Make Money Online

We did write a book. Is it a book? It’s like an essay compilation. It’s therapy.

It’s a back rub. For your mind. It’s a novelty gift basket full of snacks. It’s everything you wanted it to be and more. We’re really good at marketing, guys. It’s a dream, it’s a wish. It’s a pain, it’s a dream, it’s a fix. It’s called the Independent Consulting Manual, and it may or may not change your life. Results not guaranteed.

We were talking about the mastermind last week, the last the the group that we’re part of. Kai and I sort of met by co founding a group of independent consultants that make predominantly productized consulting services. And that’s a really long set of niches, which I’m not going to get into right now. But point being, we became friends and the thirteen of us decided to write a book together. And so, what we did is a very short form of it. We each wrote two chapters, or one very long chapter. about five, six thousand words about various predetermined topics about running an independent consulting business. And I think we staple them all together in one exquisite corpse of text. And put it on the internet with a buy button. There were a bunch of other things that happened between then. There are other things that happened also. Like, we got a bunch of freebies together for it. We put up like consulting calls and these We got together in groups on the internet and recorded nice roundtables about how great we are. It’s it’s done okay. What’s what’s the sales total Kai? How much money have you made online?

I want to be abundantly clear that we were splitting this like 14 ways. So it’s not. Kai gets an extra share because he edited the whole thing. So I, you know, that’s money. That’s it’s like beer money for a year, which is dope. I’m grateful I’m not going to look a you know, gift. $2,500 in the mouth or anything like that. But in many ways, for me, and I think for many of the other people in the group, it was kind of a labor of love. We did it because we wanted to. And I had fun. Did you have fun?

It’s story time. I’m going to talk about when I wrote a book in 2010. I wrote a small book about interaction design called Cadence and Slang. If you’re curious, Cadence. cc. It is still selling copies every day and evergreen and wonderful. And I’m very transparent with my sales numbers about Cadence and Slang. I’ve been doing it since I before I was independent. And the first time I posted my sales numbers was February of twenty eleven. It was right after like three months right after the book came out. And I told people that I made 42 grand in profit from the book by selling about 2,200 copies at the time, something like that. And it was about to sell out. And three weeks later, I went to South by Southwest Interactive to speak. And one of the hire ups at O’Reilly Publishing. Took me aside and said, Nick D, I read your post. I was like, Great. Thank you so much. And she was like, You made ten times more than the highest author advance we have ever paid out in profit for your book. And I was like, okay, that’s great. It’s paying down my student loans. I actually have no money right now. Please advise. But they were a little irked about it. It was a little bit awkward because I was like showing this path where, you know, not only was I writing something and not having to deal with them, like I didn’t even shop it to O’Reilly when I first made it. But I think O’Reilly, in my personal opinion, O’Reilly would have made it actively aggressively worse because the book is weird. It has a character about it that does not fit O’Reilly at all, to the point where people were making like parody wood carvings of Cadence and Slang and like ITC Garriman font as like an O’Reilly book. Of course, the conversation ended with him asking me to write for O’Reilly, and wall. So, point being, you do not need a traditional publisher. I have told literally everyone that you do not need a traditional publisher. They act as validators. If you have bad self-esteem, by all means, get a traditional publisher. They will make you feel good in that they decide to go with you, and then they will make you feel bad by editing your book within an inch of its life to fit their agenda. So you’ll just continue to have bad self-esteem after you finish publishing it, and you’ll make about $1,000 from it. I made more from my share of the independent consulting manual than a lot of authors get from their advance. Which is absolutely crazy. It’s crazy. It’s crazy. And I’m probably selling more people, to be honest. Because I built up a marketing system around my book with Cadence and Slang. It was on Kickstarter. It was one of the earliest projects on Kickstarter. And I built a community around that. And they told a lot of people. I built word of mouth and fanned out that way. I got a you know, I got to speak at South by Southwest in a room with like five, six hundred people in it. That helped blow it up a lot. The fortunate thing is, it’s a lot easier to make a book by yourself. The unfortunate thing is, it’s a lot harder to market a book by yourself. And it’s a lot more daunting because you don’t necessarily know what you’re doing and what you’re making or if what you’re making is valuable, right? What do you think of when you think of independent publishers? Like just typical it doesn’t matter if they’re nonfiction Kai, just any independent publishers?

See, I think about it a little bit differently. If I think somebody’s making a book by themselves and selling it by themselves, I think they’ve written the great American novel or like a bunch of emo poetry that sucks. And nobody’s going to want it except their mom. And like, I have this perception that, like, they’re doing it mostly to indulge their own ego. And they weren’t able to get published by any place big, right? Like, so they’re not, they’re, they’re clearly not worth my time. And that’s what I think for just like the broad industry. As it applies to consulting, I think you’re right. I think a lot of people are independent as consultants. And they write their own books. Like Blair Enz wrote the Win Without Pitching Manifesto. I’m pretty sure he did himself. Alan Weiss had an editor for Million Dollar Consulting, but a lot of those books are just his like unfettered id, and they’re glorious, but they weren’t as like run through the ringer. Yeah, so you can have a lot of situations. I mean, how many downloadable PDFs have you received as like info products from colleagues, right? Measure it in scientific notation. I have more books than I know what to do with. Half the people in our Bootstrap or Mastermind group have written books.

