it goes even further than that. There's online communities, Facebook groups, Reddit that you're able to get traffic in. And oftentimes when it comes to these sorts of communities, it's better to have someone else talk about your books rather than you because it comes off as more organic. And this is where you're able to have street teams and ambassadors go out and it's called astroturfing, and basically go into these communities and post on your behalf organically like they do. Love your stories, but you're really pressing the needle here, encouraging people to post in specific places. It works really well. And this is how you're able to mine underutilized attention when it comes to thinking about digital communities and online. But there's another way to do this too. You can go to in person events, right? And it doesn't have to just be book signings. Maybe there's local festivals near you that are not explicitly focused on books. So there's lots of readers who are probably going to show up there. And it might be a lower proportion of the total people there compared to a book festival, but you'll stand out and capture a way higher proportion of the readers because you're one of one there. And this especially works well if you have a book set in your local city. People love buying things set in their local city and it could be a really good way to get traction and get off the ground. And the last way that you're really able to make use of underutilized attention is, is seeing where these attention markets are shifting, AKA where are people spending more time now than they were six months ago or six years ago? Examples now can include things like threads. Threads has grown a lot. Threads didn't even exist really three years ago and there's a lot of authors on it. Is there an opportunity to actually tap into the reader community there and create content that has lower barrier to entry? And I constantly looking for like platform shifts like this because sometimes being an early mover to a platform doesn't work well if you're too early and it doesn't take off. But if something's been established for a little while, but it's still not mature yet, you do have an opportunity to make use of that. Now the next thing I want to talk about in this sixth weird way that authors can make millions in their stories, is merchant and other swag connected to your stories Now? One of the biggest problems here is that when we think about merchant swag, we only think about our existing readership and integrating our IP into it. Whereas the bigger opportunity is oftentimes thinking about your readers first and how you can create merch and swag designed for discovery, AKA how can you create different merch and swag that taps into a specific genre are marketed readers so that everyone in that marketing genre is interested in it and then they're discovering you through your merch. And a great example of this is the author only James. She's a huge MM romance author and she's created a really awesome merch store that not only has some shirts and other content featuring her ip, but also has tons and I mean, there's tons of incredible stickers and other content that's like really focus just for an MM romance reader audience broadly, so that if you stumble upon this, you'll be like, oh, this is really cool, I want to buy this. And then it's, oh, wait, only James writes books too. I guess I'm going to check those out. And where these things are really useful is when you're marketing to a cold audience, you're able to increase your conversion rate off the bat because you're creating something that has a little bit more of a broad interest, but that no one's really fulfilling yet. So if there isn't an romance merch store, which in this case only's really created that, but in your context, if no one's created a merch store, a specific swag or mugs for your readers, you're able to now sell those through Facebook and have your book be the upsell or the book is there and the merch is the upsell. And all of a sudden you've gotten more people interested in your product while simultaneously increasing the lifetime value of your consumer and what they're going to be paying up front, which means that you're able to make your money back faster on ads, ideally profit way quicker. And this doesn't just tie into the ads. This also goes with any organic content. Any marketing you do, your marketing can go farther when you're able to actually create more experiences that are attuned to the needs of the readers that you're going to be serving with your books. Which is exactly why selling more than just books can be a huge way to be successful as an author. And this whole thing, all these reasons and all these ways to make money as authors are less, hey, go out and do all 10 of these. But hey, think about one or two ways that you can branch out and go beyond the book. Because the truth is, so many of the successful authors, and increasingly the ones who are breaking through in this market today are not thinking about books first but instead thinking about their readers. Now the seventh way that authors are making millions that is pretty weird, but also really fun is creating content on social media for readers and then building product specific for them. And this is similar to the last one, but the big difference is that they're building like true brands beyond just like merchant swag. We'll talk about like almost consumer packaged goods of sorts of. And I find these to be fascinating and I find these to be really interesting for the long haul because someone who taps into something like this can create a product that scales beyond their book if they have a book and can generate like real enterprise value for a business that other people