how to make money | David M Masters

How You Can Write and Sell Your Books and Make Money

Question: How can you sell your books and make money? Answer: All you have to do is use the same method that we use repeatedly, without fail.

1 Start with What You Want to Accomplish

Know what you want the purpose of your book to be. Do you want to help raise the IQ of kids? Do you want to help people in struggling relationships? Do you want to warn people about the pitfalls of making bad judgments? Do you want to help people love more? Do you want to help people increase their scores?

A book can do just about anything, from just experiencing a fanciful getaway from the everyday drudgery of life or learning to think about or do something to increasing one’s human or spiritual potential.

2 What Will Your Book Be About?

Your book will have a particular message, tone, and theme. How-to books are the easiest to make money with. Here’s an example of some How-to books:

Bake a Cake, Be Happy, Bees and Honey, Breakup Better, Business via Cell Phone, Cook Better, Create Your Own Art, Decorate, Exercise, Find Love, Fish, Fly a Plane, Gambling Tips, Get 6-pack Abs, Get a Better Job, Heal a Broken Heart, Increase Business, Increase Productivity, Invest Better, Live a Better Life, Lose Weight, Make Arts and Crafts, Make the World a Better Place, Manage Disease, Meditate, Read Body Language, Read the Stars, Save Your Marriage, Self-heal, Send Love to the World, Survive Infidelity, Travel Better, Use Computers, Use Herbs, Win at Games, or how to do Yoga.

The possibilities are endless. And any of the aforementioned books could be easily monetized.

If your book is not a how-to book, you need to turn your book into a series of hypothetical examples of how to move through a process or life in general. For instance, any book, such as The Hobbit, could be turned into a way to manage one’s career, family, education, or life path for excellent adventure and outcome, metaphorically, chapter by chapter.

Or consider writing another book. We do this all the time, in 90 days or less.

3 Start Writing the Book

If you still need to write the book, start writing it today. We accomplish this feat by committing to writing at least 500 words a day, every day, for 90 days. Usually, one or more of us do this at any time, so when someone starts doing this, like you, for instance, you can do it along with one or more of us, and we can help be your accountability partner.

This sounds like an impossible task to many, but we make it so easy. Just write whatever you want about your topic any day. Do this freestyle without any preset order in mind. Just keep writing your 500 words a day, then at the end of 90 days, sort out your writings, put them in order, separate them into chapters, then create your table of contents.

Build your ook organically. In this way, it is like just writing from your heart or automatic writing. If you’re writing with us, we can help you with writer’s block if you’re frustrated and looking at a blank page.

4 Prepare to Teach the Book

While writing the book, think about the many ways you can conduct classes to reach the people your book was written to reach.

5 Format and Publish Your Book

After the 90 days are up, format your book and publish it. This is easier nowadays with the advent of on-demand self-publishing. There are many ways to get this done with little or no investment.

Back in the day, I was known as the 7-Day Author, and I wrote a book and taught a class on how to write and publish your book in 7 days. That book is out of print, and now we do it in 72 hours. Don’t let this part stop you; you can do it in tandem with us because we’re doing it all the time, or you can just write it up and publish it through Amazon’s Kindle on-demand publishing. There is no cost to publish. You will have to buy copies of your book to sell with your product, and if you are publishing through Amazon’s Kindle program (KDP), you can purchase inexpensive author copies of your books at well below wholesale.

6 Create Your Product

Give yourself a month or a month-and-a-half (or two months if you have to) to create your product or course, where you will be using your book as the textbook.

You will need to come up with all the ad copy, graphics, and worksheets and, hopefully, find friends who will help you with the dry run and testing your delivery methods. You may need slide presentations or other presentation tools. And don’t let this overwhelm you. We used to do this with makers and an overhead projector or easel with large presentation pads; some still do that today.

Just get started and make it better as you go.

7 Sell Books Make Money

Here’s where you can easily make a living doing what you love, connecting with your audience and helping them in whatever way you can, as you sell books and make money doing it.

You put on your own classes. You charge money for the classes, and the students buy your book and the textbook, and that’s what my friends and I have been doing since 1980.

And it’s easier today than ever before. My friends and I were always tied into doing live classes. Rent a space, advertise in media, sell tickets in advance, blah, blah, blah. That was until the COVID pandemic barred us from doing so. This was the blessing inside the curse of the lockdown. It forced us to

GO ONLINE

Doing so enabled us to reach more people at a far lower cost as we sold more books and made more money.

