Hi.
I’ve been going through a very hard and dark period in my life. I am very confused, and I need some perspective.
Here’s my intro thread:
INTRO - Hello! from a location-independent self-publisher. My journey so far
Since then, I was able to get to $11k in sales in the beginning of 2018 and keep that average for a long time.
From the outside it looked like I more than doubled my business in a year – but I also started spending much more on AMS ads, so it didn’t exactly double. But it was still a significant progress. The hustle gave tangible results.
I was also happy knowing that I’m at $11k with less than 20 books, where many other publishers can’t get to that level with 150+ published books.
Finally, things started slowly going my planned direction. My goal was to get to ~30k a month and keep it long enough to save $1M (that would be around 3-4 years). I believed that I was finally in the vehicle that was going to take me to my first million dollars. But then life came in.
Come March 2018 I started feeling totally miserable. Nightmarish. It’s not a medical forum and I don’t want to get too much into it in this thread to avoid chaos, but I had problems with extreme anxiety (generalized anxiety, I literally felt like I was in hell for about 5 months, afraid to get out of bed). Turned out it probably was untreated Lyme disease. After many struggles I finally got rid of the anxiety and Lyme (according to blood tests) and bam…got (accidentally) diagnosed with Hashimoto’s.
It's an autoimmune disease that destroys your thyroid, gives you mood swings, weight swings, depression, brain fog, falling hair, candida skin infections, vision problems and other attractions – not fatal by itself, but incurable according to academic medicine, so they usually tell you that you're f*cked for life. The diagnosis itself is enough to break many people, not to mention the symptoms.
There were also countless other problems (existential crisis, for the reasons listed above and many more) and my life turned into mess. Long story short, I didn’t accomplish too much in 2018, other than publishing two perma-free books (to grow my mailing list and dominate my niche's search results a bit more) and one short-read. Fortunately, I was able to still maintain my income on a similar level. It’s one of the things that was keeping me afloat mentally. I’m in the middle of the storm, but at least the income’s fine, even though I can’t focus on my biz like I used to.
In 2019 I went back to working on a more regular basis, but still most of my energy went to my health struggles, planning how to recover, how to get better, and to other life issues. One of them was (still is) being homeless, as I planned to stay in my country for just 2 months and go back to SE Asia ASAP – but I ended up staying for over a year, living on many different Airbnb’s, at my parents’ and on friends’ couches (as I rented out my place to some family), running from one clueless doctor to another, from lab to lab, from one herbalist to other guru, spending lots of money (I estimate I spent around $20k on doctors, supplements, treatments etc. in 2018 and 2019) trying to figure out my health...it was more than totally exhausting).
Where I am at now: as some of you might know, Audible removed their Bounties program, which instantly removed about $2000 USD monthly from my income. That’s around $24000 yearly down the drain, quite a lot. That was the first problem.
Then I realized that AMS (amazon PPC ads) started converting rather shitty, the overall ACOS went up.
I also saw that my ability to save slowed down significantly. I re-calculated my costs, and it looks like they went up from ~36% (yearly average of 2018) to over 50% PRE-TAX. That’s a lot for digital products.
In late 2018 I moved my company and tax residency to Cyprus where I now live, so tax is literally just a few percent (as I’m banking on royalties), but the overall situation still sucks. I moved here participating that I would quickly start making much more, not less, so that it generates some nice savings. I wasn’t planning for a failure.
So - I fell from 11k with 36% costs to around 7-8k with 50% cost in matter of months. Income-wise I literally went back in time 3 or 4 years in few short months. The good ole commandment of control.
Now, I’m not the only one with this problem. Everyone profiting on ACX bounties lost a lot. Many people in this biz lost five figures in income overnight. The truth is we were just lucky in the first place, it didn't even make sense for ACX to pay so much for it. Too good to be true, as they say.
But the difference is that many of these people were able to save millions or at least hundreds of thousands in the process. They are now financially safe, or often practically retired. I am not. It makes me question my venture overall.
So here I am.
