This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.
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As we come to the end of another month, I wanna tell you today about Kindle books that produce passive income for Aussie novelists. This is a fun story. We're gonna go to Melbourne, Australia, at least virtually. It's a beautiful city, by the way. I'm just sad we're not going there in person, but for now, virtually at least, we're gonna hear from Kyla Gardner.
She has created passive income from a series of self-published nonfiction books on Kindle. That would be Amazon's Kindle direct publishing platform. And now she's actually jumping into fiction. This segment is part of our Throwback Thursday series. We also call it Where Are They Now?
We get to take an in-depth look at someone whose story has evolved since we first featured them. So Kyla has been very productive. She's written all of these nonfiction books. They're kind of like guides or handbooks. And it's basically a lifestyle business that allows her to do other things.
You're gonna hear about that, like write fiction. So this all sounds like a pretty cool business to me. Let's hear some details and some updates from Kyla. I'm hoping this is gonna inspire some listeners out there. I'll be back at the end with a quick wrap up.
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My name is Kyla Gardner and I live in Melbourne, Australia. My side hustle is self-publishing eBooks. I was featured on episode 1006 of Side Hustle School. I have more than 50 books published now. I've written a lot of them myself, but some of them I have outsourced to other writers.
I got started by hearing about Kindle from one of my coworkers who is making money from it. At the time, I worked in customer service for a software company that helped people sell physical products on Amazon. Before that, I worked as a journalist. So Kindle made sense of the combination of those two areas. I knew about researching and writing quickly from journalism, and then I learned all about Amazon selling an Amazon SEO from my customer service job.
So publishing books on Amazon made sense for me as a side hustle. My first couple of books took me about six months to write and publish, and it took about a year before I was making a full-time income from my business. These nonfiction books are my main source of income, but I wouldn't say I'm hustling on them day to day. It's become more of a passive income that's allowed me to work on my next side hustle, which is self-publishing fiction books. In terms of side hustles, I know they both, of course, sound very similar, nonfiction or fiction, but within publishing, they are very different.
Since I was featured on the show in 2019, I haven't published any more nonfiction books. That side of my business is almost entirely passive income now. In my episode, my income was quoted at $3,500 to $7,000 a month in profit. My income doesn't fluctuate that high anymore. It's more towards the lower end of that range, but it is more consistent month to month.
Now I see my nonfiction books as a lifestyle business that allows me to pivot to new genres that I'm more interested in. I love to read domestic suspense and psychological thrillers, so that's what I'm writing now. I have a new pen name, and my most recent book was about a murder within an MLM or multilevel marketing scheme. The biggest challenge I'm facing at the moment is patience in my business. In the past, I've loved working on "Deadline," moving super fast, writing nonfiction how-to guides that were only 50 to 75 pages long, so I could research and write one of those in a couple of weeks.
Writing a 200 to 300 page novel takes me a lot more time, and this form of storytelling is a skill I'm still developing versus being comfortable with writing nonfiction. But I love that challenge and feeling like I'm growing every day. I hope one day my fiction will become as profitable as my nonfiction books, but I know that so far it's been a slower build, and I'm just gonna have to keep working at it. If you're looking for your own side hustle, look at what you already have going for you. Kindle made sense for me with my work experience as a journalist and the Amazon-related software company, so it was a natural fit, but it may not be that perfect fit for everyone.
If someone has writing experience or SEO experience, maybe that's a great fit, but at the end of the day, you're going to have trouble just trying to replicate someone else's success. I've learned that myself even within self-publishing that I've had to write about topics or in genres that are interesting to me. So you have to make your side hustle your own. If people do wanna check out some of my fiction, they can find that under my pen name, Kyla Sharp. [Music]
Hey, thanks so much to Kyla for sharing those updates with us.
I was just doing some research. She's actually published more than 35 books on Amazon. As noted, a lot of those are fairly short books, but nevertheless, I don't mean to disparage them in any way. I haven't made it to 35 books or anything close to that. I'm just at nine so far, so still got a long way to go.
Kyla's on Goodreads as Kyla Gardner. And as you just heard, the pen name for the new fiction she's doing is Kyla Sharp. So check that out as well. And listeners, let me know what you think. If you are working on anything, we've got a lot of listeners out there that have done stuff in the world of independent publishing on Kindle or elsewhere.
Let me know what you think and who you'd like to see featured from our archives of more than a thousand stories, well over 3,000 episodes, lots of case studies and detailed stories within that big catalog. I love making this show for you, by the way. I make it every day. I've been doing it every day for 3,400 plus days and we're still going, right? We are still going seven days a week.
New episodes, you can subscribe or follow wherever you get your shows. You can download or stream the entire archive, the entire library at sidehustleschool.com. That's all for today. But of course, I'll be back tomorrow for a new month and beyond. My name is Chris Guillebeau.
And you're listening to Side Hustle School. [Music]
