Fastlane Opportunities for Writers

[MTF]

I think the challenge he has with this is a bit like myself ... we have ABSOLUTELY NO DESIRE to become a personal brand with some level of notoriety. We want to write, we don't want to be some figurehead on stage.

100%.

Which is the reason why I can't make non-fiction work anymore for me. A few years ago, you could hit it big without having a personal brand. Amazon helped promote books that you put on their radar through your initial efforts. These days, more marketing is needed and people want to know the author behind the book, want to see the author's blog, YouTube channel, Instagram profile, etc. I don't want to sell my life like that.

There are possibly some non-fiction niches where you could get away without doing this (or even without an author name) but I'm not sure if I still want to write non-fiction. I have one idea in mind but it's not something I'm extremely fired up about so writing a series of books might be a challenge.

That's one of the reasons why I'm learning how to write fiction. Very few people care who's behind a novel they enjoy. It's the fictional characters they care about.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Both.

I've only used it personally for nonfiction but I have seen applications in nonfiction which seem to work just as well.

According to GPT-3 Wikipedia:

• GPT-3 has been used by Andrew Mayne for AI Writer, which allows people to correspond with historical figures via email.

I haven't tried it but I'm guessing it's pretty good.

All of the stuff we currently have access to is the consumer available, limited API. I don't see why if you train these networks on great American authors, it couldn't easily reproduce amazing fiction stories.

It's all about patterns.

The "hero's journey" is easily the most reproduced pattern in fiction and I bet if you train the model on it, it would produce amazing stories.

So basically writing is going to be a mass-produced, ubiquitous commodity? That's a bit scary.

 

[Lex DeVille]

2020 Writing Income | Jim C. Hines

www.jimchines.com

This is super depressing. The guy has been publishing these income reports since 2007, has a nice catalog, and has been working with major New York publishers, and yet made only $31k in 2020, $14k in 2019, and $39k in 2018. His BEST year ever (2016) was $77k.

He makes some money from his self-published titles but it was less than 7% of his 2020 income. I wonder how much he would earn if all of his books were self-published instead of traditionally-published.



For me, writing helps with other aspects of life so its overall ROI, not just monetary, is substantial. It's sort of a meditative experience, it helps you clarify your thoughts (in non-fiction) or maybe deal with some emotions (in fiction). It improves your vocabulary, makes you curious about new things (if you need to do research), and sometimes even helps you become an expert in a topic that may one day generate a higher monetary ROI.

I'm learning how to write fiction now hoping it'll make some money. Considering all the depressing earnings of average fiction writers, I'm not sure how likely it is that it'll ever be anything more than a tiny bit of side income. But maybe the storytelling skills I'll hopefully learn will help me become a better person and also somehow translate into business.

All I know is that there is, for sure, a way to make it work. Who is making it work now? What are they doing? When was the last time you went for a brainstorm to come up with new ideas on the business front, not the writing front?

If you want this to be Fastlane, you need solutions for the parts that aren't working for yourself and others. Not focus on how depressing it is that their business isn't working. How can you solve that? What can you do differently? You don't have to solve it for them. Just for you.

If it's not about the money, then who cares what anybody is doing? Just write.

Part of being an entrepreneur is solving hard shit that nobody else has answers for. Figuring it out when nobody else can. I think that is what is most rewarding about any of this. Being the person who goes beyond - who finds a way even when the darkest hour falls. What is more rewarding than that moment when you realize, it was me all along. Only I could solve this problem that defeated everyone else...

 

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[Primeperiwinkle]

You're not being a downer. Not at all. There are introverts and extroverts and both are important. There are grumpy pessimists who face reality fast but need others to see the beautiful and there are cheerful optimists who see the goodness immediately but need others more when things are rough.

I wish I could sit for a while and drink some coffee with you and let you talk. I know there’s a way through to wherever you want to go.. I don’t know how right now but I’m certain of it.

 

[StrikingViper69]

Ok, I just want to share an alternative perspective.

This AI stuff is making me so happy. For YEARS all of my friends and all of my homeschool friends and all of my classically taught friends and all of my.. ok you get the point, have been complaining about how weak and pathetic and vapid the vocabulary on the internet is. I mean, to rank an article it's best to aim for FOURTH grade reading level?!?!? WTF. It’s like we’ve been given the single most powerful ability in thousands of years and what do we use it for? Porn and googling what time it is. Seriously?

and now.. now with this?? I’m cackling with joy. AI will spell the doom to ANYTHING on the Internet. Not today.. not next week.. but it’s coming. Why the ever-living f*ck would I buy a book that somebody used a machine to make?

if you can’t trust a single word or picture or identity that’s on your device.. the only thing you CAN trust is real ppl you meet in your own community, who write books, who make beautiful things, who grow real food NOT laden with pesticides or destroying waterways, people who care about their reputation.

