Today, I’m talking to Hassan Osman— he’s the host of Writer on the Side, and himself a prolific writer. We talk about crafting books that sell (and keep selling), self-publishing on Amazon, and how to write while having a full-time job. Here’s Hassan!
Arvid Kahl
Hello everyone and welcome to the Bootstrapped Founder. Today, I’m talking to Hassan Osman. He’s the host of Writer on the Side and himself a prolific writer. We talk about crafting books that sell and keep selling self publishing on Amazon, and how to write while having a full time job. Here’s Hassan. I was super fortunate to be on your show because I think that was the first time that I was ever allowed to talk about the writing side of things, and not just a startup side of things. And it makes a whole lot of difference to write or to be appreciated for the craft of actually putting words into a book, instead of just the expert who uses the medium of writing. And what I find super interesting in your journey now that I’ve listened to your podcasts a lot and just followed you on social media and wherever you are. Not as intensely as I use social media maybe but you’re there. I can find you there. I see that you approach writing in a quite a different way than most other people who use writing as a means to communicate with potential customers or even to sell books to make a living off. For you, writing is a thing you do on the side. Obviously, your podcast is called Writer on the Side or you do things intentionally as a side project. And that is novel to me because most people do a thing like either they do it fully or they don’t do it at all. So I would love to know more about this intentional choice, and how that came about.
Hassan Osman
Yeah. Gosh, where do we start? First of all, I’m super glad we’re connecting on this. It’s an honor being on your show too and this is a lot of fun, really looking forward to it. By the way, I followed your guidelines. I haven’t prepared anything for this casual conversation, got my cup of coffee.
Arvid Kahl
There you go. Me, too.
Hassan Osman
So if I go on rambling about something, feel free to cut me off or read the deck because I don’t have it.
Arvid Kahl
That’s what I do this for. C’mon.
Hassan Osman
There you go. There you go. I love it. I love sorts of very casual laid back conversation. So let me start with what I do for my day job. So I work for Cisco Systems. I’m a director leading what’s called the program management office for the Americas. I always have to say this, Arvid. Whenever I’m on a podcast , these are my own and not those of my company, right? It’s a lawyer required notes. I guess it comes with the territory of being a full time employee and doing things on the sides. And I’ve always had this passion for writing, for sharing knowledge, for teaching. And the first day, not in my current job. But my previous job, I was a consultant at Ernst & Young. I now kind of helping large organizations. First day on the job, I finish up, go back home. And the first thing I do is open up my laptop, I started writing a book. Like literally the first kind of chapter of that book. So it’s always been in me that I wanted to kind of share my knowledge. I really enjoyed the entrepreneurial side of it. But then I said, with my constraints, a job is very demanding. I’m married. I’ve got two little girls. Family takes up a lot of time. What can I do with like my disposable free time to be able to, you know, enjoy that time that I have? So I had a blog, but I wasn’t as actively involved in it as I was with writing. And so in a way, it was very time boxed, like I’ve got X amount of time per day or per week where I can spend writing. And so I might as well put that effort into a product that I can potentially sell later on as opposed to, you know, focusing on Twitter or any other social media. So that’s sort of my strategy is really, you know, sort of timeboxing what I have in terms of my free time and focusing on books from that standpoint.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, it makes sense. Like, to me, the interesting thing is that you are successful with your books, and that people read your books, they buy your books, they like your books, they talk about your books, yet still. And that’s the part I don’t think it’s confusing. It’s just an intentional choice. You still don’t wanna become a full time writer.
Hassan Osman
Yes
Arvid Kahl
Is there anything that kind of keeps you from wanting to become a full time writer?
Hassan Osman
Yeah, that’s a great question. And you’re too kind about the comments about the books. Have been very fortunate that, you know, they’ve been picked up. And we can talk a little bit about leveraging platforms versus selling on your own. You know, I think this is the first time I can give an answer, which is more of I don’t know. Like previously it was no. Like I don’t think I wanna do this 100% full time because I enjoy the gray matter stimulation. I enjoy the fact that I’m working a full time job. You know, I enjoy that corporate side of the world. And then I kind of enjoy that. I’m not sure if I do writing exclusively for a living where I have to make ends meet would be something that I enjoy doing without sort of having that a little bit of a security blanket. Plus, it’s the mental stimulation, it’s sort of being able to do both. A lot of the topics that I write about, Arvid in my books have to do with what I learned in my job too, right? So it’s about managing virtual teams. It’s about communicating via email with large teams. It’s about hybrid work now. It’s about Project kickoff meeting. So a lot of that is sort of knowledge I gained from on the job, sort of tacit knowledge, and they kind of translated to that. But now it feels like well, you know, recession potentially on the corner. We’re all hearing the news, layoffs left and right. And so it’s like, well, if I had to, then it’s probably not too bad. Like, I actually enjoy waking up and writing and creating courses too. So I kind of do that as well, which is similar in the same vein as the books. But yeah, so that’s sort of my package answer for you. That’s probably at this point in time.
Arvid Kahl
I can see. First, I can totally understand that this is something that you enjoy doing. And you don’t wanna kind of ruin it by having like, for it to have to work right for you. And if you don’t like it, you still have to do it. Because that’s the only way you would have an income. It makes perfect sense. And the other thing like slowly shifting perspective also makes sense. Like with the recession, owning your means of production to, you know, get a bit into that kind of jargon, that’s important at this point because how quickly we can all lose our jobs. Like I think this recession in particular is showing us even in the tech sector, that has usually been, you know, more stable, and people have been higher qualified. And in the last to let go, there is no job security. Like whatever happens, you have no control over which company is gonna let how many people go. It’s quite bizarre, it’s very sad to watch. And it’s certainly giving me even more courage to tell people to at least try to do something on the side, no matter if it’s writing or building a business or growing a community, building an audience, building reputation, so that you can leverage it in the future. It doesn’t matter what it is, anything on the side is better than just totally focusing on the one thing that may be gone within a day.
Hassan Osman
100%
Arvid Kahl
I appreciate your perspective on this. You just said something about social media platforms and the presence or lack of presence there off. And you have built kind of an audience that is not technically located exclusively on social media. Can you tell me more about like how you’ve been increasing your reputation in the field and just the eyeballs on your product without being like a Twitter extremist? Can you tell me about that?
