I like to think my books are good. One has over 900 reviews with an average of 4.8 stars. Two others have over 100 reviews with about a 4.6. The 4th one has about 20 reviews with 4.4 stars-ish (I didn't follow the formula on this one, my own fault). I'm not the only one doing this, of course. Most of the books I see my competitors make are of lower quality, but they probably paid a lot less for them. In general, book…
Are there any good sites that do that... seems like they're filled with sites that are hard to verify if they're legit.
you might want to check MicroAcquire
I was disappointed by that website. You can’t see much without registering and once you have, you still can’t see much about businesses (let alone ask questions) without buying a 300$ membership.
Yeah, nobody can control that, so you can either give up or keep working hard at things until you "get lucky". One has the possibility of success and one doesn't.
Not necessarily. You get hit by a Mercedes while crossing the street and you could just luck into money without hard work.
I used to work at an insurance company. It was interesting to listen to some of the underwriters talk a bout how trivially easy it can be to scam a small mom & pop business through a fake trip & fall "accident".
Over the lifespan of owning the building, say a few decades, you can expect: 1. Rare but highly expensive major expenses like a new roof, new heating system, etc. It's like a tail risk- you don't pay for it most years, but when it comes up, it costs a lot. 2. Required renovations- just to stay at your current level of quality. I.e. let's say you rent to normal middle class tenants now. In 10-15 years, you'll need to…
Most folks I know that purchase properties are not in it for cashflow. Breaking even is enough. The goal is to purchase the next one with a downpayment against existing equity. The deck of cards falls apart if the property market corrects significantly but how is that different than everything else happening in this economy.
For one it's an extremely capital intensive operation for most folks. In fact buying a property is usually many times their net worth. Which means now one is not allowed to make mistakes, because losing means not only going to zero, but going underwater many times over what the cashflow can cover.
This argument falls apart once a property is a fraction of someone's net worth, but it's rarely the case.
There's something about this that just makes me really sad. I guess being in my late 30's I hold on to the flawed notion that there is sanctity in something that is 'published'. Does anyone here want to read a book that wasn't written by an expert on the topic? How upset or sad would you feel if you spend several hours reading a book only to discover it was produced by an opportunist who picked that keyword and asked…
because now you have to sort out 'real' knowledgeable authors from this carpet bagging I don't believe that's difficult. You can almost always differentiate real books from the grift-type ebooks by looking at them by publisher. Big difference between serious non-fiction publishers and print on demand titles.
The problem is that if you're looking for information about a niche subject, there are sometimes independent researchers who study for their own fulfillment, and then self-publish or publish through small publishers or vanity publishers. If you happen to find a book like this it can be a treasure since it's literally several years labor of love on the topic you want to know about. That person is also happy to have reached someone interested in their topic, even if their financial reward is negligible, zero or negative.
Because of the 'business' described above, that book is now impossible to find. It's been swamped by hundreds of easily generated titles which are at best copy pasted from the wikipedia, at worst utter gibberish.
I’m sure we can trust the self publisher of a ghostwritten unedited cost-first keyword-selected book to never employ fake reviews. He’s only here to provide what’s best for his customer.
That's pretty disingenuous to say they employ fake reviews, regardless of whatever your opinions of self publishing are.
Why is it disingenuous? They've literally described a process optimised to produce "passive income" with absolutely no quality control at all.
There's something about this that just makes me really sad. I guess being in my late 30's I hold on to the flawed notion that there is sanctity in something that is 'published'. Does anyone here want to read a book that wasn't written by an expert on the topic? How upset or sad would you feel if you spend several hours reading a book only to discover it was produced by an opportunist who picked that keyword and asked…
Who says the ghostwriter is not an expert on the topic? The above is quite similar to a startup incubator, there is a demand in the marketplace that's unmet, one hires people to meet that demand and develop a product after which customers buy it.
Since the person promoting the book has literally no interest in the content, it doesn't make sense that the writer would be an expert, nor that the book would be any good.
An expert ghostwriter would be undercut by a ghostwriter supplying copy-pasted material just good enough to get past the publisher. A publisher who actually cares about whether or not the book is worthless would outbid this publisher for the skills of the expert.
Publish books on Amazon. I've published 4 and make about $3k in profit per month, after paying for ads on amazon. Don't write them yourself, that's a lot of work. Instead, do key word research about what books sell in non-fiction categories (fiction is a whole different ballgame). Look for keywords that 1) auto complete in the amazon search bar, and 2) have less than 4,000 matching books, and 3) have an average Amazo…
Do you run the ads on Amazon itself, or on Google Ads, or Reddit ads, or somewhere else?
"What do I know that gives me an advantage over the average joe? What other resources do I have that give me an advantage over the average joe?" What if my answers are none and none?
Some of the best advice I've ever heard regarding this is that you don't have to be an expert, you just have to know a little bit more than someone else. So take whatever you've recently learned, write it up, package and sell that. People tend to overestimate the level of knowledge required to sell advice. People pay for beginner level courses all the time.
Marge to Lisa: “I could give piano lessons!”
Lisa: “But you don’t play the piano…”
Marge: “I just gotta stay one lesson ahead of the kid!”
Cheeky-and-also-serious response: Soil, for the food you grow to eat, share, or sell. Much about a green, growing area is passive income for is. Another option is lobbying your elected officials to regulate in the interest of healthier land, water, and air, which will help you and many others. Making something useful and giving it away (or charging a nominal amount for hosting costs, or asking others to help with tha…
No need for soil for some plants. Check-out Hydroponics[0] no need soil for farming. You could grow indoors or outdoors. That's free food for the future. There's a lot of ongoing hype in this right now. Youtube, facebook groups, reddit, blogs . . . [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics
Yes, and soil can be such a rich place for life to exist and carry on. Hydroponics is cool and useful, and I’m going to keep converting my previously-grass yard into meadow, woodland, and no-till farm because I love the feeling of being surrounded by so much life, above and below.
Soil is also a carbon-sink. At the Bell Museum in the Twin Cities there are examples of prairie grasses whose roots went down about six feet (maybe more; trying to be conservative here).
I live in a graveyard of massive, long-dead tree-stumps, new trees around my age. What it used to be I like to imagine and to help bring about again, for its own sake.