Matt Rudnitsky (aka “Rud”) thinks you should write your book already. Get noticed, make an impact, turn it into a profitable business. Sell courses, coaching, consulting, speaking.
Matt wrote a book on sports betting back in the day, sharing the lessons he’d learned turning a $100 gift from his grandmother into $10,000 just by betting on games.
Took him six weeks to write. Didn’t hire an editor or a designer. Just kept it simple, put some useful information in it.
“It was okay,” Rud says. “But I had realistic expectations. I wasn’t expecting to get rich from self-publishing.”
“Anyways, I launch it, tell my 46-person email list about it [which he’d built from this little blog he had], I DM’d all my Twitter followers, wasn’t expecting much.”
“Fast forward, I get my first royalty check. I think it was like $200 or $300. I was like, ‘Okay, this helps with rent. Pretty cool. If this stays steady, I’m not exactly getting rich, but whatever, this is awesome.'”
“Second month rolls around. I don’t do anything. I’m looking at teaching jobs, just kinda d*cking around,” Rud continues.
“And the second month’s royalty check comes in, and it’s $1,150.06. I’ll never forget that number. Because it blew my f*cking mind. ‘This is actually real money.'”
“So I got obsessed with self-publishing. Spent the next two years trying to get these sort of freelance slash consulting jobs helping people out with their own books. And I got a couple of clients. Didn’t make much money, but kept learning, kept getting better.”
Eventually he realizes he’s selling himself short.
Why not write a book about writing books? Wouldn’t that be more scalable?
Yes, it would be, Rud decides.
But he takes his sweet time on this one, inching his way to a final product over the course of the next two years.
Expects it to do just as good if not better than his sports betting book, right? After all, it’s a bigger, hungrier audience.
So he launches, and… crickets. A colossal disaster.
Makes a grand total of like $200 in royalties.
But then something weird happens.
“Despite very low readership numbers for that book, I still had people reaching out to me for advice on publishing,” Rud explains.
“For example, I had this founder of a New York City startup hit me up on Twitter. I don’t even think he read the book.”
“I hate to say it, but 80% of the benefit of writing a book is just the fact that you did it. If it looks good, people assume you’re an expert.”
“So this guy asked me for advice and I ended up charging him $250 an hour for some consulting. He was happy and it was great.”
And this just keeps happening even though Rud totally screwed the pooch on marketing this book.
He no longer had to sell himself. Instead of chasing clients, they were pursuing him.
“Point being, having this book out there, especially if it’s good, especially if it has good reviews, especially if you get some media coverage and stuff like that? It lets you charge more. People trust you more. It just stops you from needing to do this frustrating selling yourself constantly. Which is just exhausting,” Rud rants.
But that horse has left the barn. Today, Rud’s killing it.
Not from royalties but from leveraging his book to sell courses, ghostwriting services, coaching, masterminds, and more.
All of a sudden, he went from making $20k a year to a strong six figure business, all thanks to a book that hardly sells.
And it’s fulfilling. He’s working with like-minded people, talking about what he loves, just mopping up money over there.
Check out Rud’s Punchy Books Accelerator (cost is $3,997) if you’d like to do the same.