Small communities will thrive, again.

Keep feeding the machine man, make it grow. The faster it grows the faster the world will get through this bullshit and on to the next era of ignorance and the next great Renaissance.

I totes wanna go buy a printer now..

A lot of people don't want good quality art (whether it's music, paintings, books etc), they want to be entertained and to fit in.

Aslong as something is popular, even if it is trash, people will want it.

 

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[Awaken Study]

For anyone interested in the data for Jarvis/ conversion.ai, I tracked my stats the past two days.

I answered 15 Quora questions for a total of 6,211 words. It took me 2 hours and 5 minutes total. (I took breaks but stopped the timer)

Here are two examples of what I wrote. They aren't perfect but as a beginner writer it's a lot better than what I would have been able to do on my own. These took a max of 15 minutes each to write.

I see myself using this software in the future to write lead magnets/ mini ebooks. It's also great for blog posts. The better the content/questions you feed it, the better the response/output.

I'm using the $130/month version. Not sure if there is a difference between that and the $120/month version.

I've already gotten my money's worth. Hiring a ghostwriter at $.04 cents a word would have cost $250. Saving me $130 and this is only day 2 of using it.

Ethics: Using this software has felt like cheating. It's almost too easy. At the same time, with 7 million blog posts being written everyday there's no way to be 100% original. Even if I wrote something by hand it would probably sound like the 1000 other blog posts on the same topic. The content produced passes plagiarism checks so it's not stealing.

I'm going to gain more experience and invest a little more time in each post to produce quality content.

 

[LifeDeathTime]

I'm still blown away by what it produces. I can't stop playing with it and I'm so impressed by all the opportunities AI presents that I'm seriously considering retraining myself...

If anyone isn't using the assistance of AI in -
- Copywriting (human persuasion is all patterns, humans aren't as different as we like to believe)
- Content Writing (10-100x faster at the same quality, if not better in many cases)
- Ad buying (Facebook, Google, etc. - you get better results by feeding their networks the right inputs and defining what you want out of it than you could ever get manually. I'm seeing this over multiple millions in monthly ad spend from clients. Big-tech in-house algorithms and systems know their users and behaviors far better than we ever could.)

...then you're falling behind and pissing into the wind.

That's like believing you're going to beat Deep Blue in a chess match, just because you're a good chess player and you believe "the individual creativity of the human being can never be topped". Lmao, good F*cking luck.

In '97 it took a specialized supercomputer to beat the best player. Now, chess programs running on cheap hardware - like mobile phones - defeat even the strongest human players.

I wouldn't be surprised if that annoying @robertwills guy was an AI writing bot being run to simply cause outrage on this forum.
I mean, "Thirty-one OpenAI researchers and engineers presented the original May 28, 2020 paper introducing GPT-3.... In their May 28, 2020 paper, the researchers described in detail the potential "harmful effects of GPT-3"[4] which include "misinformation, spam, phishing, abuse of legal and governmental processes, fraudulent academic essay writing and social engineering pretexting".

If you disagree, that's fine, I just picture this -

 

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[Madame Peccato]

I bought a month subscription to Jarvis's Boss Mode and played around with it for a bit. I'm a content writer, and wow, this is going to save me so much time!

The output takes some editing and fact-checking, but man, there's nothing like typing "write a funny story about [article's argument]" and getting one ready for the article.

Also, getting the AI to write an extra sentence or two to unblock me when I feel stuck is another huge timesaver.

 

[Madame Peccato]

Can that AI thing summarise well? It seems quite verbose.

I’m a fan of one liners and my goal is to find to get to the aha moment in as few words as possible.

It has a feature called "Text Summarizer" and another called "Explain it to a child". Here's what I got by inputting the last text @MTF generated:

 

[Madame Peccato]

Pretty sure we'll be able to leverage a "Written by ACTUAL human beings!" USP real soon.

Can't wait to slap "Made in Italy" on my first book

 

[LifeDeathTime]

How many others did not become anything because they assumed AI would make it not worth it?