might want to own one day. A business that you could sell and also create a sort of product product that other authors can collaborate with and tap into and also sell it to their reader base. So you're almost building a platform to both reach more readers and also help other authors make more money. And it becomes this really mutually beneficial thing for the community as a whole. And a lot of the authors who are doing this are also simultaneously building audiences of readers and growing their audience of readers through social media so that they're able to have their own marketing engine for their unique products and brands. Now this sounds a little far fetched. Let me give you two examples. One is Hayley Pham in Booktok. She's literally has million millions followers across YouTube and TikTok following her for her book recommendations and her awesome videos. And through her like bookish lifestyle content, she created book sleeves that sold out almost immediately. And they're really cool book sleeves that serve and solve a real problem with her readers. So now she could build this book sleep brand and it seems to be in the process of doing so all the meanwhile she's writing her first romance book and she's again gone out and found the audience before she even wrote the book, is now selling on this brand that could be bigger than her books and then other influencers can sell. And then now is writing and going to release her book as well. Just a kind of a case study and thinking readers first and going beyond the book. And if you want to see me dive deep with an author, an amazing author actually and how she's doing this with her books. You can check out my podcast episode with Maggie Bealer. It's linked down below. We talk all about how she's going to turn her cocktail book for readers trope tales into a multimillion dollar cocktail brand. So you can check that out in the description down below. It's one of the first podcast episodes of beyond the Book and I think you'll really enjoy it now. The eighth way that authors are making millions of their stories that's weird, but really cool is what I'll call the community play. And this is where an author starts acunity, not explicitly for their books, but for an overall genre or for an overall space of readership. Really what CUNY is, in short, is owning a space in readers minds. And if you don't have any readers or a small amount of readers, a CUNY about your books is going to own the space of your books and readers mind. But there's not gonna be a huge market for that because you don't have many readers yet. And then you get into that same problem where it's how do I convince people to join this community? I guess I have to convince them to buy my books first. And then you're not thinking for readers first lines, but a story first lens. And then you end up stuck and discouraged. But if we think from a reader's first lens, we approach community completely differently. And Alaron Kong is the best example in this. He started the LITRPG community on Facebook and has 25,000 members. And through that he's really being able to brand himself as the godfather of American lit rpg. And that was his whole goal, to build a cuny of lit RPG readers in America who are exploring the genre, sharing book recs and also other authors too, and uplift the entire Alaron Kong's become really a legend in this space because of it. It's helped him certainly sell a lot more books and really builds a moat where now he has this space that trusts him and that he's able to now share any future novels with and almost become canon because he's tapped into the CUNY and owns it already. So really cool stuff. And there's so many different cunies that need to be built. Smuthood is another really popular Facebook group that took off from COVID to now and is massive for romance readers. And I just see CUNY as such a big opportunity. And for authors who are excited about building CUNY instead of thinking about your reader group, how can you build the reader group that then all readers who could ever be interested in your books want to come to? And it becomes again a vehicle to not only uplift you, but other authors. And what's cooler than that? Now the ninth weird way that authors are making millions of their books is movies and what's really cool, and I made a Facebook post about this recently, was that we're entering an age where YouTube is the default app. People watch their television. People now spend more time watching YouTube on TV than they do on their phones or tablets. And YouTube is now basically the new Hollywood. And anyone can upload a YouTube video, which means you can make movies, make television shows and upload them to YouTube. Now of course, the question is, how do we fund these and how do I do this? There's a lot of different skills required of me. First of all, some authors might have a filmmaking background where this feels very natural to them. And I could go on for three hours about this. In fact, probably each one of these weird ways to make money will become a separate video at some point that I do a huge deep dive into. But with YouTube, I'm specifically excited about creators partnering with authors, especially up and coming creators who are filmmakers who want to make it big on YouTube and who are taking authors content and IP, really partnering with them and then working with that author's ex audience to basically run a Kickstarter or another crowdfunding campaign to then try and actually produce that movie and that short film and then incorporate different product placement and other brands into the movie itself to actually generate additional revenues that the Kickstarter is essentially covering the costs of the production. And you have your