Hassan Osman
I’m not sure extremist is the right word because I do aspire to be you know, have the number of followers that you have too. Look, it’s a simple mathematical formula, right? I’ve got limited time in the day that I can spend on anything outside of work and outside of family. And so I said, where do I wanna spend that time? Do I go and build an audience? Which by the way, is a fantastic strategy, just like you know, you’ve been super successful. You know, folks like Daniel Vassallo have been insanely successful. Justin Wells, I mean, a lot of folks that have built an audience and then monetize it is a phenomenal strategy. However, it does take time and it takes patience. And it takes a lot of work too. Like people think, you know, it’s not like just scheduling things and hype up or whatever. And you’re done, right? You actively have to engage with people online, and so on and so forth. And so I took a step back and said, that works. However, with my situation, I need to think a little bit differently. I thought about leveraging existing marketplaces such as Amazon, for example, for books and Udemy, for courses. To say, that’s where the traffic already is, right? They do take a much higher cut from the profits that you know, that you take compared to what you would do selling solo. And you and I have talked about this Gumroad versus Amazon, so on and so forth. However, the volume is insane on those platforms, right? A platform like Amazon, people are on there with their credit cards ready to buy something, right? They’re not there like Facebook to socialize or Instagram, scroll through photos or TikTok for videos or entertainment. They’re on Amazon to buy. And so when you have millions of users on that, and by the way, obviously it started with books. So it’s the largest book marketplace, like well, how can I leverage that if I don’t have an audience? I don’t have a lot of followers to use the algorithm of Amazon to be able to get traction and eyeballs on my books and then increase conversion rates through you know, creating a better cover, a better title, subtitle, description, all those metrics, but really kind of focusing on that. And I’ve been very fortunate, very lucky that initially, you know, published my first book. Well, my first book was back in 2006. That was a huge lesson learned. I can talk about that here just as a sidebar. I used to think that if you take a pie chart and you split it into 90% versus 10%, I used to think that 90% of it is writing and like 10% is marketing. But then turns out to be the other way around, right? It’s 10% writing, even though it’s a lot of work. But then 90% of it is marketing starting out from when you first start writing out the book all the way through, and even after launch. So with my first book on Amazon, I learned that lesson back in 2014, and launched a book about virtual teams, and I started seeing a lot of traction on that. And even to this day, you know, eight years later, it still brings in some sort of revenue because of some of the tactics I’ve followed and I learned over the years.
Arvid Kahl
Do you update your books that you’ve written ever?
Hassan Osman
No, very little. I mean, I updates, maybe I tweak, sometimes, the description, a couple of things. But the cool thing about the topics I write about is that they are evergreen, right? So there are a couple of types of books that need some tweaking. But unlike technology books, which usually require an update to let’s say, the graphical user interface or commands that change over time with different versions. With management books, soft skills, those are sort of evergreen where I don’t really need to spend that much time on updating them.
Arvid Kahl
I found that too. I don’t have the time, honestly. Even though I just have two books, but they are they’re quite sizable. So any edit kind of has this long tail of things you need to do to make sure everything is still going into place where you want it to be. So I also I wonder like, should I revise my book at some point? Next year, Zero to Sold is now two years old, right? Two years in a couple months, when could be a good time to think of a second edition? Take the learnings from my whole building in public thing that I’ve since done, put it into the break. So I’m kind of asking you because I myself would like to know, like, do people do that? Like is that something that I would assume in a regular publisher, like writer relationship where you’re not self published, the publisher would see stuff drying up or interest for a new revised edition being present somewhere and then kind of asked you to do it. But as a self published author, usually you have to do everything, right? So you don’t really know when or if there’s a time to change the books. So that yeah, interesting. I thought like, with the amount of books that you have, you have plenty, right? How many do you have on Amazon at this point?
Hassan Osman
I have 16 so far, writing the 17th one now.
Arvid Kahl
That’s a lot of work to just even I honestly, I wouldn’t even know, I would probably forget how the names of a couple of them along the way. How has that been? Has it been a problem for you to just make sure every one of them gets the same amount of attention?
Hassan Osman
Yeah, great question. So going back to what you were saying updating the book, right? Does it make sense or not? I really think it depends. I really think it depends on a few factors. One is obviously the big one, the type of content, right? So if you’re writing a book about operating systems or graphical user interfaces, or whatever, obviously, very soon, it’s gonna become obsolete in two to three years. But then others and I’m I recall that we had a good discussion about Zero to Sold. I feel like it lasts more than two years in terms of the content of it, that’s how much of it is really does need to change or be tweaked. So it’s also a factor of how much of the book needs changing or updating if it’s minor updates, then it’s probably not worth going through it. However, if you are getting feedback from the market, and this is so important, I think you talk about this so much, too, is listening to the market, listening to the leaders, listening to anyone who’s consuming your content. If you feel like the product that you put out there is outdated based on some questions or clarifications and its significance, then it probably is a good prompt to update it. And then when you wanna update it, there’s two ways to go through that. It’s either updated silently, right? It’s sort of like you go into Amazon and then update the content. No one’s gonna know unless they download the book, like do a refresh on the downloads, or the new users would get the new version, or you go through a major relaunch with a version 2.0 or the next iteration of the book, right? I haven’t done the latter. So I haven’t done a relaunch of a version 2.0 book. However, I have made some tweaks like typos for example, if that’s something’s off, or I have like a small paragraph that doesn’t apply any more, or I need to kind of mention a new product that I have, you know, more evergreen, I’ll add that in. But to be honest, it’s funny. I’d rather spend that time writing my second next next book as opposed to, you know, pruning all the previous books that I have. It’s just the you know what I enjoyed doing.
Arvid Kahl
That is an incredibly interesting perspective because, like obviously, you could spend a lot of time like update it. You could probably update it daily if you wanted to by having yet another story that you could put somewhere or a little side note or a new link to a new resource that has come up like the week before that is interesting for people, but people don’t usually update their Kindle ebooks, right? They’re not gonna buy a new paper version just because you added a new link. So that is probably not worth it. But even with an ebook, the update mechanics are kind of complicated. I feel like you have to actively update your book as a reader. And it kind of messes with your bookmarks if you have any notes. So it really, the technology is not version compatible feels.