Fair point. I agree, doing anything is far better than doing nothing.

I've actually been fighting this worry myself in the back of my mind. I'm still taking massive action, but some little part of me is worried that it's all for not.

If this technology truly is exponential, and even though it just became available to the public within the last year, I don't even want to imagine what someone or some entity is doing with hundreds of millions or billions of dollars in resources with this technology.

So I don't think we disagree, we're just looking at different possibilities across different ranges of time.

100%. We don't disagree at all.
It's purely based on the time perspective we're taking.

If you haven't done anything to date , just getting started is most important.

If you're actively cranking out content, and building a "content system" to detach your time from your business system, start allocating some portion of your time to researching, understanding, testing, and leveraging these systems.

I'm not a big fan of worrying about the future at all, unless you can do something in the present moment that will alter your trajectory

 

[seraphine]

I just bought a month's subscription last night in order to write some articles, but it didn't help too much because the articles are really fact-based, so I still have to do the research and put everything into my own words. Astoundingly, it's able to generate facts that sound completely legit but are actually 100% false, which is kind of scary because someone might use something like this to pump out false facts into the world, not out of malice but just ignorance/carelessness.

However, it's really cool to just play around with it, and I can definitely see it being useful in other circumstances. I don't think it'd be that helpful in situations where personal voice/style and imagination are more important and the writer has to draw on personal experiences and emotions or do a lot of contemplation, reflection, and thinking. I'm interested to see whether OpenAI's GPT-3 by itself could be trained so I could get it to write in something that sounds like what I'd actually think and feel—like importing my brain into a machine.

 

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[Charnell]

I'm glad you did the comparison, because one thing we have to keep in mind is that Jarvis is not designed to write fiction, it's designed to write marketing and sales copy.

Sidebar, but I was granted developer access to openAI...but have no use & I am not a developer.

 

[BizyDad]

That's what I'm saying.

I'm in the middle of putting together a case study for this forum on some results I've been getting from this.

Will share soon.

Tag me when you do, plz. Don't want to miss that.

Extra editing tip: take Jarvis' output, paste it into Hemingwayapp, and trim the fat from ther

And for those writing blog posts or web content, you can use frase to create the input.

View attachment 39262

If you want to laugh, try writing a sarcastic yelp review of a company.

Been so impressed with Jarvis that I signed up to be an affiliate. Looks like a great program too with residuals. Great for someone with a forum, blog, or some type of audience, could ramp up passivity on top of a core business.

This won't stay a secret for long. A lot of people are pushing this affiliate-wise. I wonder how long they'll honor the lifetime payment structure...

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Per the recommendations in this thread, I'm also experimenting with Sudowrite. After just a few minutes, it's clear this thing is a writer's block killer. Even if you don't like the suggestions, it gives you some great tangents and things to work with. And yes this AI seems more suitable for stories, whereas Jarvis seems good for business, blogs, and content marketing.

 

[Antifragile]

I wrote a piece directly on Jarvis’ platform, spent probably 2 hours in total. But only half of the work was saved. I received a warning notice that Jarvis is having server problem and tried to copy/paste my work to a MS Word document, only half of the work was copied. Worse yet, Jarvis re-booted the page for me and half was lost on the screen too. Took me another hour to re-write.
Lesson: it is not a good platform to use directly, it’s better to still write elsewhere and then copy your work back to Jarvis, or generate ideas with Jarvis and copy it back.

Echoing @MJ DeMarco, I am slowly finding that my edits do take longer. Only because when Jarvis re-writes a paragraph it can totally mess up the directionality of a message. Example: “I was introduced to Smith by John“ becomes “Smith introduced me to Josh”.

It is still amazing. Just need to learn to navigate the pitfalls.

 

[Antifragile]

I finally pulled the trigger and got 12 months for Jarvis. kind of exciting times for me.

 

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[MTF]

I finally pulled the trigger and got 12 months for Jarvis. kind of exciting times for me.

I reacted with "wow" but to be honest I'm also considering this. I use it for fiction writing a lot as it has become one of my main writing tools (alongside Thesaurus.com, Google, and Sudowrite).

 

[DWX]

I was wondering about one thing...

In interviews, bestselling fiction writers usually say that they had to write their books because they needed to tell the story that was in their head.

I'm not wired like that. I write primarily to make money. If somebody told me I wouldn't be able to make money off writing, I wouldn't write anymore.

