How to self-publish your way to a long-term passive income revenue stream.
Building a backlist of books that can be your literary pension
A few years ago, it felt like the whole world had a side-hustle. Almost everyone under thirty that I knew seemed to rush home from their day-job to work on other projects. Students and retirees were earning decent supplemental cash from Ebaying. Stay at home mum friends were discovering that you could do all sort of things - bookkeeping, event planning and creating online businesses - between the school-runs. Several people became quite-known influencers as well as holding down full-time jobs, the new digital world making it easy for us all to professionally multi-task.
Of course, it was all exhausting, for everybody, so the dream side-hustle was one that would bring in passive income, a phrase that I’d barely heard of until I’d read Tim Ferris’s bestselling book The Four Hour Work Week, back in 2009.
The premise of Tim’s book was simple and seductive. Setting up your life - and work - to give you the flexibility to do the things you really loved, like travel.
At the heart of it was the concept of passive income. Automating processes, hiring virtual assistants, outsourcing as much as possible, creating a product that would just keep on selling and making money, without too much attention.
At the time, we were in Australia, having a mini-sabbatical in the sunshine before our son started school. It was a magical time and I was so productive, cranking out two or three thousands words a day, that I began to wonder if I was solar-powered.
We were here! I wrote 65k words in three weeks…
Being an author, I was living this fun and flexible lifestyle that Tim was talking about, able to work from wherever there was a plug socket. But I wasn’t generating much passive income. And here’s why.