930 – Make more money instead: Tom talks Why I Don’t Waste Time Writing Books

Summary by ChatGPT

In this episode of Screw the Commute podcast (#930), host Tom Antion discusses why he doesn’t waste time writing books, although he has written 25 so far. He explains that while he loves books and has many, traditional book writing can be time-consuming and unprofitable. Instead, he focuses on creating books quickly that lead to bigger business opportunities like speeches, consulting, or membership sites, rather than relying solely on book sales. Digital books, for instance, yield 97% profit because of their low cost and instant gratification factor.

Tom emphasizes the importance of getting past perfectionism and ego, sharing an example of a friend who spent years working on a book but never completed it. In contrast, Tom has successfully written books in just hours that have made him millions. He suggests three fast and efficient methods for writing books:

Look inside other books on Amazon to gather ideas for content by reviewing their tables of contents.
Use PLR (Private Label Rights): Buy content, modify it with personal stories or insights, and sell it as your own.
User-Generated Content: Interview experts in forums on specific topics, use their expertise, and compile it into a book. This method allows you to create high-quality books on topics you don’t know about.
The key, he stresses, is that books should lead to other opportunities and income streams. Tom also promotes his online mentor program and his internet marketing school, encouraging listeners to explore these resources for a more lucrative and faster approach to making money.

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Episode 930 – Why I Don’t Waste Time Writing Books
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 930 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today is part of the Why I Don't Waste Time series, and this is going to be why I don't waste time writing books. Does not mean I don't write books. 25 that I last count. So listen up and I'll tell you. Show you how to do it fast so you don't waste time. Hope you didn't miss episode 929. That was why I don't waste time on artificial intelligence. Yeah, it's sweeping the world, but you can waste a lot of time and money on stuff that It could actually get you in trouble. So that's 929. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, and then the episode number. Last one was 929. Make sure you download a copy of my automation book if you want to save time and not waste time. This is the book that will tell you how I do it. I've handled up to 150,000 subscribers and 65,000 customers with that with, you know, without pulling my hair out with a very small staff. So check it out at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. Now, at the end of this, I'm going to give you a method where you can create quality. And remember, I'm always about quality, not schlock, just because you can do it fast quality books without knowing a thing about the topic.

[00:01:56] It works. I've done it. It's beautiful. All right. Okay, first of all, I do love books. I'm not talking about. I don't love books. I've got three libraries here at the retreat center. I've got hundreds of books on my. Or more than that. Probably on my cell phone. So I love books, but books are to write books and typically has been the most hassle, least profitable thing you do in your business. All right, but here's one overriding principle on books they should always lead to something bigger. If speeches, consulting, coaching, membership sites, something not just the money from the book. Although you can make a lot of money from books, especially when they're digital, because it's 97% profit I've bought and I've sold lots of books at $97 ebooks because of the urgency factor and and immediate gratification, people can get them right away. So why do I say I don't waste time on books? Well, first of all, I got my ego out of it. I got one guy I know, family friend for almost 50 years now. Been claiming to write a book. Never did it, never did it. Talked about it, never did it. Mr. Perfection or Mr. Perfection didn't make millions of dollars like I have on writing books that weren't perfect, but they were good enough that people loved them, and I can't remember.

[00:03:27] I remember one return in the last, oh. 25 years. And it was a it was a web person that stole my click book and said that they knew everything in it. It was a thousand pages of stuff I'd sweated blood for years on, and this guy was a out of work graphic designer yesterday and claimed he knew all the stuff. Got his $97 back and stole my book. But guess what? He's probably. You know, working at McDonald's and I'm a multi-millionaire, so screw him. Anyway, I got my ego out of it. People get their ego involved and they take years. I took me four years to write this book. Okay, great. All right. But you couldn't make your car payment. So what I do is I simply. I give people what they want. Perfection will kill you. There's no doubt about that. I got one book that I wrote in four hours at a layover in McCarran airport. I remember it vividly. I've updated it once, and it's brought in $3.92 million. No. And a lot of times it's free. I sell for maybe $0.99 on Amazon. All right. But the book leads to something else that brings in money. That's what you got to think about. That doesn't mean it's just a big sales letter. You have to give quality because people won't trust you and buy your other stuff and take your other offers if you don't give them quality at every step of the way.