Hassan Osman
Before I forget, I wanted to mention one thing. So on the note of updating the book, so back in 2014, I published like the first Amazon bestseller, which was Influencing Virtual Teams. That was a book about working remotely. And during COVID, everyone started working remotely, right? So now everyone went to Amazon, wanted to learn a little bit more about how do we do this? Luckily, my book was, you know, highly rated, reviewed. So it kind of bubbled up in the charts. So that caught the attention of a few traditional publishers. And I had a traditional publisher, a top 10 traditional publisher actually reach out and say they’d like me to take that book and relaunch it as a traditionally published book. I ended up saying, no, that’s why I’m not naming who the traditional publisher is. But they basically wanted to say, well, first of all, you need to double the size of the book. Because I write short books for busy managers so that’s kind of my thing. And that’s probably why it takes me a lot less time than, you know, for example, a huge book, that’s more of like a manual. And they wanted to double it in size. So I was like, okay, maybe that’s not my stick. And then they said, they’re gonna have to republish it as a brand new book, which means I lose all the reviews, all the ratings, all of that goes out the window. Even though it retains the same title, it’s kind of relaunching a new book from scratch, right? So it was like, well, you know, and there was a couple of other things that they wanted to do. And I decided it’s just not worth it. You know, I was getting best seller status for a couple of months there. And I decided to just ride that wave. And I’m happy about that decision. But it brings to the point, what you were just saying which is, you know, republishing or updating a book is not just, you know, a couple of clicks and you’re good to go. You kind of need to factor in a few things in terms of second order effects.
Arvid Kahl
Honestly, that story just blows my mind with regard to how short sighted the publisher can be. And I’m glad you’re not naming them. Even if you were, it’s probably not much difference because the traditional model is just kind of oriented along that way, right? That does, if any of the other publishers had reached out, they probably would have gone through the exact same steps because those are the steps you take. It kind of blows my mind that A, they would not wanna piggyback on existing social proof that is, in your case, significant, like hundreds of reviews, 1000s maybe, right? I haven’t really checked the most recent numbers for your books. But hundreds of reviews still indicates that a lot of people took the time to write a review, which also indicates that a lot of, many more people don’t take the time to write a review, right? So there’s this kind of group of people that is out there that has read the book, but just hasn’t taken the time. So that is something that a is very short sighted not to try to take and to increase the size of your book to make it I think what is the terminology in the industry, make it fit with the make the spine big enough to put something on it. So in the store, you can actually see it among the other books, which is hilarious in the world of digital books, and it really doesn’t matter. That kind of tells me that those people have not understood who you’re selling these books to, where they like to consume them, and how they like to consume them and what matters to them, which is social proof, small size. And essentially, like a continuous, a reliable source of information, which is you as the writer, not the publisher, as the
Hassan Osman
Exactly. And you touch upon you know, I was about to say bingo on the spine thing because they want it to justify a higher price point and work backwards from that, right? So if they’re gonna put a $25 hardcover book on the shelf, it can’t be you know, 70 pages, right? And granted I understand that, but it’s like the, you know, the spine width isn’t thick enough for them to be able to write some text on it. But yet, this is what the market is asking for, right? So you’re right. I think there is a discrepancy and, you know, ultimately they’re a business. They wanna make money, I get it, but it’s just not what I want it to go through at that point in time.
Arvid Kahl
I do wonder though, like, you’re saying that they wouldn’t be able to sell a hardcover book for 25 bucks that is that small. Who’s saying that, right? Like who is actually who has ever even tried to put a hardcover book like that into the market or on the shelves and then just see what happens, right? They’re so afraid of running this experiment, that they’ve regressed to making you fluff your book, which then also lowers the quality of the writing. And that kind of comes back to you as a writer, right? Now people say, oh, this guy’s just writing fluff pieces. And now all your books, all your future books too are gonna be like, associated with a bad business decision by a publisher. Good choice not to take that offer, gotta say. And I honestly just that I feels like you would have gotten, I don’t know, you probably can’t talk about any kind of numbers there. But hopefully a sizable amount of a sizable amount of cash for them to be able to publish it for you. But, man, that would be the only good thing about it. Everything else comes back to you in a negative way.
Hassan Osman
Of course, yeah, I think you nailed it. I mean, it’s the brand hit that you take. It’s exactly what they asked for, they wanted to double the book. And I was like, well, I’m gonna start having to make stuff up and add then more fluff into the book, just to, you know, increase the page numbers. And yeah, even the royal like, even any advance that’s treated as a loan.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah
Hassan Osman
So meaning if they gave me $30,000, they’re like, well, we wanna recoup it first from the sales and then you get that, you know, what I mean. So it’s sort of a loan that they wanna take forever. And but yeah, that didn’t work out for me. And I’m so glad I didn’t end up going with it. Because the, you know, follow up books kind of continued on with the same sorts of strategy. And so far, thankfully, it’s been successful. You know, one thing, Arvid I wanna mention is that, for your listeners is that, you know, the way I view writing books is not just about writing the book as a product. I write a book as a business card on steroids, right? So a book is really this sort of tool, just like social media and content, right? What we’re doing here, it brings more awareness to how you conduct an interview and what you do and all the great stuff that you’re publishing. A book acts in the same way, it’s just a different format, right? And the fact is that people pay for it compared to consume free content on Twitter or on podcasts. And it has an incredible long term effects. I mean, one of them is just this being established as this thought leader, where you get potential opportunities for other, you know. If you’re employed, you get other potential employment opportunities, it helps you shine from that perspective, it elevates you as a thought leader in your space, right? So it gives you that added perception, and you get invited to give talks, for example. It sort of acts as like that business cards, where people say, oh, you’re an expert at this, you know, topic x, so we’d love you to come over and talk at our conference about the subject. So it increases your perceived value. And you’ll make more money because of your book than from your book, right? So you know, forget the royalties that $1’s and $2 you get from from Amazon, it’s the because you have a book out there, there’s a lot more opportunities and ROI effects there that are more long term. So that has also helped over time for sure.
Arvid Kahl
Would you consider that a thing that every founder, every creator, everybody who’s building like a public reputation should be doing like aiming to write a book or just to write at all?