I still travel and do live classes. This is how I travel and enjoy the various places and environments around the world while deeply connecting with my people face-to-face and letting the events pay for it all. But I serve far more people live streaming online now than I do live, in person.

Do this, and you’re not just selling books and making money; you are leaving a legacy, building an enterprise, and/or leading a movement.

Doing What You Love vs Making Money

Yesterday, my granddaughter comes up to me and says, “Papa, I know what I want to do with my life!” Very excited, she continues, “You know how you’re always talking about doing what you love vs making money?” I respond enthusiastically, “Yes. Yes, go on.” After some thoughtful framing, she tells me the details of her plan.

When she told me the details of her plan, it nearly broke me, because what she wanted to do with her life, what she was so passionate about, what she loved to do more than anything, her reason for getting up every day, to breathe, and how she defined herself in the world, was reduced to her presenting business plan.

I was blessed and honored to be the first person to whom she reported her heart’s desire, and to know that my encouragement that she seek to achieve her highest and best had found resonance in her. She had thoroughly understood my explaining about doing what you love vs making money to her and developed a sound business plan which monetized her hopes and dreams.

In a million years, I would have not come up with an idea to pursue, like hers, and I would have hoped that she choose almost anything else besides what she’d selected to be her ultimate goal in life, but this did not dissuade me from supporting her completely. For how can you deny or dictate the desires of someone’s heart? You can try, but to do so doesn’t make any sense.

The desires of someone’s heart, what they love more than anything, can change over time, but whatever it is, right now, simply is. You cannot change it. So, bless and support whoever they are in whatever it is that they love beyond all other things in this life.

Doing What You Love vs. Making Money

In doing what you love vs. making money, the basis is that you discover the thing that you’d love to do, what you are passionate about, the activity that you would engage in where time just disappears, to make money doing what you love would be far superior to working just to make a paycheck to survive.

When I am working with a client, it is very rare that I find someone who does not know what they are passionate about. Even so, with a little probing, together we can find out what turns you on.

Now, finding a way to monetize your passion is a whole other process. It takes some creative detective work to come up with a plan for making money doing what you love, and you’re going to have to stretch your imagination enough to look at ways you can make it happen.

It takes a bit of ingenuity to monetize your heart’s desire, and there is a degree of risk in stepping out in faith to make money doing what you love. If your need to make money outweighs your desire to pursue your passion for profit, this can be a problem, and it is the primary reason why more people do not do what they love for money.

In most cases, people are more likely to settle for finding a career doing something they like, or is not too distasteful, in exchange for a paycheck. And there’s nothing wrong with that, but you could do better, if you are courageous enough to tackle such a task.

In the case of my granddaughter, she had done the research, developed her brand, a marketing strategy, and even came up with potential locations to launch her dream business. A grandfather couldn’t be more proud.

Generally, you will need some assistance in working out the details to create or pursue your passion and make your dream come true.

Thanks to the world wide web, you have access to all the resources you need to get from here to there, and if you’re feeling like it’s just too much to take on, seek out a qualified coach or consultant who can help you get you to where you want to be.

You May Fail

Doing so, will not be without risk, and you may not achieve your financial goals the first time out.

There is no need to feel dejected if you fail, for those who have found their way to monetize what they love have failed, but kept going. Look for your Return on Failure Learning (ROFL) and you can use what you have learned to strengthen your resolve to keep going.

Even if you’re feeling unworthy, or like, “My life has been so awful,” and you just can’t see the forest for the trees, look for others who you look up to, and know even though to us it looks as though they experienced instant success, a closer look at their stories will reveal their journey was not an easy one, and they continued to push through and overcome the obstacles which presented themselves along the way.

You can do this.

Do what you love and the money will follow.

If you need help, call me.

How to Make a Million Dollars

If you’ve ever pondered how to make a million dollars, chances are you don’t already have a million dollars and probably have never possessed 1 million dollars.

You’ve heard all the stories about how other people have awakened one morning to suddenly have a million dollars in their bank account and you’re thinking you want some of that too.

Are these stories true?

For the most part, they are, though many important details are often left out.

Could it happen to you?

Yes, it could. Anything could happen. Will it happen? Well, that’s another question entirely. Whether it happens to you, or not, depends on you and what you do.

Which of these two?

First, you have to ask yourself how bad you want it?

Based on your desire to attain your one million dollars, do you want it

The Easy Way? or The Hard Way?

