Database Expert Helps Students Solve Real Problems

This transcript was generated from the episode audio and may contain minor errors.

[Music]

Hello and welcome to Side Hustle School. My name is Chris Guillebeau. Every single day bringing you a different story of someone who is creating more freedom for themselves through the form of an income generating project. This is usually a person who has a day job and takes the skills they already have to create that side hustle. And today's story features a Seattle area database consultant who longs to transfer her skills to the next generation.

She first gets an assignment teaching at her local university but then decides to design her own curriculum in the form of an ebook. At the end of this episode, I'll also talk a bit about publishing through Amazon's Kindle Direct Program. That's where anyone can publish a book directly to readers without going through any publishers or gatekeepers. And I'll tell you exactly how much you can earn on royalties based on the price of that ebook. Our sponsor allows the show to be completely free to you.

So let me say thank you to them and then I'll tell you the story. [Music]

Sylvia Mustel Vasilik is passionate about her career as a database consultant. Over the past 15 years, she's built a portfolio of clients and created databases for titans of industry like Microsoft and T-Mobile. As her career progressed, Sylvia longed to teach what she knew. Since 2009, she'd been occasionally sharing her real world knowledge on her blog, databases are fun but she wanted a more concrete way to help the next generation of database engineers and architects.

She was able to land a side position teaching an SQL server certificate course as part of the University of Washington's professional education program. Here she taught people that standard database language, SQL and gave students a foundation for their future careers. Her students paid a lot of money to the university to attend the course and they came from far and wide. Still, Sylvia couldn't help but feel something was missing. She believed that 90% of the skills that students needed weren't being taught in that course.

Like many education programs, it gave an overview of the basics but rarely went into depth on any individual topics. This meant her students were prepared for entry-level requirements but would struggle with more complex tasks. While teaching the course, Sylvia began to toy with ideas about how she could help her students go to more depth. Her first idea was the obvious one, to write a book or create a course, but she wasn't sure if it would be worth the time or investment, so she kept it on the back burner. However, when the university course was finally over, she received lots of emails from students asking about how they could get more practical experience.

They realized their education wasn't enough and they were eager to improve their skills. This confirmed to Sylvia that her idea was a good one, so she set out to write a book. That book was called "SQL Practice Problems." It gave students real challenges. These weren't the hypothetical assignments of university textbooks, but actual problems that developers and engineers would face in their day-to-day lives. It started at the beginner's level and then moved to intermediate and advanced problems.

Sylvia wrote the book using Microsoft Word and self-publish it for sale on Amazon.com. She did very little marketing there, but still saw consistent sales of her book. She attributes this to writing a great product description, focusing on answering the most commonly asked questions about SQL from her students. And instead of simply saying, "Hey, this is a book about SQL," Sylvia wrote the description to communicate the message, "Here's why you need this book about SQL." She included her email in the copy of the book and answered any questions she was sent by students. Keeping close contact also allowed her to request reviews to include on Amazon and gather information about what students were looking for.

After she started getting so many questions, she decided to progress her side hustle even further and increase the value she was delivering. In fact, she started getting so many questions, she decided to do something else. The next step was to adapt that book into an online course. Students would still get access to her book of 57 SQL problems, but she also offered video tutorials, additional practice problems, and free updates. Producing the course cost less than $500, most of which went towards software.

She bought a product called Screencast-O-Matic to help her capture video and use Canva to create the necessary images. She also moved the product away from Amazon and onto a standalone WordPress website, which she created with Thrive Themes. And of course, if you're curious about any of those resources, we will link them up for you on the notes page. Sylvia admits that she didn't really have a pricing strategy for her book and course. She prized where she felt comfortable and where she felt her students would get value.

She's still trying to figure out the correct pricing for her course. Right now, she sells a basic version for $39 and a premium version for $99. She's found that answering questions on Quora and Reddit have been the most successful tools for generating sales. She'll find questions related to the content in the book and then offer solutions with a link back to her course's website. This leads to a lot of referral traffic from people who like the answer or have a similar problem.