Hassan Osman
I think it’s a fantastic marketing tool. But I’m also cognizant of the fact that you don’t wanna publish something just for the sake of saying you published it, right? So if you feel like, well, I’m gonna go and hire a ghostwriter to do this for me and your heart is not into it. There’s, you know, one thing I tell a lot of people I talk to is that if you’re gonna be writing a book, keep in mind, you’re gonna be doing a lot more writing and speaking about this topic later on. So if it’s not something you’re passionate about, if it’s not something you’re experienced about, it’s gonna show, right? People are very smart, that’s sniffing out whether someone is using a marketing tool, or they’re actually trying to provide value for someone who reads it, right? So I always talk about rule number one with writing books, is write a really, really useful book. That’s it, right? You know, focus on the customer, make sure that the value that you provide to your readers is more than what they paid for it in both cash and time, right? So not just cash, not just 10 bucks, it’s also the amount of time they spend writing it. If the answer isn’t, you know, you’re getting 2x or, you know, more value to the reader, then you probably shouldn’t write it or you should go back and, you know, refine it until you get to that confidence level.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, that time component is super important. And I gotta say, I wrote a pretty time consuming book, like 500 pages or something, but it is also meant as a manual that just kind of accompanies you throughout your journey, right? You’re not supposed to or if you can, but you don’t have to read it like all in one go. Because why would you read about exiting a business when you’re just starting to build it, right?
Hassan Osman
Yeah
Arvid Kahl
There are things that you don’t have to know at that point. It’s good to know them at some point but not in the beginning, which is why I like books, like the ones that you write short ones like not just short, because the scope is small, you have a pretty huge scope in your books, but you just condense it to a point where every minute spent with the book is actually something that gives you new knowledge. And I’ve seen this in other writers too like Rob Fitzpatrick. I’m a big fan of his with The Mom Test, right? That is one of the things that is actually selling the book for him is that you can read it in two hours, and you have knowledge about how to talk to customers. It’s such a specific thing that he just didn’t spend any fluff, like any time on writing fluff into the book didn’t need it because he wanted to, for you to be able to read it in an afternoon, and then you know, something for the next day. And if more writers were to do this, including myself, I think I would be happy, right? Because that allows people to just find more meaning in the time they spent reading, and not go into reading as I hope this is gonna be helpful kind of thing. But okay, I’m gonna spend two hours and I know something that will come out of this. So short books, well scoped books, that’s perfect.
Hassan Osman
Exactly. And by the way, just a couple of things. One, Rob Fitzpatrick, great kind of has as well, he was on the Writer on the Side podcast too a while ago. So it’s great to kind of get his perspective on a few things. I also wanna point out, the short book doesn’t like I’m not against long books, in general. I’m against long books with a lot of fluff and non value add material in general. That’s, I think the key, a book can be as long as it needs to be as long as its value add, right? So, you know, at one point, I might write a 400 or 500 page book, but it’s gonna be with the same sort of mentality of, I’m gonna make the most out of the the readers time, right? And I think your book does that. So and you can tell, because of the reviews, I’ve also checked in and you’ve got hundreds of reviews as well, which is great because the market is reacting to that. So you usually see a lot of negative reviews on long books that are full of fluff, like, you know, this could have been two pages instead of like 50, right? Or this chapter, they just went on and on. And then they’re talking about their services, and so on and so forth. So I’m not against long books, it’s just making sure that it is, you know, overall very useful. You know, another thing is, you know, one of the things we talked about is when you wanna write a book on the side, like it’s just a simple formula for me. You know, think of a Venn diagram, right? Three circles. And this is not gonna be some earth shattering moment because it’s kind of obvious, but three circles. The first is interest, the second is experience, and the third is market. So what does that mean? Interest first circle is something that you have some sort of interest in. It doesn’t necessarily mean you have to fall in love and be super passionate about it. But you have to be somewhat interested in the topic. Like with the whole crypto thing. Previous real estate agents started getting into crypto, they wanna write about crypto, but it kind of shows that a lot of them were like just you know, it’s a moneymaker, whatever. So interest is important. Two, is experience because again, your reader is going to be able to you know, sniff out if you’re just starting out two months ago with this topic, or you’ve actually done it. Like I know with Zero to Sold, you had a lot of experience before you sold your company. You bootstrapped it, then great. So you’ve got a perspective where people, you know, trust and can learn from. And then the third is market, that’s the most important one where there’s an active buy sell market for that topic that you have an interest in and you have some experience in, right? And you can test that on Amazon, just look for any other books that are selling within that space. You wanna look at the sweet spot in those three. Now those are mandatory. But there’s a couple of other sorts of optional ways of thinking about this too. Two more criteria, one evergreen, so it’s gonna help you all out a lot if you pick a topic out of many that has an evergreen lifespan or, you know, nothing’s 100% evergreen, but you know, you want a shelf life of a shelf, not a shelf life of a banana. I think someone mentioned that. And I thought was very funny, right? So basically, you want that level of of evergreeness to it. And then the other is job related. So if you’re an entrepreneur or you’re a full time employee, and you have multiple topics to choose from that meet the previous criteria, the one that is job related is going to give you maximum ROI on everything else later on. Because if you’re an accountant and you write a book about tax saving strategies, or you’re an accountant and you write a book about children’s stories, guess which one’s gonna help you a lot more, get invited to speaking, get invited to, you know, write white papers or whatever. So that’s gonna help. It’s gonna help you maximize the return on investment in the book that you have. So I kind of use that for nearly every book that I write. There have been some exceptions, but they’ve been conscious exceptions that I’ve done on that formula. But if you follow that, then the time you spend writing and publishing a book, you’re not gonna lose. It’s just gonna be a positive return even if no one buys your book. Like this is so important to try and make people understand is that the value you get, the learning you get, just going through the A to Z process. It’s like, you know, mini MBA on steroids.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, that’s right. Like even just writing a book, like, let alone all the publishing parts and the marketing parts, just gathering the information and putting it into structure, writing an outline, like making sure the outline has everything you wanna say, and then figuring out oh, there are more things that I wanna say, right? That process alone is already increasing your expertise in the subject. I very much agree. And of course, it would be nice to have people read it. But it’s usually with like knowledge production, the act of producing knowledge itself is a knowledge production act like I mean, obviously, but you know, for the person creating the thing. I really liked that. One question that I have, though, when you say, kind of stay in your lane professionally because that has the highest impact. Is there a risk of you kind of pigeon holing yourself there, like just staying in the subject matter that you already know, and never really looking into anything else?
