Sports Writer Wins Big Gambling On His Own Book

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

Did you know that there are now over one million books self-published in the U.S. every year? Amazon.com and other platforms have made it very easy to publish your book. Talked about that a couple of times recently in some different ways. That doesn't mean your book is going to be any good.

And it doesn't mean anyone will ever see it, let alone choose to purchase and read it. Just because you can publish a book in a day or two doesn't mean it's a good book or that people will buy it. Just to restate the obvious. In situations like these, I'm always interested in understanding what sets apart the few successes from the many failures. And as an author myself, I'll tell you something right up front that pretty much everyone in this industry agrees upon.

And that is that we don't always know. There are a lot of great books that never get the audience they deserve. And there's also probably some books that take off, become a huge commercial success, despite a lot of good reasons why they shouldn't. So there's definitely a mystery factor, in other words. Still, there are some things we can learn from both the successes and the failures.

So in today's story, when a sports blogger creates an accidental self-published hit, he becomes an independent publisher himself, helping people write winning books of their own. Welcome to Silenceful School, I'm your host, Chris Guillebeau. Stay tuned for Sports Writer Wins Big, gambling on his own book. Matt Rodnitsky was working as a writer and editor for a sports blog when he first became interested in gambling. He began placing a few bets as a way of making his favorite sporting events more exciting.

He never took it too seriously and lived by the old mantra of "Never gamble more than you are willing to lose." Good advice for everyone out there. As a writer himself, Matt was shocked to notice that there was very little useful content out there on gambling. Nothing that encouraged people to make informed decisions about how to bet. In fact, much of the information was of low quality and typically written to promote online gambling websites. Matt was keen to learn more, and not from someone who had a chance to win big at his expense.

That meant scouring Twitter and Reddit and online message boards for winning advice. After months of research, he decided to put his money to the test. He took $100, gifted to him by his grandma for his birthday, and began to play. As he gained more knowledge and experience, he managed to turn $100 into $10,000 over the course of two years. But then, he got cocky.

He forgot what he had learned and became reckless. Within two months, he had lost it all and was back to zero. Let this be another reminder to gamble responsibly, which for many of us means not at all. With his bankroll bruised and broken, Matt realized something else. He actually hadn't been following any real system.

In fact, he'd actually just gotten lucky. He'd been playing for table stakes without earning a seat at the table. It was a crushing blow, but instead of giving up, he decided to double down. And not on gambling itself, but on something else entirely. He thought about his experience over the past two years, the highs and the lows, and when recounting the story to friends, they all found it highly entertaining.

So he decided to write a book. It would be part memoir, part education, and all fun. In this book, he would chronicle how he'd won big and lost it all and what he learned along the way so that readers wouldn't make the same mistakes. Sort of like a self-help book dedicated to gamblers. He worked on this short book for a few months, and in October 2014, published his tell-all as a 114-page e-book on Amazon.

At the time, he was living in Prague, working as an English teacher. To reward himself, he took a short vacation to Croatia, staying in a hostel. To launch that guide, he performed some basic promotion. When I say basic, I mean really basic. He CC'd 46 people on an email list, many of whom were unhappy at having their email address revealed to everyone else on the list.

He also sent direct messages to his 500-ish Twitter followers. Also not a great idea. So it wasn't exactly a winning strategy. And as such, he thought the book would be a disaster and fade into obscurity. But little did he know he'd actually hit a home run.

Two months later, Matt received a royalty check for $1,100 $1,150.06 to be specific, and he was absolutely shocked. He celebrated back in Prague by drinking too much Pilsner at the bar. It was worth it. With that success, his life was never the same. He felt like a real bonafide writer.

Over the next year, his book earned $6,000. Within three years, he'd netted $14,000 in totally passive profits and sold thousands of copies, all completely by accident. By 2017, Matt had worked to reverse engineer the success of his project and was confident he'd figured out why it resonated. He realized that by following the Minimum Viable Product, or MVP, process for Amazon sales, you could eliminate much of the risk before going to all the effort of writing and publishing. That meant coming up with some interesting ideas, testing those ideas on a small audience, and then only investing time into the ideas that you had promised.

In what was a very meta way to test the concept, he wrote a book about the concept itself titled, "You Are An Author, So Go And Write Your F-ing Book." And F-ing is normally pronounced differently, but for the sake of our Family Friendly podcast, that's what we're going to go with. "You Are An Author" was not a slim dunk like his previous title, but it generated some revenue and ended up being the catalyst for helping him launch something far more lucrative. Rather than write a third book, he decided to launch a side hustle to his new side hustle, as one does. It would be a publishing venture to help other would-be authors tell their unique stories. He would help them test their ideas, distill those ideas into a catchy hook, and eventually publish their masterpiece.

He called the endeavor "Platipus Publishing." At first, Matt found clients through cold emails. He went to the creators of blog posts or podcasts he thought were great and pitched them on helping to turn their content into a book. As his reputation grew, he began to receive clients through referral. Slowly but surely, his revenue increased, and as he helped aspiring authors and interesting people launch books, he amassed several success stories. Authors for some of the books Matt helped publish ended up on major media outlets like ESPN and The Daily Beast.

Success led to more success, and his winnings increased. That led to him being able to charge more for his services, which, since inception in 2017, have netted him over six figures in income with an average of about $5,000 per month. The only downside is that, like gambling itself, the results are mixed. Sometimes Matt will have big wins in the form of very profitable months, other times huge losses, or at least a loss in the sense of having no income at all from this project. He's working to solve the problem by creating an online course outlining his whole process.

His hope is that it will bring more consistency to his earnings. All right, so when it comes to publishing and self-publishing, this story actually reminded me of another self-publishing story we had recently, episode 942, that I kind of provided a bit of a disclaimer around. Just because of my background, I am an author. I'm a more traditional author. It's probably the only thing I'm traditional about, but I am a more traditional author in that I work with publishers, and I go through a pretty extensive editing process.

From the time I finish a manuscript, it's usually a year until the book actually comes out. So it's a much slower, more deliberate process, and I can definitely say it's a better process for me. Not saying it's a better process for everyone, but for me it certainly is. And there is more than one way to do these things, so just like I said in that other episode, I like to give you options and information. So this is one perspective.

There's another perspective in that other episode. There's my perspective and my experience, which I'm always happy to share with anyone who wants to write a book. And of course, there are lots of others as well. Now here's something that I am totally on board with. A value that I do share with Matt here.

I like something that he said. We always ask people, "What's the best part of your project? What's the best part of your side hustle? What's the most challenging part, but also what's the best part?" And he said, "The best part was feeling like I wasn't crazy for thinking the ideas in my head were worth money and could help people, and that I could make a living with words from anywhere in the world. I've been to about 50 countries and have no permanent home.

It has allowed me to work on whatever I want to write every day, travel freely, and help like-minded people chase their dreams." So love that mission statement. We are actually perfectly aligned there. So congratulations to Matt. Thank you, Matt, for letting us share your story. Listeners, I hope you enjoyed it.

Inspiration is good, but inspiration with action is better. If there's a book you want to write, I hope you will write it in one fashion or another. If there's a message you have to get out in the world, I hope you will do so, whether it's through a blog, a podcast, a YouTube channel, standing on the street talking to strangers, whatever it is. Don't keep it to yourself. Today's show notes.

All right, sidehustleschool.com/955. I'll include links to everything I mentioned and maybe some other resources as well. You never know. Do come back tomorrow. Much more is coming up.

My name is Chris Guillebeau. This is Side Hustle School. From the Onward Project.