Yeah. Philip’s written two. Stark’s written like one and a half, two, and he’s he told the whole room. Like, he’s written for, I think, O’Reilly or New Riders or somebody.

Yeah. And he’s like, I’m never doing it again. And sorry if that’s how you’re getting the news about this, O’Reilly, but you know, there’s There’s definitely a lot of benefit to doing that as an independent consultant, especially if you’re like using it as a way to level people up to professional coaching practice or something like that. A large part of why I decided to go in on this book is not just because I love all of you guys dearly, but because I knew it was going to help position me more as a leader around the business of design. When you write a book, you level up as an authority. You can be the most amazing designer in the world. But what matters is what you ship.

Saying the author of this or uh Brennan Dunn, I’m gonna continue the streak of mentioning him. He he likes calling his books courses. Which is a nice little twist of phrase that makes you seem more professorial, which is even more authoritative. You like upgrade from being an author, like something that’s taught in a college class, the person that teaches the college class, right? And I think that’s a very important distinction to be had there. Like figuring out in what way you’re upping your authority by releasing this book in this way.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you sign up for any one of my services, you get a free copy of Cadence and Slang. I just mail it to you. Because everything is priced high enough and I have a high enough margin that I can throw away books, you know? And you get. More than just the book. You get my point of view. You get the fact that I wrote a book and you hired someone dope enough to write a book. And you can’t, you earn that. You can’t buy it. You can’t. Artificially manufacture it.

Right. I mean, this goes back to a lot of broader notions of imposter syndrome, but if you immediately believe that you don’t Earn a seat at the table or aren’t worthy enough to make a book, it’s going to be true. You just made it true by not doing something. It’s very easy to not do something. So Nobody is going to actually sit down and make the clackety noise and dispel all of the like naysaying contradictions that you have about this than you. And making a book is very hard. I’m not trying to play off like it’s easy, but it is absolutely worth it. Absolutely worth it. I wish I was writing another book right now. I love talking to you right now, but. I want to be putting together another book as soon as humanly possible because I have a lot to say. I’ve just built it up over like five years. And I miss the process. I miss running the marathon to do that. And let’s talk a little bit about how that came about then for ICM in particular and our other books in specific.

Yeah, you know, I think the 13 of us all have really unique perspectives. We have different specializations. You and I are in very different fields. Stark’s in a different field. Phillips in a different field. Moitza’s in a different field, and we all have different perspectives to bear. Making that not clash is important, but there’s something that overlaps about all of us. And I feel it’s quite evergreen. It’s some set of tactics and techniques that we use to position ourselves effectively and stand up for ourselves in our work. And it’s where we find the commonality that’s most interesting to our audience, I feel, but also least interesting to us because I like exploring the differences and debating that internally. But making it legible what the like collective point of view is. Because I don’t really disagree with a whole lot that’s in that book. And it’s what, like a 270-page book. I should be disagreeing with most of any 270-page book. But I love this book. And it covers a very broad range of topics, and I think that’s interesting.

Um I was starting to I made like a zine in uh 2007 or 8? I think it was 8. Where I talked about kind of evergreen principles around interaction design that I wasn’t really seeing anywhere. Where there were things like Fitz’s law, which dictates like tap target size, or like usability analyses that had coalesced quite a bit, but was really bandied about by a few people and hadn’t really been crystallized effectively, or design patterns, which had its own whole book. And the way that you learn about interaction design in 2008 was by buying like 13 books. And there was no one book that was like, here’s how you start. And you have the very brief principles. And if you don’t know anything about this field, know this. And if you’re a developer, then you know how to talk to designers more effectively, or you know how to be a designer better. If you want to learn that. And if you’re a designer, here’s how you get to be an even better designer. So I put that together and it was like a very brief zine. It was like 40 pages. And I was like, at the end of it, I was like, should I make this into a book or not? And people were like, yes, you should absolutely make it into a book. And I was thinking, okay, I’m going to start writing a book and I have no idea where to shop it around. I’ll give like a finished manuscript to people. April of 2009 Kickstarter launches, and one of my friends from college actually was a co-founder. So he emailed Like literally everyone in his address book. It was like one of those things. It’s like, hey, I changed my email address. This is the new email address that you get, like, you know, twice a year or something. And you’re like, okay, you cut my hair in 2004. I don’t know who you are. But I looked at it and he was like, I made a website called Kickstarter. Take a look at it. And I’m like. This is actually really interesting. And so I just did that. And plan B would have been to shop it around, but I never had to get to plan B because it got funded.

