This Is How Writers Actually Make Money From Their Books

Here's what's cool about books. And this is a whole rabbit hole. I've spent a lot of time building different systems around books. Books can be just about anything you want them to be. There's almost two different ways of thinking about books. The first way is you think of content that becomes books. So, this would be like weekly newsletters, for example. If you start with the end in mind, your weekly newsletters can ladder up to a book every 6 to 12 months. This is the model that I did with Category Pirates. It was extremely effective. So you can think of content always being the rough draft version or the in-progress version of your next book. So you can do this over and over again. But you can also take a book, you can do it in the inverse. And there's two ways of taking a book and leveraging it. One is you can take this book and reverse engineer content out of it. So, like, for example, okay, I have these three books here, like, of many others, right? Art and Business of Ghostwriting, Art and Business of Online Writing, Writer Career Paths, okay?

Mm-hmm.

These are not just books. These are basically months and months of content that have just been organized into a book. And so once you have a book, you can extract shorts from it. You can extract long-form content. You could extract newsletters. There's no reason why— just to make this really clear for you and for everyone— if I wanted to, I could take every chapter from every one of these books and send them as a weekly newsletter for the next year. There's no reason why I, I couldn't do that because I already wrote the content. I own the content. It's a little different if you sign a publishing deal. Publishing deals and publishers don't like you to do that, but if you self-publish, you can do whatever you want with it. But you can also— going to the, the real question that you asked— you can also expand the book into other more valuable versions. So your question of, um, how do you take a book and expand it into a course? The answer is actually so simple that I think people don't believe me when I say it. You can take the entire book and all you do is add videos and add tangible assets. Mm-hmm. Or templates to each chapter. So I could take Writer Career Paths here, I could make this into a course by taking each chapter and pairing each chap— make each chapter a module and pair each chapter with a video of me explaining all the ideas inside of it and me adding some sort of digital asset template, whatever. So at the end, it's like, here's a checklist to decide if this is the right career path for you, or here's a template that you can use to clean up your bio if this is the career path you want to pick. That's the only difference between a book and a course. Does that make sense?

Well, it makes perfect sense. And that's the reason why I asked the question, because being able to do that's one thing, but knowing how to do it is really what I'm looking to figure out. Like, I have the content, I'm going to self-publish so I can do whatever I want. What I, what I need to know is how do I, how do I take that, the content from that chapter and strip it down into these component pieces that I can use? Like for instance, my Substack is gonna be the same name as the book and that's going to be, eventually a membership where people will pay to have access to the information.

Yeah. Okay. So two, two different questions here. One is, how do you actually do it? The way you do it is you take each chapter, you take the entire chapter, you don't change anything. You take the entire chapter and you record a Loom video of you talking over the chapter. There's actually nothing that a— a digital product module and a nonfiction book chapter are actually identical. They are the same thing. They can be the same thing. And so you have to realize that the value— like, why would someone buy the course opposed to buying the book? The value is that you're, A, you're changing the medium in which they're learning. Now they're not just reading, they're actually listening to you. They can see you on a video. That change in medium is increasing access.

Right.

It's increasing access to you, right? And then second is pairing each chapter with some sort of tangible asset. The whole secret, like, how do you go from book to course to paid newsletter to community to consulting, like, like the whole ladder? The whole secret is a word called more. That's all it is. How do you increase? Well, I give the reader more by giving them videos, and then I also give them tangible assets. And then if it's a topic area that is applicable, I also give them AI prompts. And I also give them, you know, like if it's a paid newsletter or community, I also give them like a community Q&A function. And maybe if I'm, you know, even building on that, I also give them live sessions.

Yeah.

Just like we're doing here. So the book is really the forcing function for you to clarify all the thinking. That's the beauty of writing a book is you clarified all the ideas. Then the different ways you monetize those ideas are just giving readers more and more access, more examples, more— more tangible assets, more playbooks, more templates. But the ideas aren't changing. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it makes perfect sense. Absolutely. Yeah. And it's a great way of simplifying the complexity of all the different thoughts that were colliding in my mind.

Yeah.

About exactly what to do and how to do it. So thank you very much for that. I appreciate it.

