Paternal Twins Produce Passive Publishing Profits

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

[Music]

Hello, greetings. What's up? Welcome to Side Hustle School. This is your host, Chris Guillebeau. For anyone listening in real time, I will be live in Chicago tonight.

I believe the location is WeWorkKenzie at 6.30 PM, but you can always get the details for that kind of stuff at sidehustleschool.com/tour. And now for all of our listeners who are not in Chicago, I have a particularly interesting story for you today. When identical twins decide to start an online business, they have a friendly competition to see which business model is best. The one that wins out, at least for them, is self-publishing. And over time, they build a mini empire for themselves, outsourcing the writing and even complete process of publishing a series of short books on Amazon, which is now bringing in $8,000 a month.

They drop out of school, move to Thailand, now they're making a course and so on. So it's definitely a wild ride. And for a bit of disclosure, I did have some feelings about this story as an author myself, just in terms of outsourcing the complete process of writing and publishing. As non-traditional as I am, I do follow a more traditional book publishing path. And I personally couldn't imagine being so disconnected from the process of writing, but I managed to overcome those personal feelings to work on this story because I think you should hear about different approaches.

Also, these guys are really young, and the fact that they've been able to spot and take advantage of an opportunity is admirable. So we are all about highlighting creative approaches to create passive income here on the program. With that in mind, Paternal Twins produce passive publishing profits is coming right up. [Music]

In 2016, the Mickelson brothers, Rasmus and Christian, were working their way through college. In addition to being identical twins, they also had identical 4.0 GPAs.

To pay the bills while studying, they each worked part-time jobs. Rasmus as a Chinese food delivery driver, and Christian as a receptionist. The jobs weren't high paying, but gave them the money they needed to live. If they continued down their current path, they would graduate with honors and go on to lucrative careers. But these two had other plans.

They already knew that the typical path of college to office job just wasn't for them. They wanted something different, and they hoped to escape the rat race before they even started running. So they began to explore different online business models in hopes of making some real money. Since it was their first foray into this world, they didn't quite know where to start. So they spent a couple of days scouring Google, researching as many methods as they could, from dropshipping to affiliate marketing, app building, fulfillment by Amazon, and the list goes on.

After that, they decided on a divide and conquer approach. They would each choose a business model and dedicate a few months to trying to make it work. For Rasmus, it was dropshipping. Christian would try his hand at self-publishing e-books. Within six months, a clear winner emerged.

While Rasmus' dropshipping experiment gilded some success, it was Christian's self-publishing that really excited them. So here's what happened. On July 2016, Christian published his first e-book. He wrote about something he knew and titled it "How to be a 4.0 GPA student in college, like me." It was a 5,000-word guide that included study tips, hacks, and techniques he used to maintain top grades. At 5,000 words, it wasn't exactly a magnum opus, but a useful handbook nonetheless.

He published it on Amazon and made $6.46 that first month. The next month, they quit school and retired to a life of leisure. Oh, wait, not quite. I'm getting ahead of things here. Still, even earning $6 felt validating because, you know, you have to start somewhere.

Christian then commissioned ghostwriters to write four other books, more like guides or short reports, each of only 5,000 words. The topics were the keto diet, the paleo diet, the IIFYM diet, which I believe stands for if it fits your macros, and real estate investing. Because, you know, why not? Just throw that one in. He launched them one by one over the next few months.

Before long, combined sales of these guides generated a profit of a couple hundred dollars per month. By the six-month mark, they were netting close to the magic $1,000 per month, all completely passive. That's when Christian and Rasmus decided to join forces. They pressed that secret button, twin powers activate. The self-publishing model had proved superior to drop shipping in every way.

At this stage, they were both still enrolled in college, working those day jobs, and still living at home. But it was time to make some tough decisions. Remember, they already knew the standard career path wasn't for them. They wanted a life of fun, adventure, and freedom. They figured their best course of action was to drop out of college and go all in with this opportunity.

Over the next year, self-publishing became their sole focus. To increase monthly revenue, they decided to publish more books, rather than attempt to sell more copies of the ones they already had. To do that, they needed more ideas. For inspiration, they looked through Amazon's categories for best-selling books. If they found there weren't too many other books on the same topic, they would add it to their list of candidates.

Using that method, they brainstormed hundreds of book ideas in many categories, including true crime, young adult, and even erotica, which reminds me, that's like a sneak peek of my next book, by the way, true crime, young adult, erotica altogether. Stay tuned. With profits rolling in, the twins were able to outsource each part of the process. This included the writing, cover design, and even the formatting. In addition, they began having the guides recorded in audio book format as another potential revenue source.

By outsourcing everything, it made it possible to publish books, not only on Amazon and Audible, Amazon's audio book platform, but several other platforms, including Google Books, Apple Books, Barnes & Noble, and Lulu. In addition, outsourcing the content gave them more time to figure out the best ways to market those books. They became experts at Amazon search results, ordering to use a meaningful book title plus keyword-rich product descriptions. They also used Amazon ads to drive readers to their book's pages, which they continually optimized for sales. Through a lot of trial and error, by the end of that year, they were making over $5,000 per month through their self-publishing business.

It was easily enough to live on, perhaps not for two people in the USA, but definitely in Thailand. So that's what they did. They embraced the expat lifestyle and moved overseas to lower their expenses, all while continuing to work on the business. Over the next year, they traveled to over a dozen countries while growing revenue to more than $8,000 per month. That success has led them to something new to teach what they know.

They've started a YouTube channel and are working on a self-publishing course. The story of the Mickelson twins is only half complete, but this time, instead of outsourcing, they're writing it themselves. [Music]

All right, a few thoughts here. First of all, a very interesting project, definitely an interesting process. And for me, being an author, as I just kind of alluded to in the introduction, my process is very different than what these guys do.

And I was thinking about this and I was like, to everything there is a season, right? And I don't know exactly how old these guys are, but I think they're like 20 something or young 20s. And when I was 20 something, young 20s, especially, if I had an opportunity like this, I absolutely would have pursued it. These days, I'm more interested in impact. I don't wanna just write a bunch of random guides and have those up for sale.

I actually wanna spend a year writing a book and then go through a long process of editing and quality control, put it out and go and tour and meet readers in 30 cities and all that kind of stuff. So it's just a different kind of thing. This is a different way that I've chosen myself. On a couple of practical notes, the story reminds me a bit of public domain publishing, which we've talked about before, episode 906, in particular, software engineer sells 64,000 copies of Anne of Green Gables. These are like opportunities.

And sometimes these opportunities come and go, sometimes they sprout up for a while, you can jump on them, do well, and then they go away, and you do something else. Nothing wrong with that. I do wonder if all their books/guides/reports are being sold from the same account. I would guess probably not. Just because even though there's nothing technically wrong, illegal or immoral with this, I do wonder if Amazon or other powers that be might get tired of somebody coming out and publishing 30 short books in a month or whatever, and then just either deactivate that account or penalize it in some way in the search results.

So they probably know more about that than I do, but I would guess that they're not selling everything from the same account. Anyway, as I say from time to time, there's all kinds of ways to make money. I wanna show you lots of different models. Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is so much better. Today's show notes, including links to the Mickelson twins, anything else that I mentioned in the episode, will be at sidehustleschool.com/942.

Episode 942. I'll be back again tomorrow. Much more is coming up. Be sure you're subscribed. Thanks so much.

I'm Chris Guillebeau for Side Hustle School. [Music]

From the Onward Project.