Hi, welcome to The Daily Grateful. I am Michael Prose, and... Good morning, Americans. It's Friday.
And on today's Daily Grateful, we're going to talk about gratitude and self-publishing. Well, we're going to talk about self-publishing. Maybe you'll be grateful. Maybe you won't.
What is self-publishing? Self-publishing allows authors to have complete creative freedom from cover designs to content and all kinds of stuff. And I know people who make a good living self-publishing. I have a friend named Barbara Grassy.
She lives in Portugal. She used to live here. And she makes a really good living self-publishing. I've met other people.
I've actually spoken. I have no idea why I was invited to do this, but I got invited to speak at a self-publishing convention in Orlando. Trust me, it wasn't that big of a deal, but I met some big-ass YouTube stars there. One of the big-ass YouTube stars that I met there was Dale Roberts and his wife, who are both self-publishers.
Well, him now predominantly, and she used to be. And, you know, I learned a lot. I went out and did my thing, and I met some other people there, and I met them, and they're like really cool people. But self-publishing is, you know, we're just gonna, let me tell you how it used to be.
Okay, how it used, I have this guy that I know. His name is Everett. That's all I'm gonna say. I'm not gonna say his last name, but he self-published a book about motivation and all this good type of stuff.
And he did it the old-fashioned way of self-publishing. In other words, he put this thing together. He didn't edit it, and it had a bunch of misspellings in it and just a bunch of, it was terrible. And he went to a printer and had a ton of these things printed up, and they were in his garage in boxes, and he attempted to sell them.
Not the way to do it. I have another friend that I went to high school with. As a matter of fact, he was my first friend when I moved to Dunedin, Florida in 1965. And his name is John Tenuto.
It still is. John Tenuto self-published a book, and he did it that way too. And he sells it himself, and he sells it for 80 bucks. I don't know how many he's selling.
You can find him on YouTube. Go to YouTube and look for John Tenuto, because he's putting out videos now about his philosophy, which is what his book was about. And I don't have his book, because it's $80. But anyway, I've known John since we were kids, and now we're old men.
But anyhow, when you, the way you do it now, and there's lots of ways to do it. I would suggest going to YouTube and looking for Dale Roberts, self-publishing. There's all kinds of stuff. He's got a course.
I actually bought his course. When I met him in Orlando, I said, I want your course. And he sold me his course at a discount. He was going to give it to me.
I said, no, I'm buying it. So he gave it to me at a discount. I also bought his wife's course. And, you know, my favorite ex-wife and I sat down and we started doing self-publishing.
And we did it through something called KDP, which is Kindle Direct Publishing from Amazon. It doesn't cost you anything. You write your book, you design your book, you design your cover. And then when it's all ready, it has to meet all of these specifications.
You can put it right up on KDP and people will find it on KDP. Now I have probably, between Diane and I, we've probably put out 30 books. There are different types of books you can put out. What was real popular back then was low content books or no content books.
They were journals. They were just lined journals with nifty looking covers. Then there's something called medium content books. And that is a book like a coloring book or a puzzle book.
And there's all kinds of software that you can buy to help you design this and do all of these things. And then there is regular books, as they say, where you write a book and you publish it. And you put it out there. Now, if you're going to do that, that's a little bit more complicated.
You've got to have an editor. I've got another friend named Tara Richter of Richter Publishing. Look it up. She helps you with that.
She's going to charge you, but she helps you with that because she's got editors that work for her. And she's one of the smartest people I've ever met. I really got into self-publishing through her. I went to a seminar that she put on.
I paid money to go to a seminar that she put on about self-publishing. And I will just tell you, can you get rich doing this? Well, she's doing pretty well. And my friend Barbara Grassi is doing real well.
And Dale Roberts is doing real well. There's a lot of people who are doing real well. I myself have made dozens of dollars with self-publishing. Dozens!
But the nice thing about it is you own the book. You own the rights. You have higher royalties than if you go to a traditional publisher. It's a faster publication process.
Why distribution? Because you don't have to stay on KDP. And I would suggest that you distribute on other things that are out there. And if you go on the internet, go to Dale Roberts' YouTube channel.
You'll find all kinds of stuff. And it doesn't cost you anything to do it. Now, what you need to do is you need to market the book. Otherwise, people won't buy it.
Well, guess what I found on TikTok? I found this lady who wrote a book about meditation and self-understanding. And she is on TikTok every day talking about meditation and self-understanding and all of this stuff. And she's always got her book there.
And she said, if you buy the book right now, you know, link in my bio type thing, which takes you right to Amazon and you buy the book, she is selling a poop ton of books doing this. And as a matter of fact, since I looked into this, there's several people that are doing this. And then these people are, you know, they're doing other ways. They're buying the books themselves from Amazon at a wholesale level.
And they're selling them themselves using the TikTok shop. And they're shipping the things out and autographing them and including little two-page worksheets and things like that with it and making bunches of money. I mean, I don't know how much money, but they're on there. And they've been on there for a while.
And they do live TikToks and they get 600 people in the room. I'm here to tell you, if you get 600 people in a TikTok room and you're talking about your book, you're selling books every day. Okay? And she's doing more than just talking about the book.
She's talking about the subject. But everything goes back to the book. Now, my bestseller is Planning Your Podcast, a 52-episode podcasting log and journal by Michael Gross. You can find it on Amazon.
I don't even remember what it costs, but it's worth the money. I've sold a bunch of them. I wrote it in 2020. And it's still selling.
I've got another gardening manual. I've got a bunch of stuff up there. And Diane's got a bunch of stuff up there. And some of it still sells.
But like I say, I have made dozens of dollars. If you're ambitious, you can do better. I should do better. But that's it.
Now, if you don't hear me next week, it's because my electricity is out because the storm has come through and it's not back on yet. I've got five of these episodes that I've just recorded that I must edit now and get them up on the interwebs scheduled to come out on each day. If I can do this tomorrow, I've got some work I've got to do tomorrow on the house to make sure the house is shored up. As a matter of fact, I stopped between podcasts and Zach and I were in the attic dealing with a small leak.
And I know what I've got to go get tomorrow to do a better job with the small leak. So, it's always something. Have a great day. We will hopefully see you next week.
And if we don't, that's why. Take care.