Do you think you need to share the "I need to tell the story" mindset to succeed on a big level? Or are they outliers among millions of writers who also had to "tell their stories" but never managed to make anything off them? Or are they saying it because it sounds nice but in reality their priority was also money, not art?

No, I don't believe you need this to succeed, but for the sake of longevity and avoiding burnout, I think it helps to have *some* desire to write/improve craft/etc.

That said, there is this one guy who turns over $40k+ per month** writing cozy mysteries (a female-dominated genre). He's ex-military, doesn't read fiction books, doesn't plot, doesn't write to market, and breaks nearly every genre trope going.

Yet, he is more successful than most who sneeze and fart purple prose.

Why?

Not because he's a talented writer (he's the first to admit he isn't). I believe it's because he treats writing like a business.

He writes fast and publishes quickly.
He engages with fans.
He markets his books.
He doesn't treat his stories like precious little darlings - they're products.

While I cannot speak of his "love" for the craft (he doesn't talk much about that in the FB group), his numbers are his numbers.

Is he an outlier? Maybe.

But I have a sneaky suspicion there are similar writers enjoying similar successes somewhere in the shadows.

(**He publishes exclusively through KU.)

 

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[MTF]

Jasper | AI copilot for enterprise marketing teams

Enterprise-grade AI tools to help marketing teams achieve both speed and performance.

www.jasper.ai

Jarvis rebranded to Jasper because Disney threatened them with legal action.

I liked the masculine name Jarvis more. Jasper sounds like a female dog character from a Disney movie to me.

 

[Andy Black]

I can't help but write, even if I don't get paid for this. I believe that @Andy Black has a quote on this, perhaps from Dan Sullivan.

I don't know who said it, but a great line I heard was:

"The best reason to start a business is because you can't NOT start it."

What I take from that is:

Observe what you can't NOT do.

• What do you have to stop yourself doing?
• What do you find yourself doing when you take a break from something you don't enjoy?
• What energises you?
• What do you think is easy but everyone wonders how you do it?

For me, that's popping into the forum helping people. I've written a LOT - hence me looking at Twitter and LinkedIn as written content can work on there too. That's not worked out for me though ... I've either approached those platforms wrong, or they're too different from communities like this forum and Facebook groups, or both.

I also hop on calls with people at the drop of a hat. I enjoy chatting one-to-one with people to help them, or presenting to groups. This is via video normally. Hence looking at video and streaming. I even forced myself to ignore YouTube for the first half of this year, which seems silly now I write this reply.

I'll come back shortly and write my thoughts on written content.

 

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[StrikingViper69]

I'm now actually tempted to start a blog and just write dozens of articles targeting long tail keywords and answering people's questions that nobody else answers.

From reading your posts, I think this would be a good fit for "you". Y'know, being a stranger on the internet

 

[MattL]

RE: The SEO discussion going on.

Income School is an established player that is positioned quite well for the "get started with blogging" crowd. They've got some good videos - nothing wrong with them. Personally I prefer smaller channels (btw, just realized I said "channels" here. Not "blogs".....) that are "in the trenches", with small niche followings, being really transparent. In the SEO space there are several interesting ones, such as this guy, this dude (nice book in the background) and I was gonna link a third channel for the tripling effect but can't think of any.

Also you might want to check out the r/juststart subreddit - search or filter by case studies to get some insights to the effort and number of articles you need to pump out to get traction.

RE: The YouTube discussion going on.

I've experienced the exact same thing @Andy Black mentioned about Twitter. Take your foot off the gas and you come to an immediate stop. There's no coasting.

I think YouTube and video in general is the better play going forward (why do you think Google rewards videos in blog posts so much..), for that there's these great channels.

RE: Newsletters

Only sending one email each month is crazy. Most engineer-types think that the only value that exists is information. "I need to provide value in my emails so I'll only email when I have something important to say." Bs. If you feel like you don't have anything important to share, just remember that they signed up to hear your take on whatever it is you're an expert on.

 

[MTF]

Free awesome SEO course:
SEO Writing Masterclass - SEO Writing Masterclass 2.0

The presenter is super fun and the information is very well explained without any of the shadiness of SEO.

Also, this will require a longer post but I just started playing with Surfer SEO and holy F*cking shit, it's MIND-BLOWING.

 

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[MTF]

Curious, how are you finding Surfer SEO a couple of weeks on?

So far I wrote four long tail keyword focused articles with it. It's been working great.