Hassan Osman
Yeah, there is always that risk. And I’ll give you an anecdote about my own book. So I veered off a little bit. So my main topic that I’ve read about is about management topics, right? So I think is generic enough as an umbrella to be able to diversify within this umbrella, right? So it doesn’t have to be like you can talk entrepreneurship so much that you can talk about within entrepreneurship, marketing, sales, technology, you know, product, that sort of thing. So there is a concern if you pigeonhole yourself in a very small niche, and only talk about that niche. I agree with you. But if you diversify within that greater general topic, you’ll be okay. However, I was talking about an exception earlier on, and this is a great segue into that. So in addition to writing management books, I traveled with my wife and kids, this is preCOVID, every year and we usually go to Europe, and we spent a couple of days in a different city on the way back to I’m Lebanese originally. So on the way back to Lebanon just kind of take a couple of days. And so I’m a project manager, so I project manage everything, especially with two little kids, and you wanna know what you wanna do, let’s say in Rome and Paris and all of that.
Arvid Kahl
Yup
Hassan Osman
So I thought, why not put that in a book? Like I already have the itinerary. I project manage that and two kids. And so I started a series of travel books called, you know, let’s say Rome in a Weekend with Two Kids. And then it was Paris in a Weekend with Two Kids and then London in a Weekend with Two Kids. And those books, even though I’ve never blogged I’m not a travel blogger. I’m not interested in starting out like a TikTok account about travel. Like, none of this is appealing to me. I just wanted to do that book, because it’s sort of fun for me, and hey, we did this, and let’s see if it’s gonna work out. And that was, you know, thankfully, it did work out. And you know, I didn’t make hundreds of 1000s of dollars, but every month or so, I do get sales even to this day. Now, the interesting thing is about your question is if you look at the charts of my Influencing Virtual Teams book over the last few years and then my travel books over the last few years. You see that when COVID hit March 2020, there was a spike in the Influencing Virtual Teams book like 2x or 3x. I can’t remember it was crazy for a few months, and then all the travel books went down to zero, right? Because obviously, no one wanted to travel during COVID and you know, the whole lockdown and all of that. So that to me was a wake up call in terms of diversifying your own portfolio just like I know Daniel talks about this a lot. Daniel Vassallo, you know, treat everything like a VC even your small projects as a venture capitalist, like try to be, you know, reduce risk overall with your portfolio. And that was a wake up call that, hey, you know, I could have if I was only focused on travel, if that was my thing, that would have been a huge hit, right? Like I would have went down to zero and everything. So yes, I really think it’s a brilliant question. I think, pigeon holing not just you know, COVID is a once in, you know, X year’s event, but it’s also a good idea to kind of think through, yeah, knock on wood, right? You never know. But you know, this is one thing to be cognizant of, is that yes, you don’t wanna pigeonhole yourself too much. But there’s a balance to with if you write for everyone, you write for no one, right? That’s also very important. Like you don’t wanna make water down where it’s just like, you know, how to lead a team, right? I mean, that’s just too generic. There’s so much that can go into that. So you know, that’s sort of my two cents on that.
Arvid Kahl
I like your approach generally, like you pick topics that are intersectional in themselves, right? You have you’re traveling. That particular city intersecting with traveling and then intersecting it with having two kids. That alone is already niche enough for it not to be too generic, but also not too niche necessarily to, you know, have almost no audience whatsoever. Because you know, there are many in each of these parts of the Venn diagram there. And in the middle of still a lot of them, maybe by far not as many as in each of these groups, but a more definable group of people. And I think it’s the same for virtual teams, right? Like that can happen throughout all different kinds of industries. But the process and that the kind of mechanics of how people deal with each other the dynamics there. They’re essentially the same, like everybody hates it.
Hassan Osman
Yes
Arvid Kahl
No, everybody struggles with things they don’t innately understand. And that is where these books are helpful. I find it interesting that you started these kinds of travel books. It seems like you’re almost accidentally diversifying your portfolio because there’s some other thing that you are building expertise in. Even if it’s just a weekend, it’s already more expertise to people who’ve never been to that city with their kids like my half, right? So have you ever had any books that you wrote that didn’t work out at all in that diversified portfolio?
Hassan Osman
Yeah, definitely. I mean, out of the 16 books, maybe 7 or 8 are fairly selling well, others not so much. And I’ll give you a couple of examples on that. Before I do, though, let me just quickly touch upon a couple of other things because I think your listeners are gonna get value from it. If you you know, if you’d like Google my name and or an Amazon, you go and you check out my name, you’re gonna see the management books only on one profile. I have another pen name for my travel books, right? So I created Amazon lets you through KDP create up to three different pen names to use different author profiles. And this kind of ties back to your earlier question about, you know, one is diversifying your portfolio. But two, you also don’t wanna be niching in one topic. I also didn’t wanna be an author where someone checks out my author page, and it’s like, he’s talking about travel here. And now he’s talking about, you know, this weird topic and oh, now he’s got a book on management. So I made a conscious decision to say, all right, I’m gonna create a separate profile. It’s still my name. I just use HOsman instead of Hassan Osman, and different picture, but it’s all there. And then you get to see all those books. And that helps the Amazon algorithm too when they wanna cross recommends people who are interested in traveling to Rome with kids might be interested in Paris or London. They’re not gonna be interested in virtual teams or email communication.
Arvid Kahl
They might be. They might work from there.
Hassan Osman
You know Europeans more than I do. I’m in the US. But I believe when you’re off on vacation, you’re off on vacation, right?
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I guess. We don’t wanna go where do you wanna work from anywhere.