No joke. I mean, I. It’s been long enough that I literally could not tell you how screwed I would probably be, like almost every professional opportunity that has occurred to me. Every full-time gig was like this perfunctory half-hour interview where they knew I was completely awesome. And it went from having to prove myself to that. Most of the gigs I’ve gotten as a result of being independent. A lot of them came from being a book author. Most of my speaking engagements. Actually, probably all of my speaking engagements. And what else? Everything. Everything came out of it. It’s. About one seventh of my total income from no, it’s less. It’s like one ninth of my total income from the past five years. But it was the foundation. It’s the bedrock of everything that I do. It’s how I’m known. People are like, oh, are you the cadence and slang guy? They don’t know the guy, but they know the book.

And it’s still a success. It sold eight grand of copies last year. And you know how much publicity I did for it? Nothing. I did nothing. I talked about it once on my Twitter. That was it. It’s just been word of mouth, and people complaining that it’s too expensive, and other people being like, oh my God, this was completely worth it. That was it. That’s the entirety of people. Like, I don’t get anything beyond, or I get, can you make a Kindle version? The answer is no. Download the PDF, put it on your iPad. You own one. Come on. That’s it. That’s it. That’s everybody. And I cannot possibly overstate how. Influential. The book has influenced me. Like, I go back and get inspired from reading that book because I forget about what I wrote in it. Like, we’re on that level about the book because I’m that absent-minded. Benefit number four. There are a lot of benefits, man. A lot of the benefits are my drawbacks. It’s pretty great.

For me, the leads are almost gravy. I just like being known. I like going to conferences and having a name for myself. And the leads come out of that. It’s a nice benefit that I can actually feed myself and stuff. I feel very happy about being able to do that. But I like having. Design is a conversation, and I like knowing that I’ve contributed a significant and enduring voice to that conversation. I get a tremendous amount of pride from that every day, knowing that that was And it essentially came from remixing the content of dozens and dozens of different people and citing tons of sources. Most of Cadence and Slang’s value comes from the side notes where I just endlessly cite all of these weird, obscure references and people like Google everything. And they end up with a reading list a mile long because they read cadence and slang, and I’m not sorry. I feel like I somehow managed to like just Synthesize everything that I know about design that I learned from other books and very little from the actual practice of design, and then turned it into something that like blew up. It’s a sign that design is doing well for itself. But it had nothing to do with leads. I wrote the book initially for no business purpose because I was working a full-time job. What business purpose did it have? I got a raise. That was the business purpose, but I didn’t have a business, you know?

Oh, no, I quit and got a new job. That was like a one-third pay grade. No, they were not in my league anymore, right? Because and I knew that like intellectually, but It took writing the book for it to be legible to people who would be hiring me.

When you’re doing a professional text that contributes to the conversation in a meaningful way and is unlike things that currently exist in the corpus of information that’s out there, and you promote it effectively, you are Making a name for yourself by default. People remember you. And everybody tries to do this. They aspire to it a lot. They make like these info products that try and sell well and they do a lot of stuff. But it has to be. There has to be an amount of uniqueness to it that makes it worth the reader’s time. Because then why wouldn’t I mean, it’s like the O’Reilly problem, right? Not to continually rip on O’Reilly. O’Reilly has, you know, a book to read to program C-sharp, for instance. So does Pragmatic Programmers probably, and New Riders, and probably a bunch of other presses. And so if I go on Amazon and I type in C Sharp Programming Guide, ‘cause the problem at hand is that I need to know C Sharp. I’m going to get a bunch of stuff that’s kind of undifferentiated. But there’s only, you know, if you want to learn like CSS, there’s like 25 different guides, but there’s only one cadence in slang. There’s only one way, and there’s a certain amount of tone and structure that make that unique. But figuring out, it’s not hard to figure out what makes a book unique. Have a distinctive tone. have a distinctive organization to it. Edit it with a certain point of view in mind. Do a weird open source project and use that as your example. You know? Like there are a million different things that you can do to Make yourself unique and get over the hump that like maybe I don’t deserve to write a book. You know, that’s another nice consequence of it. It’s because I have like a weird, baffling perspective and I’m really confident about it. And I’m going to go out and do it because nobody else has.

There’s going to be someone out there who’s a better writer than you or knows more about the subject area than you, but they’re not sitting down and making a clackety noise, well, are they? You are. You’re the one actually executing on it. Or they are. And they’ll eat your lunch.

Yeah, and people develop a habit for reading books that allows them to figure out what those divergences are very quickly. Like I, you’re not Sitting down and reading every single word in a row. If you did that, you would have a book stack 10 miles high. Sophisticated readers know how a book is structured, can figure out what to get the value out of, and then they move on to the next book. It’s hard to read a book, but there’s a technique to it that I wish more people would understand. But yeah, it’s something that you shouldn’t let yourself be discouraged by. And that’s how we made money online.

Yeah, yeah. We have a lot to dig in with this. And You have not heard the last of the Independent Consulting Manual. If you want to continue not hearing the last of the Independent Consulting Manual, I’m going to be super shameless and just say you can go to independentconsultingmanual. com. which is a website on the Internet that exists where you can give us money and then read the independent consulting manual after you give us the money. I know this is It’s staggering, really.

You will love it or else. Or else you won’t love it. Which I’m so sorry I wasted your time.

Do we? Okay, great. Don’t use that.