The articles start ranking between position 10-25 within a day. I imagine that within a few weeks they should be in top5.

 

[MTF]

Damn, that's impressive. I assume your domain isn't aged?

AI is shaking things up.

I posted the first content on the domain on January 31 and it went "live" on February 3 so it's out of the sandbox already (it's been over 6 months).

Two things for clarification:

• I'm targeting VERY uncompetitive keywords with VERY little volume. We're talking Ahrefs' KD of 5 or less and a few dozen searches a month (but combined with variations it may be closer to a couple of hundred a month). That's unless I find an exception like with one of the keywords that has 2,500 monthly searches yet has almost no real competition. I'm already #10 for this keyword and I know the article will crush the competition since its quality is by far the best out there.
• I don't use Surfer's AI-writing feature. I only use their Content Editor to help me use the right keywords and terms with the right density. Then I use their Audit to further optimize the article.

 

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[Lex DeVille]

Is there any way to go about this without you becoming the face of such a business? Write the content but not necessarily plaster your face all over the Internet trying to sell it?

If you mean selling courses, yes, it is possible, but I'm not sure how realistic it is without building a whole platform of content-focused courses. An example of this is Universal Class: Online Courses and Continuing Education where the company has many different courses by instructors nobody has ever heard of (because they hire freelance course creators).

 

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[MTF]

@MTF I opened this because your posts are always excellent.

Thank you.

While almost any business has a way to pivot into Fastlane, not all paths there are equally easy, some are harder and I see writing as one of the harder paths.

It can definitely be harder for an average person but what about an introvert with writing skills? Brandon Sanderson is a great example of a Fastlane author who leveraged this. But I have to admit there's no way I could ever match his interest in books. The guy lives and breathes this stuff.

To sum up, one possible way to Fastlane for you as a solo-writer-entrepreneur is to build a very niche platform and sell there. Otherwise you aren't creating enough leverage and the math is bad.

Do you mean a platform where other authors are allowed to sell as well or a platform for my stuff alone?

If you mean selling courses, yes, it is possible, but I'm not sure how realistic it is without building a whole platform of content-focused courses. An example of this is Universal Class: Online Courses and Continuing Education where the company has many different courses by instructors nobody has ever heard of (because they hire freelance course creators).

Thanks for that example. Damn that website is so ugly and cheap looking lol.

If I was starting over and looking for Fastlane opps, I wouldn't be writing. I write because I can afford to write.

What would you do if you hit your original "humble" financial independence goals through writing? Still keep writing even if you aren't sure if it can take you to the next level?

I sort of feel like I'm the victim of the sunk cost fallacy here but at the same time I can't help but feel that if I'm already so deeply embedded into this industry it's foolish to try something else.

 

[MTF]

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but this thread reminded me of my favorite example of a successful businessman-writer—Shakespeare! He owned a 12.5-7% stake in his theater company, sold grain, made multiple investments, and bought several properties he was able to rent out. When he came to London, he was probably quite poor (seeing as his father was in debt), but when he left, he was rich enough to buy himself a coat of arms and become a gentleman. From the evidence we have, it seems like he was always looking for ways to turn a profit and was very shrewd about it.

That's interesting, thank you for sharing. Some extra details from Wikipedia:

In 1599, a partnership of members of the company built their own theatre on the south bank of the River Thames, which they named the Globe. In 1608, the partnership also took over the Blackfriars indoor theatre. Extant records of Shakespeare's property purchases and investments indicate that his association with the company made him a wealthy man,[53] and in 1597, he bought the second-largest house in Stratford, New Place, and in 1605, invested in a share of the parish tithes in Stratford.[54]

If it was no longer challenging, plus enjoyable, I might seek other things.

For example, I'm really getting burned out in the business/entrepreneur/finance space as the niche is filled with posers and "trailer millionaires".

Ha, I'd rather prefer writing fiction be less challenging than it is. As for enjoyable, writing is that weird activity where sometimes you love it and sometimes you hate it.

I understand getting burned out in the space. Same for my main non-fiction niche. That's why I don't think I can write in it anymore.

there are many ways to self-publish and do well without relying on the lack of Control that an exclusively Amazon model has.

I don't publish exclusively on Amazon and have multiple sources of income. Still, at least 80% comes from Amazon because it dominates the market. Non-fiction writers can possibly escape this by selling their own products, courses, etc. But fiction writers would have a hard time avoiding breaking the commandment of control.