Hassan Osman
But yeah, to answer your earlier question, so there were some books, you know, as part of like a couple of experiments I did on Twitter. Maybe back in April, I decided I wanna write like, the fastest possible book to market like, literally sit down. And I have an idea. I wanna write a book. I wrote a book in four hours. And I published it, it’s called Rule Number One, it was heavily the purpose. So it’s not like I came up with all the content within those four hours, but it just wanted to kind of live tweet show people that, you know, it’s a lot less intimidating than you think, especially if you’re only writing an ebook, you’re not writing a full book or whatever. So I took like, one of my previous books, repurposed a chapter in it and I published that. And, you know, I didn’t put a lot of effort into what the title should be, or the cover, you know, it was just on Canva. A couple of other things. And I just went ahead and I launched it, right? So that’s a book that initially. I did it for charity. I can’t remember maybe 120 copies or something within a few days, which is cool. But it was literally just people kind of talking about it. But that’s an example of a book that it doesn’t make any sales today, right? So it’s not, I don’t get a lot of traction on it these days. The books that haven’t done so well. Like, for example, I do have a book about how to get Amazon reviews. Because I’ve, you know, I’ve hustled a lot to kind of be able to get a lot of reviews, and I wanted to share that, that surprisingly, it’s on Gumroad. And it’s doing better on Gumroad than Amazon and I believe it’s because there’s just a ton of competition. And I don’t wanna spend you know, time or money on ads or anything like that. And so that’s, you know, that’s another book that’s not doing so well. One thing I’m gonna throw out a pitch here. It’s sort of self serving, but it’s not, you know, not asking anyone to buy anything. I have a book called Write your Book on the Sides. This used to be paid, it used to be an Amazon bestseller, and now it’s 100% free. It’s 100% free on Amazon and it’s 100% free on Gumroad. If you go through writerontheside.com, front page that you know you can basically download it. And I talked about everything we’re talking about here, the launch strategy, you know how to select the topic. And you were talking about something earlier which is so important. I’m glad I remembered is, when you wanna narrow down what you wanna write about, it’s a science and an art, right? So you don’t want it to be too general. But you also don’t want it to be too specific. And the way to think about it is to narrow down two things, is to narrow down the outcome of the book, and then narrow down the audience of the book. And what I mean by that is, instead of saying, you know, the outcome of the book is to train your dog to be better, right? It would probably be better to say something like or an outcome is to train your dog to learn three tricks in 15 days, that’s so you know, the outcome is very specific, and you’re not gonna be talking about every single training method under the sun, right? Same thing with an audience, instead of saying anyone to learn it, you can say, new dog owners, right? With a new puppy. So people who just got like, you know, a new puppy, and they wanna learn how to teach them tricks over time within a couple of weeks, what do they need to do? So by narrowing down the audience and the outcome, you’re gonna get the benefits of niching down. So you know, like the Rome in a weekend with two kids type effects where I’m not writing about traveling in Rome, it’s very specific to parents who are busy and don’t wanna, you know, spend a lot of time. And that’s why I think it sells it’s not because, you know, no one knows me as a travel authority. I’m not, I never even claimed to be one. You have people buying it because it solves a small problem for them, right? And its low price to kind of help them with that. So a lot of ideas that, you know, if you’re listening to this, you can just go out there and start writing in a particular field that you can help people solve a problem.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I think that’s the most people have this fear of writing because they think they need to write the next, you know, and then whatever American novel, or the next self help book, the next atomic habits or whatever, which is not the case, right? People just need to write about what they know about one tiny thing that they know, and give people the opportunity to learn more about that one thing, how to get it right, how to like avoid the biggest mistakes, that’s still gonna make mistakes and implementing whatever lessons you might wanna teach them. But it’s much easier to focus on that one thing than it is to explore the whole space. And you don’t need to write a big book either. And you said that multiple times, and I’m grateful for that because I’m prone to ramble. That’s the thing, right? Both in my speech and in my writing, but it’s the idea that you can just be fine with small and have lots of small, that’s the kind of the small bets approach, Daniel Vassallo. There he is again, and then see which one resonates more with people and then focus on making that a bigger thing, maybe expanding on it, maybe giving it another medium in which you talk about it. And you do talk about things in different mediums too. You don’t just have the books you have the courses too, right? So you kind of you go into talking about the things that people resonate with. And then you build more around that. And I feel we are at a point where you’ve mentioned repurposing now multiple times, and I’m a big fan of repeating myself. I repeat, I’m a big fan of repeating myself. And I think, you know, with content in particular, there’s always just this kind of almost happenstance where people get to see it and consume it. But for every person that gets to see and read the thing you say, there is like hundreds out there who don’t, and they might show up tomorrow. And if you show the same thing to those people, now they might get to see it. But if you don’t if you only show it once, then it’s just that one person. So can you talk to me a bit more about repurposing and how to do that, particularly when it comes to writing?
Hassan Osman
Amazing, amazing topic. I absolutely love this topic. And you know, with repurposing, I can talk a lot about the different ways in which you think about it. So at a very high level, there’s a short course that actually talks about this, where you’ve got four different types of repurposing, think about paid and free, right? So two buckets paid and free, you can have paid to free, free to paid, right? So if you create a book and you take some sections of the book, and then publish them on Twitter, that’s a paid book that you’re using content to send out for free, it could be the other way around. So it could be free. So let’s say a blog post that you wrote on your blog, and you stitch a few together and you put them into a paid book, right? But then you also have within each one of those buckets, so free to free. So it’s a free tweet on Twitter, you can actually or thread let’s say you can have that as you can literally read it on your podcast, right? Kind of say it in your own words or whatever. So that’s kind of free tweet or Twitter thread to free podcast. And then the big one, the most exciting one is paid to paid, right? So I’ve got a book that I spent a lot of time and effort on and I sell it and it’s doing well, getting a lot of reviews. Why not take that book, the contents of it, and then go into another paid medium like a course and sell it that way? Because people learn in different ways and they consume information in different ways too, right? I’ll give you an example with numbers, actually. So you mentioned a question about the books, right? Or some books that didn’t do so well. And one of the books that did really well initially, but then faded off was a book about better online meetings. So how to conduct better meetings online and COVID, it was a big thing. And now it kind of, you know, there’s just a lot of supply, it’s not doing so well. I think I did an analysis once within a certain time periods. I made like $250 total from the book, not a lot of money, the same book, same exact contents of it. I’m not joking. I just created a course on Udemy, made five figures from that course alone. Like, I think it was $19,000 or something from that same content, nothing too different, within that same time period. Look at just the discrepancy. And I had no idea. I thought a book was gonna be more consumable, it’s easier, whatever. But you know, the course was doing much, much better overall. So I highly, highly recommend that you always think about repurposing not just paid to paid but paid to free free to paid. You know, one of the hacks if you’re an author, and you’ve got the book on Amazon, is to download the book on Kindle. And Kindle has this feature, which I’m sure you know, is the popular highlights, right? You can tell what people highlighted from the book in aggregate. And what that means is that’s a data point for you that this stuck with people something about it’s stuck. So you can create some micro content around that. It could be, you know, maybe a Twitter thread or maybe a LinkedIn post, or maybe kind of write a short blog post expanding on that particular thing that they actually enjoyed. And it’s circular because then you’ve talked about that, and then point back to the book, which ends up selling, which ends up creating more content, right? So it’s just I’m a huge fan of repurposing. I’m a huge, huge fan of repurposing, I don’t know if you got that.