The easy way, means you’ll be at the very least buying lottery tickets regularly. Buy lottery tickets regularly while you daydream about winning the lottery, getting one dollar from every person, or coming up with your ingenious idea that will shower you with millions of dollars with little or no effort on your part. Unless you have a wealthy relative with whom you share good favor and he/she has named you as the recipient of 1 million dollars in their will, you will probably win the lottery before you make a million dollars the easy way.

If you want it bad enough to be willing to do it the hard way, you are willing to take 100 percent responsibility to the work necessary to make your vision of having a million dollars a reality.

What do you have to do?

We can learn from millionaires who have amassed fortunes and started from scratch. These individuals set out to purposely create wealth and many started with little or no resources at the out-set of their financial journey.

What did they have?

1 Passion and Vision

They have a clear vision of the ultimate destination and the drive to make it happen that is so strong that it enables them to power-through the tough times (and there will be times when it gets rough).

2 Self Awareness

Successful entrepreneurs spend time assessing themselves of their skills and abilities, so that they are aware of their own individual strengths and weaknesses, realizing they will probably not be able to do it themselves, or having a team (made up of those who have the entrepreneur’s weaknesses as their strengths) to accomplish the mission.

3 Education

(Not the traditional get-a-degree type of education.) They teach themselves or learn everything there is to equip them to do whatever it takes to make their dream come true. Even if they are not doing the work themselves (outsourcing) they have a basic understanding of what needs to be done so they can hold others accountable.

4 Plans

They make plans and are willing to change them on-the-fly based on emerging data, as circumstances, the landscape and marketplace changes and they adapt.

5 Create Momentum

Without momentum, you’re really going nowhere. The people who really make their dreams come true are in the business of doing something every day (or regularly) that moves them closer toward where they want to be. Regular movement forward creates momentum and it is accumulative, resulting in a wave that can propel itself forward, while haphazard effort will mean much more work over time.

6 Accept the Process

Successful entrepreneurs who started on a shoes string accepted the idea that achieving their financial goals may take on many different faces and progress through different phases on the journey from here to there. It may take starting a small business, selling it and parlaying the profits into the next venture. A process that may need to be repeated until the goal is attained.

7 Fail Forward

Be willing to fail at any point along the way, but not to give up when faced with failure. Actually, to the burgeoning entrepreneur, there is no such thing as failure, as it is only a learning tool. It’s like being thrown off a horse. They don’t give up riding altogether. They dust themselves off, evaluate what happened, and get back on a little wiser than they were the last go ‘round.

Isn’t now the best time to start making a million dollars for you?

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Make Money Doing What You Love

Sounds crazy, right? Yet, you know there are thousands (more like, millions) of people doing what they love and getting paid for it. Some people are getting paid quite handsomely, while others are getting absolutely rich doing what they love.

Most of the people I work with either do what they love – and get paid for it – or they have other enterprises and are integrating what they love to get paid for it.

If they can do it, why not you?

Imagine for a moment that you could do what you love and get paid ten or a hundred times that you’re making now working a job for someone else… What does that look like? First, you have to decide what you love to do, more than anything.

Frances Hesselbein found a great sense of purpose and fulfillment as a volunteer leader in the Girl Scouts. She loved it so much, she rose through the ranks and became the CEO of the Girl Scouts of the USA. So inspiring was her work with the Girls Scouts, she was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

What Do You Love to Do?

Most (but not all people) have an idea of what it is that they love to do; that thing that when you’re actively engaged in it, time just seems to fade away, as well as the everyday concerns of life, and nothing else seems to matter.

When I’m working one-on-one, this is serious business, determining what is the thing that you love to do the most? In a group setting, workshop or seminar, when I ask for ideas from the audience, invariably I get someone who offers up, “I love to sleep!” (so I’m assuming someone reading these words is having the same idea).

So, let’s go there… Can you think of anyone who gets paid to sleep?

Get Paid to Sleep

Not to be confused with getting paid while you sleep (like having a revenue stream that runs around the clock) these people get paid specifically for sleeping. There are sleep or other scientific study subjects, some employers are now paying their employees to take naps on the job, many jobs pay for blocks of time that include slumber, hospitality reviewers get paid not only to sleep but to sample all the creature comforts of hotels. Some domestic in-home care workers work the night-shift to sleep (although lightly, as they are paid also to respond to an emergency). Then, of course, there is the oldest profession, where some of the assignments actually do include being paid extra to sleep.