29 years old (or young?), with business that I don’t really control, that seems to be slipping down, and I think I lost love for, with my health on a roller-coaster that I can’t control either even though I'm trying hard, and with plethora of other problems there’s no point expanding on right now.
I was on the roll travelling the world and “living the life”. Suddenly life become complicated and heavy.
I feel like I’m running in circles. Not only in business – in life in general. I am not even sure anymore if I’m an entrepreneur, or an artist who got really lost as he got disconnected from music and his true purpose (insert all this hippie spiritual mumbo jumbo here, but it might be true for me, I don't know).
But let’s focus on the business for the sake of this topic. Maybe your suggestions and thoughts will light my way.
I realized it’s been five years into this business. Sixth year running right now. That’s a long time. Many people been making their fortunes in less than 2-3 years.
I’m still not a millionaire and far away from it. I know that things take time, and things usually go slower than expected, and that you have to be patient and grateful...
but still I used to believe that this KDP vehicle might make a millionaire in the next few years.
Now I am not sure anymore if I will ever be able to get there with self-publishing. It destroys my motivation.
I’m 29. Around $160k saved. I don’t even know if that’s good or not anymore.
Maybe good in the scripted world for someone my age, but considering the “Fastlane” was my plan, it doesn’t look too impressive – I don’t know… I guess maybe I just lost my perspective.
I’m not planning to sit down and cry, even though I struggle with depression and mood swings. I push back. I already have a plan that might allow me to go back to my previous level in the next months.
However – what If I hustle super hard and manage to climb up to, say, 25-30k in the next year or two (IF I can), only to find that Amazon changed something again (maybe they decide that 70% in royalties is too much and will cut it to 30%?) or removed my account, or whatever randomness? I don’t know if it's worth it anymore.
Point’s being, the time and focus I’m putting in this business is the time and focus I’m not putting into something else, something that could possibly grow to be a super big thing in the coming years. Or something that I could sell. It's not easy to sell a KDP account as far as I know (I might be wrong).
Maybe I'm limiting my vision here, and keeping myself from bigger possibilities, by sticking to my comfort zone?
Considering it’s been so long and I’m still not even 1 / 4 there, what would you do if you were me?
Dump this business to pursue something new, or stay consistent and keep pushing?
Give myself a pre-determined time-frame to get to somewhere and dump it/sell it if I fail again?
They say that the best thing to predict future is to look at the past.
If it took me 5.5 years to get here, it means that I still won’t be there in 2024, supposing I keep the same peace.
Here’s how the chaos in my head looks like:
/Even though it looks like self-pub is getting harder and harder, I know there’s still lots of money in this biz. There are opportunities.
I have a list of things to improve upon and ideas to try, I just need to execute on those.
I know a few guys making 25-50k monthly, with ~20% costs. Some of them are projecting to get to 50-80k monthly next year. If they could do it, I guess I could too.
->BUT
\these guys are unicorns, and obviously nobody will be willing to tell me everything, so you never know what's going on behind the curtains. Most self-publishers ain't making shit on their books. Can I get there? Maybe. Or maybe not. I failed to do so (reach my financial goal) in the last 5 years. I feel slow. I don’t know what I can control and how fast I can progress anymore.
<-BUT
/I already know this business. I already have the momentum, the traction and a list of 15000 subs. It already made me some good money that most people my age simply do not have. It makes no sense to start something entirely new. There’s still money to make and I know which steps to take in order to increase my income
->BUT
\What’s good in increasing my income again if I still won’t be able to control vast majority of it? Even if I start making money outside of Amazon, they still own the biggest part of the market. So my biggest focus would still be on Amazon publishing, because the leverage is there and it only makes sense if I want to progress fast. If they change something again, I might lose another 4 years or so of progress and hustle. How likely it is things will become even harder or that Amazon decides to screw the authors? Quite likely.