Yeah. Thanks, Tom. Great question. Yeah, this is— for everyone here, books are such an interesting mechanism because they can be so many different types of things. I think this is an idea I've become very fixated on over the years because the publishing industry really only thinks of a book as a book. And the reality is that a book is really just a vehicle for thinking, and that thinking can get monetized in a zillion different ways. Like, honestly, this book, The Art and Business of Online Writing, this is such a good example of this. Okay? Every single idea, 100% of this book is available as free content on the internet. Why do you buy the book? Well, you buy the book because you don't want to spend 50 hours scrolling through my ex and my LinkedIn and my YouTube trying to piece together all of the ideas. You'd rather just spend the $20 and have me organize all of the most important ideas for you here, right? But this book can also be— we've given it away for free. We've given away the digital copy for free for viral drops, being like, "Hey, for only the next 24 hours, I'll give you a free copy of this if you type in your email." Why do we do that? We collect emails for our various funnels in different businesses. This book can also— this book was the foundation of the entire Ship 30 for 30 curriculum. What was Ship 30? Ship 30 was just instead of reading this book, I will explain this book to you live over— what was it? 8 live sessions over the course of a month, and we're gonna make it interactive with a community, and we're gonna gamify the whole experience. It was all the same idea. Every idea inside of Ship 30 was already explained in this book. So why would someone buy the book and then spend $800 on Ship 30? Because it's not just the information. It's that people wanted the information plus they wanted to hear me explain it to them over a live session, plus they wanted to implement the information with everyone around them. They wanted to be part of a challenge, plus they wanted the information in addition to, right? More, more, more. They wanted the templates. They wanted the examples. They wanted the behind-the-scenes breakdowns. This is what's so fascinating about books is that books are real— like, I actually think now it's very unproductive to think of the act of writing a book as I have to sit down and write a book. It's much more productive to think, what, what are the things that I want to say on a topic? How can I chip away at all those things I want to say in content? And then over time, when I've said enough things on that overarching topic, I smash it together into a book. That book can be used as an asset, but that book can also be used as the foundation for a low-ticket digital product, a cohort-based experience, a high-ticket group coaching program. If I wanted to, it could be consulting. Do you know how many people— people will pay me $5,000 for an hour for me to tell them everything that's in this book. Why does someone spend $5,000 for an hour with me when they can just read the book? Well, because they don't want to just read the book. They don't just want the information. They want me to tailor the information to their specific situation. So this is something that took me so long to understand is that The ideas don't really change. It's not really like I'm telling people different things in different pockets. I mean, yeah, sometimes I am, or like frameworks change, or I add new things, or I'm talking about a different version of something somewhere else, yeah. But really what's changing is the level of access, the different forms, or the different mediums. It's not just text, it's text plus video, or text plus video plus audio. Mm-hmm. Or text plus video and audio plus live, right? I'm giving not just information, but information plus templates, information plus templates plus prompts, information plus templates plus prompts plus behind-the-scenes playbooks. That, that is the whole game here. The game is not how do I say completely different things on the front end here to completely different things over here to completely different things over there.

Mm-hmm.

The game is how do I keep reinforcing the same ideas over and over and over again in different ways? And if you're asking, you're like, "Cole, that sounds so silly. Like, what is the value of that?" The follow-up question is, okay, do you only need to hear something once and then you perfectly understand it? Everyone here, I explained this one thing one time. Yeah. Are you done? You never need to hear me explain it ever again? Well, of course not. And running different writing programs teaches me this on a daily basis. Do you know how many times I will— I'll do a live session or I'll answer someone's question. And the takeaway that everyone has is it's like, what'd you learn today? And they're like, I learned today that consistency is key. Like how many— I think we've all been learning consistency is key since we were like 5 years old. So it's not that you don't know it. Everyone here knows it. It's that the value is you need to be reminded of it and you need to hear it and be reminded of it in a different context. You're like, "Oh yeah, that's a pretty foundational lesson, but you know what? For whatever reason, I just never applied it to this specific situation." And I am just as guilty of this. I spend so much money on my own education or joining other people's masterminds or whatever only for me to walk away from it. I just went to a fiction mastermind. A couple weeks ago, a bunch of really successful indie fiction authors. I took a bunch of notes. Anyone want to guess what my number one takeaway was from the entire event? I spent, like, a couple thousand dollars and flew to another city for a two-day fiction writing mastermind only for my number one takeaway to be, "I should probably write more." Like, what? Like, that was the number one takeaway. And the craziest part is I sat there and I actually felt like that was valuable. I was like, that was worth me spending $5,000. I had to spend $5,000 and, you know, 3 days of travel to remind myself, you know what, Cole, you say you want to do this thing and yeah, you've been putting in some time, but the reality, you got to do it more. And that was valuable for me, just like it's valuable for everyone else. So this is a very important idea. And this is part of why, like at the beginning I was saying, I'm so excited to do Low Ticket Launchpad live because I truly feel like when it comes to building a digital business, being more of like a writerpreneur, writing on the internet, building an email list, learning how to build digital products, the hard skills are actually not that hard. Like, it is not that hard to learn how to write short-form content. It is not that hard to learn how to write a newsletter. It's not that hard to learn how to offer stack. Maybe you need to practice it a little bit. Maybe you need a little pattern recognition, but it's not like you gotta go to school for 9 years to become a doctor. Like, these are things you can learn in a couple weeks, maybe a couple months.

Mm-hmm.

Maybe worst case scenario, it takes you a year. You know what I mean? Like, this is not like rocket science. The harder thing is actually unlearning all of the things that you think are true that actually aren't. And one of the biggest faulty beliefs that people have, and I had to go through the same process, is thinking, well, if I already wrote a book on it, I mean, who's going to— who would want a course? Who would want a cohort-based experience? Who would want coaching? Who would want a paid newsletter? Who would want a community? I already wrote everything in the book. And that is such an unbelievably uninformed opinion and point of view because you don't understand what the book actually is. This is not the be-all end-all product. This was just a forcing function for you to clarify all your thinking. And then the game. Of building different types of digital products is how do I say those ideas in as many different ways as possible and give the reader more? I'm just building on them. By the way, if you're brand new to writing online and want a really easy place to start, I recommend reading "The Art and Business of Online Writing." I wrote this book after I'd been writing online for over a decade and accumulated over a billion views on my work, monetizing my writing in all sorts of unconventional ways. And I wrote this book to give other writers like you a way to skip all the lessons that I had to learn the hard way and start seeing success from your writing a whole lot faster than I did. So if writing online is something you're thinking about or something you're actively practicing, I recommend picking up a copy of The Art and Business of Online Writing. Thank you.