[00:05:00] I've never had a book that didn't make money. Well, let me think about that exception. It's kind of a halfway exception. It made money, but not in the way you would think. So I did a wedding. You know, I did very well with wedding toast and wedding speech books. $72,000 a year for nine years straight on these two wedding books. So I thought I'll do a wedding reception book. Didn't sell hardly at all, because there was a million wedding magazines and all kinds of stuff available that that was being planned, you know, sometimes a year in advance. So the urgency wasn't there for the book. So what did I how come I say it kind of made money? Well, because what I did is I just split it up, put it into blog postings on a wedding reception site, and put Google AdSense ads around it that I got paid commissions on the ads. So it still turned into money. All right, so let me give you the methods to write fast so you don't waste time. There's more than this, but these three are enough to make you rich if you do them consistently. So first is you go to Amazon and you type in your your topic, whatever you're going to write about fishing or leadership or whatever the heck it is.

[00:06:21] And then every book that comes up, if you click on one of the books, it goes to a section it used to say at the top look in, but now it says that at the bottom, you know, read some of this book. Well, you click on that and you can see roughly it's not for sure about 10% of the book, including the table of contents. So this table of contents is giving you all the kinds of things that are covered in, in a leadership or a fishing or whatever, golf or whatever the heck it is, then you do it for a bunch of books and you start getting all these subtitle or chapter headings. You pick the ones that you want, and I'm not saying you copy what they say in their subtitle or their their chapter heading. I'm just saying it's doing the work. Somebody did this work for you already, so put it down, put it in logical order in your skeleton of your book. And now you have the whole thing laid out. You just have to fill in the details. Okay? That's the first way. It's called the look in technique. You look inside other people's books in the field and come up, you know, let them do the work for you. The next is blasphemous to all these ego driven authors who.

[00:07:36] Oh, this is that's that's no good. That's that's only hackers do that. And I mean hacks, not hackers like computer hackers. Hack is like a pejorative term about somebody that does something but doesn't do it well. No, I do it all the time and nobody calls me a hack. Here's here's what it's called. It's called PLR private label white rights or white label rights. And this is where you can type in your topic and the term PLR into Google or any search engine. And you will find hundreds, if not thousands of books on your topic that you can purchase the entire book and then convert it to and sell it as your own. Now, do I recommend that you do that? No. I recommend you buy it and you go through the book. Throw out the crap. That's ridiculous. Put in your own stories and your own experience and you have a book. I have done this twice. The last two books I did. I bought them on a Friday, and by Monday I had made a couple thousand dollars a piece on them. These are two separate ebooks. Well, I think one was email marketing, one was maybe crowdfunding, I can't remember, but I bought them on a Friday morning, put about 4 or 5 hours into each one of them, put them out to my list and sold and had for $2,000 by Monday, Monday morning.

[00:09:05] All right. So that's the kind of speed I didn't waste time. And did I get any returns? Not one return on either one of them. In fact, like I said, I can't remember returns on my ebooks for 25 years. Except that one guy that stole it. So this is a powerful method to get some intellectual property which you can pass on to your kids, your family. It's work. Get paid, paid, paid, paid, paid, which many of you have heard me say a million times, especially if you've seen me on stage. So PLR or White label, do it. All right. Now, the last one that I told you about in the beginning, about how to make a quality book without knowing a thing about the topic. Here's the story I was sitting on first class. I don't know where I was flying to LA, to Charlotte or something like that. And there was a guy sitting next to me, looked to be about in his mid 40s, and he had all these go kart books sitting in the seat pocket in front of him, and I said, hey, what's up with all these go karts? Oh boy, did he light up. He was like, oh man, me and my kids race them. I got three boys and we race them. And I said, well, how much was one of them cost? And he says, oh man, you can't get a piece of junk for ten grand.