<-BUT
/If I can rebound and increase my income significantly and keep it there for some time (e.g 35 k sales with 20% costs, maintained ifor 3 years), I might save a $Mil or close to it and then it doesn’t matter. I can invest it in real estate or something and become financially set and achieve some peace of mind (not having to worry what IF something happens to my self pub biz).
->BUT
\At the same time, I might be losing time investing it in something I can’t control and still raping the commandment of control.
And I think I kind of lost passion for this. I can spend hours producing electronic music and feeling in the state of total flow. I can travel the world with backpack and take photos with my camera. It makes me feel alive. Would it be possible to make it into a business? But after all these years, self-publishing often feels like a job, I’m not very enthusiastic about it anymore.
<-BUT
/All businesses have ups and downs…. Nothing's perfect. I don’t even have any other good idea on my mind, just fantasies, I have no idea if I can make a decent living producing and selling music, isn't it silly?…
->BUT
\I don't even think this business taught me a lot. It's a very hermetic system. The skills and "marketing" (amazon seo) skills don't even really translate outside of it, apart from basic email marketing and writing skills/content creation (but I'm outsourcing now anyway). I don't feel I'm evolving. Just growing a money system that isn't mine, doing the same thing over and over again to generate more income and savings. The only thing I built that is mine is my mailing list...
BUT…
BUT…BUT…BUT....
And so it goes. A never-ending inner conflict that I haven’t been able to solve for the last few months.
(And it's only one of the life areas I'm currently struggling with).
I was never good with decisions, and now it’s even harder when I’m through all this health bullshit.
My questions:
P.S I am not asking anyone to make life decisions for me.
I just need some perspective, maybe a different view at my problems. I was very hesitant to post it, but I feel that I need to vent out, and there's so many awesome people here, maybe I will get enlightened to some extend or be able to find some clarity knowing that someone was able to make their way through a similar storm..
cheers
I’ve been going through a very hard and dark period in my life. I am very confused, and I need some perspective.
Here’s my intro thread:
INTRO - Hello! from a location-independent self-publisher. My journey so far
Since then, I was able to get to $11k in sales in the beginning of 2018 and keep that average for a long time.
From the outside it looked like I more than doubled my business in a year – but I also started spending much more on AMS ads, so it didn’t exactly double. But it was still a significant progress. The hustle gave tangible results.
I was also happy knowing that I’m at $11k with less than 20 books, where many other publishers can’t get to that level with 150+ published books.
Finally, things started slowly going my planned direction. My goal was to get to ~30k a month and keep it long enough to save $1M (that would be around 3-4 years). I believed that I was finally in the vehicle that was going to take me to my first million dollars. But then life came in.
Come March 2018 I started feeling totally miserable. Nightmarish. It’s not a medical forum and I don’t want to get too much into it in this thread to avoid chaos, but I had problems with extreme anxiety (generalized anxiety, I literally felt like I was in hell for about 5 months, afraid to get out of bed). Turned out it probably was untreated Lyme disease. After many struggles I finally got rid of the anxiety and Lyme (according to blood tests) and bam…got (accidentally) diagnosed with Hashimoto’s.
It's an autoimmune disease that destroys your thyroid, gives you mood swings, weight swings, depression, brain fog, falling hair, candida skin infections, vision problems and other attractions – not fatal by itself, but incurable according to academic medicine, so they usually tell you that you're f*cked for life. The diagnosis itself is enough to break many people, not to mention the symptoms.
There were also countless other problems (existential crisis, for the reasons listed above and many more) and my life turned into mess. Long story short, I didn’t accomplish too much in 2018, other than publishing two perma-free books (to grow my mailing list and dominate my niche's search results a bit more) and one short-read. Fortunately, I was able to still maintain my income on a similar level. It’s one of the things that was keeping me afloat mentally. I’m in the middle of the storm, but at least the income’s fine, even though I can’t focus on my biz like I used to.
