This is a YouTube video titled "How to Make $10k/Month as a Writer - Nicolas Cole" containing an English podcast-style conversation recorded in June 2024. The discussion features Nicolas Cole and another speaker talking about practical strategies for writers to monetize their craft quickly, focusing on selling services rather than products, and addressing common misconceptions about building an audience and making money online as a writer.
There are so many people that are now realizing that they all need to build things on the Internet. So we used to live in an analog world. Now we live in a digital world.
What you're about to hear is a conversation between me and my friend, Nicholas Cole. This is Cole's second time on the podcast. The first time around, we talked about five paths to make a million dollars as an online writer, or rather as a writer. And that episode did super, super well. And today we're talking about the fastest path to $10,000 a month as a writer.
So your fast as a writer to 5K as a side hustle, you know, 10K, 20K, replacing your full time income and then some is to just go find one person and go, I can help you solve problems in your business.
We talk about how to craft the perfect email and the sort of energy that it takes to sell and how sales is really the same thing as education and a bunch of mistakes that we see people make when pitching us their various different services.
It seems like the longer road to go, I have to go educate and talk to 100 people. Well, yeah, in the beginning, that is the longer road instead of just, you know, trying to automate the whole process and defer to technology. But if you skip that step, you think you're taking the shortcut, and then guess what? Shortcut ends up being the longer road because you skipped the whole learning.
Cole, welcome back to the podcast. How's it going?
Great, man. I'm always happy to be in London.
This is going to be fun. So in part one that we did, which people absolutely loved, we went through your entire backstory and kind of a surface level overview of how to make, you know, how to make money online as a writer.
Yep.
In this episode, I was hoping we could go a little bit deeper into this because you teach people how to make money as ghostwriters, and we want to teach people what is their fastest path to actually making money as a writer. Because a lot of people still kind of think that writing is a thing that can't, like, you can't really make money from it. I've just published a book. Traditional publishing people are like, oh, do I find an agent? Do I get a book deal? What do people get wrong about making money online as a writer?
Okay, most fun question on planet Earth for me. So let's. We'll start with the mistake. So the mistake that writers make, I think, is thinking that you need to have a ton of attention in order to start monetizing. So everyone thinks step one I need a million followers. So already wrong. Because if I told you tomorrow you had to go give a speech in front of a million people, you would have an anxiety attack. You don't need a million followers. Second is they go, okay, well maybe I don't need a million followers, I just need a hundred thousand. Or I need 10,000. Reduce the number.
Okay, still I need my 1,000 true fans, right?
Yeah. Okay, so still wrong. And the reason, you know, there's all these different paths you can take to monetizing your craft. Any craft will use writing as the example. The fastest path though is not selling a product, it is selling a service. Because if you think, and everyone in the creator world talks about selling digital products, right? Sell an ebook, you sell a course, you sell cohort based experience, whatever it is, right? But that's not actually the fastest path because most of those products, if not all of them, are priced in a couple hundred bucks or less. Or if you're selling an ebook, it's like 10 or $20. Right? So the lower the price point, the more volume you need. So it sounds really easy to go, okay, well I can make, you know, five or ten grand selling a 200 course, for example, but you have to play that out and go, okay, well how many of those do I need to sell every month in order to sustain 5, 10, 20k a month. Right? You need volume.
Yeah, I mean, especially with a physical book like.
Or a physical book is.
My book has sold a lot of copy. Well, you know, sold like 200,000 copies, but I still have that many. I still haven't paid off the advance. And our royalty percentage is, I think I'm allowed to share this about this, like 10, 15%. Oh, you got, yeah, yeah, we got 15. We got a good deal. We got a decent deal. We got 15%. But it's like I make maybe 1 pound 50 every time I sell a book.
Yeah, no, it's a horrible.
So I need to sell a lot of books to make a living as a professional writer.