[00:10:19] And I'm thinking ten grand. He says, ours are about 30 grand a piece. I'm thinking to myself, oh my God, so my wheels are spinning in my head. He's got 3 or 4, four of these at 30,000 bucks a piece, a giant toy hauler or trailer to haul them in extra tires and motors and things like that and tools if he's going to race them and a big monster truck to pull the whole thing. He's got hundreds of thousands of dollars tied up in this go karts. So I was thinking to myself, if I wanted to write a book on how to purchase your first racing go kart, what I did was, well, no, I didn't do this. I'm just this is the method. I've done it on other kinds of books, but I go to what they call forums or discussion boards. These are places online that discuss specific topics. They have them on everything. In fact, I used to tease that they probably have them on pig farming. So one day I thought, you know, I should look this up. And I found one in the UK, a discussion board on pig farming, and it was all about how to sell more pigs. And I don't know all the stuff that was on there.

[00:11:30] But anyway, so you would go to a discussion board on go kart racing. And when you go to these things, you can usually join them without being having a go kart or any of the topics that you're talking about. And you would watch for the people that make the most comments. And usually it's on the left hand side and it tells how many comments they made, how many thumbs up they got, if they made so many good comments, they're senior members, they're called. So these people are talking about go karts all the time. So you approach them and you say, look, I'm going to write a book on how to buy your first racing go kart. Could I interview you? Well, how many of those people do you think would turn you down? All right. All they do all day long is talk about racing go karts. All right. How many of them would charge you for the interview? None. Again, they they charge. They don't. They love racing go karts. They want to talk about it. How many of them would help you promote it? Well, probably all of them, because they're so thrilled to death. They see their name in lights in a in a book. All right. So now the big question is who gets all the money. You do. Okay. So so that's how you do it.

[00:12:51] Now you can you're just like a publisher that that, you know, any major publisher, there's not many left nowadays, doesn't know anything about the topic. They just know there's a demand for the topic and they hire writers to do it and give them royalties and all that stuff that they do advances which aren't hardly anything anymore unless you can prove you can sell 25,000 copies. But anyway, you're a publisher. So this is how you create a quality book. Now you still have to sell it. But again, those people are going to brag up to the roof that they're in a book. Right? And of course, you give them credit in the book. So this is called user generated content. And it's that's what's all the major sights are made of. Youtube, Twitter now x Facebook. It's all user generated content. See? So so that's how you do it. So I don't waste time writing books. I write books and they make money. Every one of them. And and in a hurry because I'm old. I don't have time to wait years and years to write a book. All right. So so that's how you do it. So that's my story. I'm sticking to it. We have more. Why I don't waste time episodes coming up on customer service, website design, social media, and whatever else I can think of in the next couple of weeks.

[00:14:08] So that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Check out our mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. And also, I have the only license dedicated school on internet and digital marketing. And yeah, there's there's schools, you know, that that are part of big universities run by people that never made a nickel selling online. This is the real deal in as little as six months. You can have. It's a certificate school. It's distance learning. You can do it if you're working. It can do it while you're in other schools. But this is fast way to money because the demand is so massive for this. Every company on earth needs this stuff. But if you if I walk down the street here in Virginia Beach and quizzed every small business, I know they'd be just messing things up, spending lots of money, getting no returns. And you can help them out of that and you can sell your stuff for yourself. So it's a great opportunity for you or a young person in your life if you're a grandparent. What a legacy you could give to to to purchase this scholarship for them. Just amazing. IMTCVA.org. Check it out. Give me a call if you're interested. All right. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. We'll catch you all in the next episode. See you later.