On the other hand, she's tried paying for ads but that hasn't been successful. So she's looking to create a marketing strategy without them for the time being. Since the start of 2018, Sylvia has made $13,000 from her side hustle. $11,000 came from selling the book on Amazon and a bit more than $2,000 from direct sales on her course page. The course is still new, so we expect that to go up over time.

One of her goals is to create a gamified version of that course that rewards people with achievements as they progress throughout. She's aware that people often buy materials and courses with good intentions but never use them. So she wants to find ways to keep them engaged. You don't just learn by osmosis. You can't just put that ebook under your pillow.

You have to learn by doing. And as she continues with her mission, her mission should continue to pay good rewards. [Music]

All right, this is definitely a topic where people have a lot of needs. This is an industry in which people can get paid quite well to solve problems for companies and improve their database architecture, et cetera. I was just taking a peek on Amazon 'cause I wanted to look at that a bit.

And at the moment I'm only seeing a print version, a paperback version of Sylvia's book. So I mentioned Kindle Directular. That's what I wanna talk about here. When it comes to a print book, there's some more complexity to the royalties and how it works out with Amazon and so on. But just to tell you quickly how it works with Kindle Direct and how much you can get paid, with Kindle Direct you're just selling electronic files like eBooks.

And when you do that with Amazon, you have a choice of two royalty rates. You can either receive 70% of the book's list price or 35% of the book's list price. And just by comparison to traditional publishing, those are really great royalty rates. For traditionally published eBooks, most authors are getting a maximum of 25%. And for traditionally published print books, they're getting a maximum of 15%.

For paperback, it's usually half that, 7.5%. But for Kindle Direct, it's 70% or 35%. And you may say, well, why would I want to choose 35% when I could choose 70? Well, there's a maximum $10 sales price for the 70% option. So in other words, you have to price your ebook less than $10 if you want to receive a maximum royalty rate, which most people are going to do.

But there might be some cases in which it's more advantageous to price it higher, even though their royalty rate is lower. Also, you only get the 70% rate in certain markets. Those include the major markets of the world, the United States, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, et cetera. But there are lots of other countries in which you can only get the 35% rate. Anyway, to the point of if Sylvia is making this money on Amazon, either through Kindle or print book or both, why would she take matters in her own hands and design her own course on her own website?

Well, first of all, she can sell her course for a lot more money and keep more of the money. That premium version of the course sells for $99. By building her own website and cultivating community, she's also less reliant on the gods of Amazon. This is really important because if your business is dependent on a single sales channel, you don't really have a business, you have a codependent relationship. If Amazon changes its algorithm to where people can't find that book when they're searching, all of a sudden she's not making money from that.

Still, it's true that Amazon can definitely bring a lot of buyers to her. So my thought is that people like Sylvia can do both, basically, like you can continue to publish on Amazon, whether Kindle direct or print, while focusing more of your efforts on building your own resources that customers can purchase directly from you. That way you don't lose out on those potential sales, but it's more of a lead generation tool for your own products that you're selling at a higher price. My prediction is that this is the kind of project that can sell a lot more copies, both of the book and the course. I'd almost compare it to this guy we featured before who now earns $200,000 a year teaching people to pass construction certification exams.

That was episode 311 of the show, 311. And the topics are similar because they're both highly technical, yet very important to people in those fields. If they can gain advanced knowledge, they're going to advance in their career. So that is therefore valuable. I will be curious to see what happens in the rest of the year as she continues to build that course and reach new people.

So congrats, Sylvia, thank you for sharing your story with us. And thanks to you as well for listening. As always, inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. My hope is that you'll like these stories, but they'll also make you think. They'll also make you ask yourself, "Hey, what can I do like this?" How can I find a way to take the knowledge that I have and make an extra $13,000 this year from it or whatever the number is?

There really is something out there for you. So if you haven't found it yet, keep looking. If you want to check out the show notes for today's episode that include links to everything I mentioned, just go to sidehustleschool.com/570. That is 570. I'll be back with another story for you tomorrow.

My name is Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]