In 2019 I went back to working on a more regular basis, but still most of my energy went to my health struggles, planning how to recover, how to get better, and to other life issues. One of them was (still is) being homeless, as I planned to stay in my country for just 2 months and go back to SE Asia ASAP – but I ended up staying for over a year, living on many different Airbnb’s, at my parents’ and on friends’ couches (as I rented out my place to some family), running from one clueless doctor to another, from lab to lab, from one herbalist to other guru, spending lots of money (I estimate I spent around $20k on doctors, supplements, treatments etc. in 2018 and 2019) trying to figure out my health...it was more than totally exhausting).
Where I am at now: as some of you might know, Audible removed their Bounties program, which instantly removed about $2000 USD monthly from my income. That’s around $24000 yearly down the drain, quite a lot. That was the first problem.
Then I realized that AMS (amazon PPC ads) started converting rather shitty, the overall ACOS went up.
I also saw that my ability to save slowed down significantly. I re-calculated my costs, and it looks like they went up from ~36% (yearly average of 2018) to over 50% PRE-TAX. That’s a lot for digital products.
In late 2018 I moved my company and tax residency to Cyprus where I now live, so tax is literally just a few percent (as I’m banking on royalties), but the overall situation still sucks. I moved here participating that I would quickly start making much more, not less, so that it generates some nice savings. I wasn’t planning for a failure.
So - I fell from 11k with 36% costs to around 7-8k with 50% cost in matter of months. Income-wise I literally went back in time 3 or 4 years in few short months. The good ole commandment of control.
Now, I’m not the only one with this problem. Everyone profiting on ACX bounties lost a lot. Many people in this biz lost five figures in income overnight. The truth is we were just lucky in the first place, it didn't even make sense for ACX to pay so much for it. Too good to be true, as they say.
But the difference is that many of these people were able to save millions or at least hundreds of thousands in the process. They are now financially safe, or often practically retired. I am not. It makes me question my venture overall.
So here I am.
29 years old (or young?), with business that I don’t really control, that seems to be slipping down, and I think I lost love for, with my health on a roller-coaster that I can’t control either even though I'm trying hard, and with plethora of other problems there’s no point expanding on right now.
I was on the roll travelling the world and “living the life”. Suddenly life become complicated and heavy.
I feel like I’m running in circles. Not only in business – in life in general. I am not even sure anymore if I’m an entrepreneur, or an artist who got really lost as he got disconnected from music and his true purpose (insert all this hippie spiritual mumbo jumbo here, but it might be true for me, I don't know).
But let’s focus on the business for the sake of this topic. Maybe your suggestions and thoughts will light my way.
I realized it’s been five years into this business. Sixth year running right now. That’s a long time. Many people been making their fortunes in less than 2-3 years.
I’m still not a millionaire and far away from it. I know that things take time, and things usually go slower than expected, and that you have to be patient and grateful...
but still I used to believe that this KDP vehicle might make a millionaire in the next few years.
Now I am not sure anymore if I will ever be able to get there with self-publishing. It destroys my motivation.
I’m 29. Around $160k saved. I don’t even know if that’s good or not anymore.
Maybe good in the scripted world for someone my age, but considering the “Fastlane” was my plan, it doesn’t look too impressive – I don’t know… I guess maybe I just lost my perspective.
I’m not planning to sit down and cry, even though I struggle with depression and mood swings. I push back. I already have a plan that might allow me to go back to my previous level in the next months.
However – what If I hustle super hard and manage to climb up to, say, 25-30k in the next year or two (IF I can), only to find that Amazon changed something again (maybe they decide that 70% in royalties is too much and will cut it to 30%?) or removed my account, or whatever randomness? I don’t know if it's worth it anymore.
Point’s being, the time and focus I’m putting in this business is the time and focus I’m not putting into something else, something that could possibly grow to be a super big thing in the coming years. Or something that I could sell. It's not easy to sell a KDP account as far as I know (I might be wrong).
Maybe I'm limiting my vision here, and keeping myself from bigger possibilities, by sticking to my comfort zone?
Considering it’s been so long and I’m still not even 1 / 4 there, what would you do if you were me?
Dump this business to pursue something new, or stay consistent and keep pushing?