Joanna Penn is a popular example, and she's steadily built a mid-six-figure business out of it over several years.

As far as I know she's making at most $100k a year. It's hardly a hugely successful business considering how much recognition she has as a self-publishing expert.

This is true, but that's why coaches develop group coaching programs. Get all of you into a Facebook group for example, and provide on-the-go content at SCALE, + answer questions live, that type of thing. It still takes up your TIME initially, however, the bigger you grow, the more you can bring other experts into your group, and the less of your own time it will consume. And as you grow, you can even TRAIN other people to coach for you. Then you take yourself out of the equation for the most part. Think of people like Dan Sullivan or Tony Robbins - rarely coach themselves, mostly it's other people. And then you can still offer 1 on 1 stuff... but charge for it so that it's worth it haha... $10,000+/hr!

This reminds me of the "Mexican Fisherman" tale. Go through all this trouble to eventually do the same thing again as you're doing now lol. At least that's how it feels when I imagine doing it myself, currently enjoying a simple life of a writer with none of these headaches.

This was actually an interesting realization for me as I read your post. I'd rather live a simple life as I live now and make less than be so married to a business that I have to do things live, work with other people, etc.

Looks like this is your underlying question/problem statement.

Deep down you know the answer. It's always great to have many opportunities and other skills to leverage. Don't put all your eggs in one basket.

Good luck!

My self-publishing business fuels my investments so I'm not really putting all my eggs in one basket. But I do understand what you're trying to say. Thank you.

 

[Antifragile]

To clarify this a little, I'm already financially independent and that has happened exclusively because of my self-publishing business going Fastlane. I can write for fun alone but it just doesn't work for me. You mentioned MJ's example and him being wired to do stuff the Fastlane way. I'm the same.

Say that I would want to write a book about one of my passions. If I knew for a fact that it wouldn't ever turn a profit, I wouldn't write it, no matter how much I'd want to write about the topic.



There is leverage if you become a bestselling author on Amazon because it can generate organic traffic. I still keep making money from books I published a few years ago and that's not because of my own efforts but because of the leverage Amazon offers.

As for the platform that sells my books, I'm not sure how would this differ from any blog, authority site or anything like that. Is MJ's Viperion Publishing store his platform to sell books? I assume he still sells 90%+ via distributors like Amazon or iTunes. Or is MJ's platform this forum and by a platform you mean any website where you gather an audience? I'm just trying to understand what you mean by that.

@MTF

Very interesting post, again.

For one, you used available leverage and turned writing into enough profits to become financially independent. Awesome. But then, if you knew you would not make a profit you would not write a book, no matter how much you liked the topic.

I’d be curious to know if @MJ DeMarco felt the same way. What I mean is this: are you treating profits from writing as a signal of your own writing mastery? Meaning you want recognition that what you write is quality material and people should pay for it? Not the money.

Or, are you writing to make a profit for the profit $$?

There is a huge difference between the two. Because if you are after $$ money, my (one man’s) opinion is that writing is just not Fastlane. My analogy being, running shoes are slow, bicycle is much faster and get get you even across a country, but it’s not a car and definitely not an airplane. To me, Fastlane means very fast. You travel making profits faster.

But if you are not after the money but need some validation for your work, that can be achieved in other ways. Reviews, impact made on other people etc.

As a hobby, I volunteer my time. I have no expectation of ever making a dime from helping others. But if I felt that my work with them was not yielding any positive results, I would not do it. One day I too hope to write (when I hit my exit number on my Fastlane) and I probably will charge some fee for some of it to ensure it’s not confused with any of the millions of free garbage published daily out there. Yet profit is not on my mind with that, making an impact on someone else is.

If profits are the main objective, then there are other businesses that are more suitable to Fastlane.

To clarify my comments on the use of a platform. Amazon is a dominant force for books, its wicked huge. You can’t ignore an elephant in the room and most sales (even for MJ) will happen there. Platform like this forum, SMS list that MJ maintains and his social media accounts allow him to continue distributing his books regardless of what happens to Amazon. That’s key point I was trying to make. If you become a niche market writer, famous in a circle of people who will want to buy ANY book you publish, that’s a platform. To simplify, if MJ texts to his group that he just published one more book, I’ll buy it without having to see a tile, cover page or anything else. I know enough about him to just buy. More than that, if he said I am pre-selling a book I didn’t even write yet, I’ll buy it too. Why? That’s the power of his platform. How can you create something similar?