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, I did. It’s certainly important to repeat that. I did something very similar, I actually did the exact same thing you just mentioned, like I looked into my Zero to Sold book and I figured out all the highlights in there. And most of them were about one particular topic, which then turns into my second book. So it’s kind of like pay to pay but different in a different way. Like that feature is surprisingly effective at figuring out what people care about. And it’s also surprisingly hard to do. Because apparently, Amazon is just not willing to share this information other than you buying your own book, reading it on your device, and then you have to buy it in the right store because you only get the highlights of people in that country where you buy it. So there is a lot of complexity that should not be there. I think the analytics, the insights should be on KDP on the Amazon publishing platform. But apparently, they don’t care, which is another thing that I kind of wanted to mention here. You said you use Amazon and you use Udemy. Both of these are rather huge, if not the biggest platforms in this space. And that kind of puts you into a pretty like, into a power dynamic where you don’t have much say, right? You don’t really get to choose how much money you pay both on Amazon and on Udemy. You have these tiers of price, where they kind of decide how much they get until a certain point and you know, like the pricing structure is very in their favor. And also discovery is hard because a lot of people are on the platforms. How do you handle that? And is there any reason why you still would go with these platforms other than distribution and maybe discoverability compared to self publishing these things?
Hassan Osman
Yeah, fantastic question. Look, I’m fully aware of the pros and cons of being part of a marketplace versus doing it on your own because I’ve tried doing things on my own as well. So I’m a big fan of Gumroad. I’m an investor in Gumroad, actually too, just as a disclaimer. And I’ve also ran cohort based courses on Gumroad, which are much more fruitful than what I get from leveraging those marketplaces. However, going back to the initial premise, I’ve got a full time job, full time family, and then X amount of time, which is free. I could follow one of two things. I can say, I can, you know, disconnect from the big marketplaces like Amazon and Udemy. And then just, you know, move everything to my own platform. If you use Teachable, Kajabi, whatever, and then heavily focused on the marketing to get that maybe I might make a little bit more profit. That could be one strategy or I continue with a volume based game which is I’m writing my next book and I’m creating my next course in parallel where I put this in the machine and it takes care of it, right? And I noticed for me is that I enjoy creating more than I enjoy marketing, right? Like that’s one thing about me in particular is that they take a crazy amount of a cut from my courses. Like in some courses, you know, a transaction ends up being like two bucks or maybe a buck and a half, right? And even though it’s like $200 because they discount it, and then there’s the ad fees, and so on and so forth. But to me, that’s $2 was something I would never get because it’s someone and let’s say, India, or China, where the whole parity pricing and technology that they have in the whole engine behind their ad business that I would never get. And so far, you know, knock on wood, very fortunate, I don’t know how long this lasts, but overall, it’s around, you know, five figures a month total from between the books and the courses, which I’m like, well, do I wanna let that go? And then have to deal with the headache of doing that? Or should I just double down on it, right? So even though they’re taking an insane cut from everything, I’m still at a stage where I’m super happy that they’re taking it because they’re helping me with that. Another thing again, I wanna point double back on, Arvid is the second order effects of that. So, you know, someone maybe a few months ago was like, listen, we wanna, we were looking for someone to talk about hybrid work at our organization. It was like, okay, great. First question I usually ask is, how do you find about me? They’re like, well, we googled hybrid work, and a book popped up, and we saw your name, which is like greats. And then but we started looking again, we went on Udemy. And we looked at hybrid work, and we saw your name, we’re like, alright, this is the guy. So what that meant is it’s also a signal in the market off authority in a space, right? So that’s so important that it’s if I published that course on my own, on Teachable, on my own blog, it’s not gonna have the same effect as Udemy with 15,000 reviews on that course, right? It’s a signal from the market that this guy knows what he’s doing. And so we want to, you know, get him to help us out with a problem or to speak and all of that. So that’s another effect of why I leveraged platforms versus my own. But again, at one point, you never know recession around the corner. Next day, I call you up and I’m like I lost my job. What are some tactic for building in public? Help!
Arvid Kahl
Well, I have a course on Udemy, you know. That is hilarious. But honestly, I love your long term perspective because what you do, you invest in yourself and your public brand and the attention of other people, you’re almost do like a writer SEO. Like you do SEO beyond your own blog. You do SEO using the SEO ranking of these marketplaces. So that the things you have there show up when people search for it. That’s genius, because most people think of SEO, oh, yeah, I should put an h2 tag somewhere in my blog posts. But that’s not what it is, at least not exclusively. It’s about like making yourself visible by being in places that are seen, right? That’s kind of what it is. And I love that you don’t care about the cut that they take, which is always substantial, because that’s how these platforms kind of kind of work. But that you see this as a sign of somebody paying attention, that otherwise would have not paid attention to you. And it’s kind of reminds me of that saying, like, 100% of nothing is still nothing. So no matter where you might sell your thing, if people don’t buy it, right? You’re gonna make no money, even if you would have made the whole thing. I see that the same thing on Amazon, like my experience is exactly the same. Amazon sales are steady, like I sell books every single day, which is bizarre, if you think about it, like for something but I don’t really do much other than being a person that talks about their books from time to time. But on Gumroad, it’s extremely sporadic. And it’s sometimes happens in bursts when you somebody links the product, or does an affiliate sale or something like that, right? But it’s just it is by far not as spread out and diversified as the sale is on Udemy. Or what else do I have the thing, you know, Skillshare, I think and you know, all these little platforms, and all of these are experimental to me. I didn’t know where I was gonna go and where things would sell well. And when I launched my course, for example, Find your Following. And it sells, I think the best still on Gumroad at this point, but it is as a significant amount of sales on Udemy as well, because it’s there and it’s not as expensive. So it is expensive. But you know, they mark it down all the time, without any control that I would have. So I guess that’s what you pay for it. But that’s just what it is. And it gives people the awareness of my presence in the space and you’re absolutely right, that increases reputation. They come to Twitter, see my name, follow me there, increasing my amount of followers, which again, influences all these other things as well. Yeah, it’s what I like about this is that you’re playing this infinite game of you wanna stay in the space. You wanna stay a person that can write books that help people. You don’t wanna be the person that wrote the book. You wanna be the person that writes the books and that is amazing. I really, really appreciate that about you.
