Ask HN: Making extra income with books

Thanks!

I wrote a book on neurochips in 2003. Could not find a publisher to help me publish it. I turned it into a sci-fi novel with a character based on the name of this account. I tried to self-promote my book and writings with that name all over the Internet.

After I could not find a publisher, I self published on Amazon Kindle in 2010 and sold thousands of Kindle books.

In 2013, they had invented a neurochip, and then these cyberpunk, conspiracy, and transhumanist forums would link to my Kindle book as an example of the abuse of a neurochip. I got luck and others started to promote my book for me.

It was so popular that I started up two websites to support the book as a 'company' used in my book for part two:

http://blastar.in/ http://www.blastar.org/

The main character Orion, works as a programmer for a medical company. He is programming surgical tray tracking software, and then learns his coworker and manager are doing something else with the code. It is being used a track people with neurochips. His coworker poisons him after his manager fires him and he gets suicidal and ends up in a hospital were he meets Karen who had worked on the neurochip to help out her brother who has schizophrenia, but she learned they were using it for something else, so they did the same thing to her that they did to Orion. Orion is mentally ill and Karen is not, and Orion benefits from the neurochip but finds they left in his debugging backdoor in the code and gets in and finds out there is hidden code for death and unconscious functions. The N-Chip law is passed forcing the mentally ill and people with a criminal record to have neurochips implanted into their brains to control they negative thinking and negative behavior. The US government is controlled by a megacorporation who used two shell companies as a front to develop this tech to enslave people, and have something that replaces the smartphones and tablets. First they have a law passed that forces the neurochip on the mentally ill and people with a criminal record to test it out, and later the neruochip 2.0 will come out as a new way to communicate using wireless networks and hearing audio in your head and seeing video (telepathy via technology).

My problem is that I have a mental illness of my own that damaged the language part of my brain and I get past and present tense mixed up and botched some of the dialog and words. It is an original story and has a lot of interest, but I got nobody willing to help me edit it to make it better. It is only a 99 cent short-story and the Atopia Chronicles came out later with smarticles instead of a neruochip that is a better written story.

All I can say is don't give up writing, get a focus group of beta testers to read your book and find the errors in it before you self-publish it. If I had done that, I'd have a better source of income.

I got someone who wants to turn it into a comic book with his comic book startup, I met him on Reddit, but he cannot find any artists willing to draw the comic and like me he has limited income.

Orion modifies the code in the neurochip to improve his memory and download information off the Internet directly into his memory. There is a lot he can do with the chip I haven't gotten into yet. I've been mentally sick, my father died in 2010, and I got into a deep depression. Best I could do was design some websites to support the book, before I can write part 2. I wrote most of part 2, but Word 2010 crashed and corrupted it, so I had to start over with Libreoffice.

I am helping a few people in my area, all they can afford is a $100 Windows XP laptop without MS-Office so I load LibreOffice or OpenOffice.Org and help them learn it and self-publish to Kindle. So even if you cannot write your own books, at least offer your services to others in your area to help them out with their books. I get mostly English teachers who don't know how a computer works, and I train them to a level of writing on a word processor, printing, and saving in RTF, DOC, and ODT formats and exporting to PDF and uploading the DOC to Kindle, Smashwords, Lulu, Nook/Kobo and others.

In the last month I had success crowdfunding (and subsequently creating) and online course about running a bitcoin arbitrage bot. I set up the crowdfund on https://www.uludum.org/ and added a link to it from my blog, which was the primary source of traffic. I've had just over $1,000 in sales since then.

The crowdfund: https://www.uludum.org/funds/2

If anyone has any questions about 'publishing' or using this model on Uludum, I'm the creator, so I'd be extremely happy to answer any questions. I think it can be a pretty good model for the type of knowledge sharing people are doing here.

Thank you very much!

I went fiction and told a story that's been rattling around in my head a while... not making a fortune by any means, but some sales, and as they say, ebooks are forever. Self-published to Amazon, etc. with some of the smaller outfits through Smashwords, which takes a cut from sales in exchange for the hassles of the vendors.

Open Gate - SciFi

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00GV0BFNE/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

Rachael Johnson is soon to graduate from college and begin the rest of her life. Today her biggest worries are dirt and bugs as her friend James drags her underground to go exploring. What she didn’t expect was to find an abandoned city on another planet.

It’s the chance for the human race to leave Earth and have breathing room. A place for the explorers at heart to blaze new trails.

But Rachael is torn—does she call the police or block the cave? Will James agree? How can they keep this secret? How can they not?

And what about the original owners of this new-found world? Where are they, and are they wanting visitors? And don’t forget about the universe of other planets a few short steps away.

Now government is breaking down, there is rioting in the streets and there are roadblocks everywhere. The authorities have decided to arrest them on site. Their decision just might be made for them.

Influenced by Heinlein’s juveniles, Open Gate is a Science Fiction adventure that will appeal to all ages from teens to adults.