And that’s not including the many people who enjoy a great deal of success, including fortunes, as the rewards for their sleeping. Many of the most creative ideas are birthed while sleeping according to Albert Einstein, Robert Louis Stevenson, Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Carl Jung, Edgar Allen Poe, Salvador Dali, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, just to name a few (of the people who are also famous for getting paid for doing what they love).

In other words, if you have verifiable evidence that you can get paid – receive fortunes or benefit humanity greatly – from sleeping (thank you, hecklers), is it too much a stretch of the imagination that you could turn that thing that you love to do into – not only a regular income stream, but possibly – a veritable gold mine?

I don’t love money
I get money doing what I love

It happens every day and I am blessed to help assist some of the people in reorganizing their lives to do just that. Making a living doing what you love is one thing, especially if your sights are set very low, as is the case of starving artists. They are able to eek out a living as best they can, possibly by subsidizing their income by doing add jobs, or as wait staff.

On the other hand, many other artists thrive, but they approach their art differently, more like a business. I mean, if you’re going to work for someone, why shouldn’t it be you? Although, if you want to be a success in this arrangement, that puts more responsibility on you to be a successful business person and employer. This ambition, though potentially extremely profitable, is not for the faint of heart.

Really, there is no reason that anyone should not be doing what they love and get paid for it. In fact, this is the natural order of things, though it has been corrupted by a corporate societal structure imposing a different set of ideals we all have succumbed to.

We all know people who are doing what they love and enjoying remuneration for their craft, it wouldn’t take much – just a few tweaks, here and there – to put those individuals in an increased income bracket. More effort to supercharge your brand and marketing, could rocket-launch your success even more.

It might be time for you to

Do what you love

and

Earn Money

Do what you love and the money will follow.

If I Could Just Get One Dollar from Every Person…

If I had a dollar from every person (client or not) who said to me, “If I could just get one dollar from every person…” (fill in the blank), I’d be almost as rich as those who fantasize about the idea, dream of being.

Sure, it’s a great idea, and there are people (and companies) who have done it.

But can you do it?

How to make a million dollars

Can you actually get one dollar from everyone in your target market?

Well, to start; it’s up to you.

You must be willing to start to get the ball rolling… You are going to have to be willing to do some work (just like those who have done it before)… “But,” you say, he/she, “didn’t have to do any work, and look at what happened to them.”

Really?

You’re confusing possible with plausible. While a thing may be possible (as in it actually happened at some time in the past) to think that it is duplicatable may be highly unlikely; for if it were plausible, wouldn’t everyone do it? If you really think that you have a chance of being that lucky, but a lottery ticket and save yourself the grief.

Okay, let’s assume that you’re not looking for free money but you are looking for passive income. Passive income is income that is generated from something that you did in the past that requires little or no maintenance.

Is that plausible? Yes. Many people engage in investments or opportunities requiring work in the beginning that generate recurring income over time.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the biggest selling authors in the world and cash from their continued sales of their books exceed the $1 per person that may seem so illusive to you at this point.

So, if you’re willing and able to write and publish a best-selling book, your chances could be better because you create and market your book in the beginning and if it’s a hit, you earn over the life of the project (as well as possible merchandise tie-ins and maybe even the film rights, etc…).

Besides writing a book, are their other ways to make passive income? You bet; people just like you are doing it every day. For instance you could buy and own a business that you don’t have to work. May be a little spendy at the outset but the continued income could be just what you’re looking for. But if you do this, make sure that you’re the owner, and someone else is doing all the work.

Enterprising creators can create a franchise, phone ap or software, designers (who create an original item that is replicated and they get a piece of the action) as well as inventors.

Rental real estate (where someone else manages the properties and you earn everything over actual expenses), rental stores, in fact rental anything!

Some of the other examples that I’ve seen include ATM machines, vending machines, blogs, e-stores, membership sites, online courses, Laundromats, sell ad space (physical or virtual) and licensing your ideas are just a few more examples of ways you can create continued cash flow off the back end.

Is it possible? Yes.

Is it plausible? Could be, if you stack the deck correctly, you could increase your odds immensely of having a winning hand.

My question to you is:

Are you willing, able and committed to work on this project and follow it through to completion?

Those are the people who I hang out with. These people have done (or are doing) the work necessary to be ready when lightning strikes.

Are you looking for a free ride?

Good luck with that… Really; I hope you are that lucky. 🙂