profit from YouTube AdSense, which is somewhat minimal, but then actual brand deals, which could be quite significant depending on the number of people who watch it. So examples of this are Jonathan Yanez. He had literally 25,000 plus dollars raised to create a short film of his sci fi novel. And he, he raised this through Kickstarter and his fans were getting access to it, different DVDs, all this stuff. Then another example is the Lizzie Bennett Diaries, which existed on the Internet now a long time ago. And I actually found this out through someone in the cuny, Morgana, who has an amazing podcast. Her name is Morgana Beavan. She has a great podcast about basically romancing for Swifties. And it's how to write books inspired by Taylor Swift. And what we can learn if you're a romance author from Taylor Swift. Amazing podcast Morgana's amazing. She sent me down this whole rabbit hole of web series and one of them was called the Lizzie Bennett Diaries. And it raised nearly half a million dollars on Kickstarter nearly a decade ago to produce a web series on YouTube. It's epic stuff. And all this to say that when you're actually creating stories for your readers now it's about bigger than just even reading. It's about thinking out these other media formats that your stories are able to be into and realizing that you don't need a studio anymore, you don't need an exec to greenlight it. Things are more accessible than ever. And if you're working with the right creator and the right partnership or you have the skills yourself, there could be a really interesting opportunity in movies now the last weird way, but not the actual last weird way, because there's plenty more weird ways Authors making millions but the 10th and last final weird way authors making millions for this video is real estate and ghost hotels. And I'll be honest, this is probably my most far fetched one. And I'm leaving this out there because I think it's so cool and I know more people are going to be getting into this, which is Airbnb released on their blog, places on their platform to be able to curl up with a good read in a literature inspired stay. I'm really bullish on actually bringing experiences from the URL online to IRL or in real life. And there's no better way to do that than almost create a literal immersive experience for readers in a specific genre. Imagine a fantasy Airbnb. Imagine an Airbnb for horror readers. This stuff to me is incredibly exciting. I think there is big opportunity in creating things like this and where I see the real upside in for authors is either being able to really start those places yourself and create these experiences that can go beyond real estate. Maybe these experiences are more like creating your own escape room type thing or other types of immersive IRL experiences that bring readers together. And then the key here is amplifying it through social media because the biggest brands now really the biggest fictional IP squid games being one, has primarily marketed themselves through doing these in person activations that they bring fans into, but then get 10,000x times more fans watching it online by creating content about it. And a really interesting example of an author who's done this, which is like not connected to necessarily this concept of immersive reader experiences, but is very much connected to creating awesome reader swag and products for readers that go well beyond the book is Willow Winters. And if you look at her TikTok, if you look at her Instagram, a lot of it's documenting her actual process of creating her book boxes, the things she's putting in it, the book she's putting in it, and Willow Winters crushes it with book boxes. She's an amazing person, amazing authority and her model is really interesting because she's taking something that she's already doing right. She needs to pack these book boxes, needs to get them out for her business and using the process itself to amplify her marketing and amplify the book box to thousands and thousands of more readers, and therefore she sells more. And there's again, a really interesting opportunity to do this with Airbnbs and other types of immersive IRL experiences where readers want to come to these things. But then, in this same vein, you're using social to help your IP reach a thousand times more people, because your IP is already integrated into this IRL experience, whether it be an Airbnb or something else of that nature. Okay, I know this is a lot. As you can see here, the goal of this podcast isn't just to help you dream big and find new revenue streams. It's to help you really think differently about how you reach readers and grow your readership in a completely different way. That's what this is about. And if I can leave you with anything, it's that when you go beyond the book and when you really put your readers first, you understand that not only is publishing not only just about publishing books, that's not really what we're doing here. What publishing is really about is changing the world. And as storytellers, you are a change maker. And you can literally change how people think about themselves, what people buy, what people wear, and where people even want to live or spend their time because of your stories. And that is the coolest thing in the world. And it's why, as a collective of storytellers together, we are boundless. You'll see me next week on another episode of beyond the Book with David Vergetz. In the meantime, if you want to join the beyond the Book Academy, we have a wait list for it. It's where I'm going to help walk you through actually going beyond the book yourself and turning your story into an empire so you can join the waitlist down below. I hope you all have an amazing rest of your day.