Novice Writer Becomes Accidental Millionaire!

(How this guy got everything wrong and STILL made a million).

Not only have I taught an awful lot of students, I’m friends with others that do the same. What you’re going to learn in this post came from a discussion with a colleague that was blown away by a failed student he knew in the real world.

He’d attempted to teach a method I’ve mentioned in a past issue of my newsletter, ‘Letters From A Small island’, i.e. writing children’s books and publishing them through Kindle and Amazon.

The idea is you create a very simple book, targeting age 6 and under, 40–50 pages.

Every other page has a line of text, all pages have pictures. Simple cartoon type pictures.

The books are very basic, it could be something as simple as cartoon characters telling the story of a baby crossing a city, going on an adventure, or how kids should eat their vegetables, etc.

As you’ve only 40–50 pages, and around 25 lines of text in total, you can imagine how basic the stories are.

In the original method you then publish these simple books on Kindle, and through Amazon as paperbacks.

You don’t make much money per book, but it’s additional passive income, so the idea is good.

My friend was teaching this method and one guy wrote a small story without too many problems and then got someone to do very basic illustrations to go with it.

He couldn’t figure out Kindle though. He just couldn’t. He couldn’t figure out how to get Amazon to publish a paperback either, so he gave up with the idea thinking it was all far too techie for him..

At this point you’d think…well he’s buggered then!

Anyway, my friend met him again recently, and it has been 2 years since he assumed this guy had just given up.

BUT…The guy had made over a million selling what is now a set of 4 kids books over that time.

He’d gone from couch surfing, to having bought a house outright, and he is now driving a snazzy sports car!

Understandably my colleague asked how that had happened. To be more accurate what he said started with, “How the absolute **** did you manage that???!!!”

What follows is what the guy told him.

First, he couldn’t figure out how to go about posting his book for sale online. It confused him, so he did indeed give up.

After a month of sulking he decided he may not understand how to sell online, but he’d have a go at selling just in car boot sales. So he went to a printer and asked how much it would be to print 50 copies of his book. As he recalled he ended up getting 100 copies printed, and he took them to a car boot sale.

A guy that worked in a book shop told him his books looked good, but asked why doesn’t he sell them in the shops?

After talking he realized he needed an ISBN, so he went online and got one. That was added to the book cover using a print on sticker, though for later print runs he’d incorporate it into the back-cover design.

Following the book shop owner’s advice he tried to get his book in the local bookstore. They told him no, they only order books through a distributor.

They gave him the phone number of their book distributor, so he phones up and asks if they could distribute his book.

They said send us in a copy, so he did.

The distributor then sent it out to a trial of 10 shops. He obviously sold some as the guy came back to him and said as it sells well they’d like to distribute it through their parent company. Could he get them 5000 copies.

Apparently, he panicked as he couldn’t afford to print that many, though he later realized he could get a loan to cover it and did so.

They contacted him not long after and hooked him up with a publisher, and that took his first book global.

After the first year he hired some smart people to handle the logistics and was able to cut the publisher out of the next 3 books.

Keep in mind this isn’t some great literary achievement, it’s 40–50 page, 20 short sentence stories. The artwork is incredibly basic, though very colorful.

What he did do though is contact schools, agree to turn up and read his stories to the small children and sell books there. Any event he could go to he did. Even now he is making a lot of money, he still takes those books to schools and reads to the kids, then sells a few copies, still out of a cardboard box.

Why am I telling you this? A lot of you may have thought about writing this type of short story targeting 6 and unders as I’ve mentioned doing it in the past and I know others have as well.

This is direct evidence that even someone that had written a book but couldn’t figure out Kindle, could, just by putting in some effort, make a million promoting it.

It’s all about being determined, and not giving up. Even when it looks like you should.

I found his story quite inspirational and uplifting and was given permission to retell it provided I didn’t use any names. Hope you found it interesting.