THE BIG PICTURE

1. Books Can Be About Fun (Not Just Profit)

Books are a great revenue stream. You can make money from them (royalties) and because of them (upsells).

But sometimes, publishing books for fun can be just as rewarding as making a profit.

Here’s a little backstory.

Many years ago, I used a fake name to publish a couple of children's books.

They were written for an audience of two: my daughters.

The stories were about two little girls called Lima & Ina (created by scrambling their own names).

I even used an anagram of my own name as the author's pen name.

The idea was to keep it a long-term secret... maybe forever. And the plan worked for a few years.

But then my oldest daughter connected the dots and found out I was the author.

When the secret finally came out, I wasn't sure if the story would be over. But it ended up leading to something even better.

We decided to write another book together as co-authors (while still keeping it a secret from her younger sister).

The new book was just published a few days ago.

It's called Volcano Trouble.

And it's a short story for young kids aged 8 to 12 with a simple message: Mistakes aren't failures - they're part of learning.

It was a ton of fun writing this with my daughter, and I hope it inspires you to do something similar with your own side gigs.

TIME-SAVERS

2. Use Google Forms To Capture Email Addresses

Here’s a little hack that saves you time and money.

Instead of paying for an email service to capture email addresses (a service like ConvertKit, AWeber, Mailchimp, etc.), you can create a simple form to capture email addresses using Google Forms.

This saves you money (Google Forms is free) and time (takes a couple of minutes and you don’t have to worry about managing lists).

A few things to know about this strategy:

1. You’ll have to manually send people emails (from your personal email) after they sign up. So this doesn’t work if you expect a huge list.

2. Make sure you get explicit permission to email folks because they won’t have an automated unsubscribe option.

3. This is not meant to be used as an auto-responder. It’s best used to send people one or two emails max about an announcement.

Here’s an example.

I just published a new Udemy course yesterday.

It’s called “Stress-Free Change Management for Generative AI”

I’ll also be repurposing it into a short book soon.

I’m always looking for early reviewers, so I added the following note at the bottom of my newsletter last week.

The link goes to a Google Form where I ask them for three simple things: their first name, their email address, and what product they’re interested in reviewing.

You can view the form here

(By the way, feel free to copy the form and modify it for your own products- and if you’re interested in getting a free copy of the course or book, you can go ahead and actually fill it in 🙂).

Fun-fact: 90% of the people who filled it said they’re interested in both the course and the book. That helps because I didn’t have to ask folks twice for permission.

WORDS I LIKE

3. On Coaching & Consulting

Some people will pay thousands of dollars for someone to tell them exactly what they can get online for free.

It's not that they don't know it's free.

It's that they happily pay for the convenience, the reassurance, or the guidance (or all three).

ONE-MINUTE HACKS

4. Use Dense & Familiar Words

Dense words are those that can compress a lot of meaning.

Here are some examples that Gary Provost gives in his book, 100 Ways to Improve Your Writing:

• Instead of writing “once a month,” write “monthly“

• Instead of writing “something new,” write “novel“

• Instead of writing “impossible to imagine,” write “inconceivable“

Using dense words in your writing will help increase the impact of your ideas.