Hassan Osman
Thank you so much. I really appreciate that comment and just a couple of notes on what you said absolutely about the long term game. One thing to note is that I’m very fortunate that I have a full time job, right? Again, it’s easy for me to say I’m okay with Udemy and Amazon taking huge cuts because I can afford if it’s zero, like if the total thing is zero. So, you know, that’s a part of it. I know, if I was not fortunate to have a full time job, or maybe even wanted to have a job, I might think a little bit differently. But I’m here to tell you that it works, right? Like I actually see those numbers and it works. And yes, the SEO, the borrowed SEO, like if you Google, it was just for fun googling my name the other day, and like the top 10 results on Google had to do with me, and not because I’m some SEO expert is because Amazon and Udemy are on there, right? So it’s my profile on those platforms that spent millions of dollars in SEO, kind of piggyback on that, and it helps through that, too. So yes, it also helps that way. And I love what you’re doing is that you’re leveraging both, right? So you’re actually putting it on Udemy and on Gumroad. And then same thing with the books, which is not a bad thing, either, right? You can still do that. So
Arvid Kahl
Yeah, it’s an accessibility thing for me because some people don’t have access to Udemy or Amazon for that matter.
Hassan Osman
Yeah
Arvid Kahl
Right? Like, the fact that my books are also on Gumroad is mostly because there are countries where Amazon doesn’t sell anything, neither paper nor ebook, and for them to be able to buy the thing at a obviously heavily discounted rate as well, because these are usually countries with a pretty low like ratio of their currency to the dollar. So that’s the whole purchasing power parity pricing in that too. I have control over at least because I don’t have control over that on Amazon. And I really don’t have control over many of these things on Udemy either. So platforms kind of have their thing. And at least I have some control for those edge cases. But they mean a lot. Like I’ve had people buying my book from like Afghanistan, and they were saying like, we can never buy these books anywhere else, we kind of have to pirate them. And here’s your opportunity to actually have somebody legally purchase your book, and then tell their friends that they can finally buy one of the books that they always wanted to read.
Hassan Osman
Right
Arvid Kahl
You don’t really think about this, but you’re like Amazon and Udemy. They are ubiquitous, but they’re not everywhere.
Hassan Osman
They’re not
Arvid Kahl
You know
Hassan Osman
Yeah, yeah.
Arvid Kahl
They are all over the place, but not everywhere. They’re not available all over the world. So that’s a big thing to at least have the option. That’s why I do it. But I also understand that when you do it on the side, and I kinda wanna close with this. You kind of focus on having the largest impact on both your sales, your reputation building, and the amount of people who can read it as you can with as few steps as possible. So one thing I would like to know, from you, a person who has a big job, and has a big underside writing job as well. How do you stay consistent? How do you keep writing when you come home from work? When you know, when you have already spent a lot of mental energy on important things in a business? How do you keep yourself from just zoning out? And how you focus on making new books happen?
Hassan Osman
Yeah, so I’ll give you a two part answer how I started and how I do it now. How I started, which would probably apply to a lot of people because now of course with 16 books experience affects things. Five days a week, 30 minutes a day, take the weekends off, it’ll take you six months to get a short book done. So there’s no way around it, you need to force a block of time, right? I think everyone can find 30 minutes a day, just don’t watch Netflix for a couple of months. But it’s literally, you know, 30 minutes a day. And those 30 minutes can be different for everyone. It’s either waking up a little bit early and doing it before work. To others, it’s going coming back home, having dinner and then after the kids are asleep, or if you don’t have kids, you just you know later in the night when you’ve got TV on in the background. You know, that’s sort of how long it takes on average to get a short book done for some block of time. Now, I do it when I’m inspired, honestly, like, you know, I might have three months. I don’t wanna do anything. And then suddenly in a month, I’m like, just flowing. So on a Saturday, five hours. So it’s very sporadic. Now I just listened to my signals. If I’m too lazy, I’m too lazy. I’m just not gonna force myself to do it.
Arvid Kahl
So you’ve kind of developed this self reflected understanding of when it’s gonna be working and when it’s not.
Hassan Osman
Yeah, exactly. Now, again, if I lose a job, that will be a totally different light under the fire that kind of thing, right? Because now, you know, I enjoy at least the luxury of saying if I’m too, you know, I’m not in the mood, I’m not in the mood. But initially, I think it’s important. If you wanna get that book done, you have to sort of sit down and write.
Arvid Kahl
Well, one of the most amazing things about you and your journey is that you show people that you can have a job and still write books. You know, you didn’t have to make it your full time thing. You still don’t have to and I really hope you don’t ever need to have to, right? That you can always make the choice of writing and not be forced to write. Hassan, thank you so much for talking to me today, like sharing all these stories. I love the way you communicate your journey, is really nice. It’s full of stories that are very relatable to most people who have a job or who freelance the whole day or consultants or whatever it may be that who wants to do something else who wanna have this business card on steroids, who wanna get their knowledge out there and a form for other people to consume. I think it was very inspirational, all the things you told me today. So thank you so much. And please tell people where they can find you and your work. That’s the most important part. First of all, thank
Hassan Osman
First of all, thank you so much for the kind words. Arvid, I really enjoyed the conversation today, great questions. Looking forward to connecting more online. If you’d like to reach out and connect with me, I am at writerontheside.com all one word. I’ve got my Twitter profile there. I’ve got my free book on there, too. And then my podcast, you can actually find Arvid’s podcast with me on episode 49. So writerontheside.com/049 and you get to see some of the insights that he shared when he first launched his book. So thanks again for having me on the show. This was a pleasure.
Arvid Kahl
Absolute pleasure. Thanks for coming.
Hassan Osman
Take care.
Arvid Kahl
And that’s it for today. Thank you for listening to The Bootstrapped Founder. You can find me on Twitter @arvidkahl. You’ll find my books and my Twitter course there as well. If you wanna support me and the show, please subscribe to my YouTube channel, get the podcast in your podcast player of choice and leave a rating and a review by going to (http://ratethispodcast.com/founder). Any of this will help the show. So thank you very much for listening and have a wonderful day. Bye bye.
What we talk about
00:00:00 Introduction to Hassan Osman
00:05:59 Slowly shifting your perspective
00:10:48 Do you update your books that you have written?
00:17:24 How short-sighted publishers can be
00:24:29 The importance of the time component in your book
00:29:12 The ROI if a diverse range of topics
00:34:47 Pick topics that are intersectional, not generic
00:41:43 You don’t need to write a big book to be successful
00:47:03 Using a marketplace vs doing it on your own
00:52:15 Investing in yourself and your public brand
00:56:22 Selling on Amazon and Udemy