Give myself a pre-determined time-frame to get to somewhere and dump it/sell it if I fail again?
They say that the best thing to predict future is to look at the past.
If it took me 5.5 years to get here, it means that I still won’t be there in 2024, supposing I keep the same peace.
Here’s how the chaos in my head looks like:
/Even though it looks like self-pub is getting harder and harder, I know there’s still lots of money in this biz. There are opportunities.
I have a list of things to improve upon and ideas to try, I just need to execute on those.
I know a few guys making 25-50k monthly, with ~20% costs. Some of them are projecting to get to 50-80k monthly next year. If they could do it, I guess I could too.
->BUT
\these guys are unicorns, and obviously nobody will be willing to tell me everything, so you never know what's going on behind the curtains. Most self-publishers ain't making shit on their books. Can I get there? Maybe. Or maybe not. I failed to do so (reach my financial goal) in the last 5 years. I feel slow. I don’t know what I can control and how fast I can progress anymore.
<-BUT
/I already know this business. I already have the momentum, the traction and a list of 15000 subs. It already made me some good money that most people my age simply do not have. It makes no sense to start something entirely new. There’s still money to make and I know which steps to take in order to increase my income
->BUT
\What’s good in increasing my income again if I still won’t be able to control vast majority of it? Even if I start making money outside of Amazon, they still own the biggest part of the market. So my biggest focus would still be on Amazon publishing, because the leverage is there and it only makes sense if I want to progress fast. If they change something again, I might lose another 4 years or so of progress and hustle. How likely it is things will become even harder or that Amazon decides to screw the authors? Quite likely.
<-BUT
/If I can rebound and increase my income significantly and keep it there for some time (e.g 35 k sales with 20% costs, maintained ifor 3 years), I might save a $Mil or close to it and then it doesn’t matter. I can invest it in real estate or something and become financially set and achieve some peace of mind (not having to worry what IF something happens to my self pub biz).
->BUT
\At the same time, I might be losing time investing it in something I can’t control and still raping the commandment of control.
And I think I kind of lost passion for this. I can spend hours producing electronic music and feeling in the state of total flow. I can travel the world with backpack and take photos with my camera. It makes me feel alive. Would it be possible to make it into a business? But after all these years, self-publishing often feels like a job, I’m not very enthusiastic about it anymore.
<-BUT
/All businesses have ups and downs…. Nothing's perfect. I don’t even have any other good idea on my mind, just fantasies, I have no idea if I can make a decent living producing and selling music, isn't it silly?…
->BUT
\I don't even think this business taught me a lot. It's a very hermetic system. The skills and "marketing" (amazon seo) skills don't even really translate outside of it, apart from basic email marketing and writing skills/content creation (but I'm outsourcing now anyway). I don't feel I'm evolving. Just growing a money system that isn't mine, doing the same thing over and over again to generate more income and savings. The only thing I built that is mine is my mailing list...
BUT…
BUT…BUT…BUT....
And so it goes. A never-ending inner conflict that I haven’t been able to solve for the last few months.
(And it's only one of the life areas I'm currently struggling with).
I was never good with decisions, and now it’s even harder when I’m through all this health bullshit.
My questions:
- What would you do in my place? I am just being hot headed and not perceiving things clearly because of my depression and the overall life mess? Where is the line between being a quitter / money chaser AND someone who quits because it’s the right thing to do?
- Did you ever have a situation where you had to/decided to abandon one business that was still making money and had a potential (in theory), just to chase something entirely new, in order to give it 100% of your attention?
- How do you actually make decisions in such situations, knowing that there is no guarantees, when the inner darkness and doubts-storms make any decision-making super hard? It's been a bad trip, these last several months...
P.S I am not asking anyone to make life decisions for me.
I just need some perspective, maybe a different view at my problems. I was very hesitant to post it, but I feel that I need to vent out, and there's so many awesome people here, maybe I will get enlightened to some extend or be able to find some clarity knowing that someone was able to make their way through a similar storm..
cheers
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