Home Talk Free Talk 제 작품 초고는 여기 발표할까 합니다…. 제 작품 초고는 여기 발표할까 합니다…. Name * Password * Email 요약하면, 내가 이렇게 글을 많이 쓰고 싶어하는 욕망이 있는지는 몰랐고..... 그동안 책 발행하는 법을 몰라, 너무나 큰 낭비를 몇십년간 했다.... 그러마, 많은 세월이 남았으니, 운이 좋다....뭐 이런 내용임... 여기 다듬은 글.... ============================ 31 Expensive Hobbies Not only can a hobby be inexpensive, it can generate income as well. -Brad Kong Some people are poor since they waste all their passion and talents only for hobbies or other things; they fail to connect their strength with opportunities to make money productively. When people waste their gifts for hobbies only, and these hobbies do not bring them money back, people tend to be broke all the time. One of the examples is me, unfortunately. When I think about it now, I have written zillions of articles on myriads of web sites for nothing in the last 23 years. No one paid me, rewarded me or even appreciated me. This brought me a little bit of fame since people remember my writing ID, “brad”. Now I realize that I have always had so much passion for writing; I just wasted a chunk of my life only because I did not know how to self publish a book. All I heard was some rejection stories of famous writers; Harry Potter was rejected forty times or something like that. To make things worse, I often made a lot of enemies instead of friends since I did not stand for those nasty commenters; I often offended them back. As a result, I have wasted the first forty years of my life for nothing. However, I may have to say that I am in a lucky situation; I still have 51 years left if I die at 100. Some people really waste their whole life for diverse reasons. I guess I can publish 30 books before I die if I can write one book a year or so from now; if I write 4 pages a day, I can write 600 pages in 5 months, which is enough for a book; I can take break for the rest of the year after publishing a book; That is a 7 month break a year; Writing a 600 page book a years is possible. Some people just have unproductive, expensive hobbies: riding sports cars, collecting audios, photography with DSLR cameras, etc. Have you heard of “Ferrari beggars” in Japan? There is a group of people in Japan spending all their salaries on Ferrari cars. Alternatively, I think they could have used their passion to work for Ferrari or other sports car companies; I am pretty sure some people can use their passion and knowledge. Let’s suppose that there is one girl who likes to dance. She can waste her desire to dance away at a nightclub. Or she can use it to work as an instructor at a dancing school. Losers tend not to take things in a constructive way. After quitting my job in March, 2022, writing has been my full time profession. So, I wondered how I could increase my book sales to support my family. I cannot imagine how Herman Melville would have felt since he had four kids to feed by the time he started writing “Moby-Dick”; I cannot imagine how Charles Dickens took care of a family with 10 children; I do not think I can even produce that many to begin with. Honestly, I feel lucky that I have only one child; I feel even luckier that the world is crowded with 8 billion people, so I can relieve myself from the huge pressure to produce more children. I do have some income from investment and savings, but writing will be my major income from now. Here are three things I found about book sales increase after analyzing Amazon bestsellers. This may be off topic a little bit, but it is hard for me to write these in a separate chapter. I hope this info will be helpful for you in case you write something for your side income. First of all, I concluded that I have to write as many pages as possible to increase book sales. I originally planned to write only 300 pages for this book, but increased the target volume to over 600 pages. This is merely human psychology: People may read anything; when they buy a book, they prefer a thicker one. It is natural for customers to go for more information for the same amount of money. I noticed that a lot of top 10 bestsellers are at least 400 pages and the book, “Life force” written by Tony Robinson was even 720 pages. My wife reads a lot of books written by John Grisham and James Patterson and these are usually up to 600 pages. It seems many readers go for thicker books. The book, “Alchemist” written by Paulo Coelho, eventually sold over 600 million copies. But, he confessed that only two copies were sold initially in the first six months after release in 1985. When I checked the volume, it was only 170 pages. It was the second book for Coelho, so he was a pretty much nameless author at that time. No one will buy a thin book at a high price from a nameless writer. “The Old Man and the Sea” by Hemingway has sold millions of copies even though it is just 120 pages, but the novel won the Nobel Prize in 1954. I am talking about ordinary writers like you and me. Another advantage for a thick book is extra library purchases. If patrons borrow a thick book at the library, it usually takes longer for them to finish and return it. So, it is possible there are more waiting for that book somehow. It is possible for a library to buy one extra copy for that book since there are too many people waiting and holding. America has 140,000 libraries. If one library buys one extra copy, you can make extra sales of 100,000 books. Kindle Direct Publishing at Amazon shows that you can make about $7 profit for each book sale. Then, it would be $700,000 extra profit for the author. Probably, that is not going to happen to me. But, it is possible I can sell 20,000 books instead of 10,000 if I can write a thick book. Secondly, I assumed that a book should be written in English to sell more. I did not realize that the Korean population is only 0.05% of the world population (I mistakenly believed it is 5% of the world). Only the USA population is 6 times bigger than South Korea, where I originally came from. And there are 67 countries whose primary language is English: the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Guam, Singapore, South Africa, etc. Also, some countries like India or China have huge populations and these people know how to read English; they can buy my ebooks. Nevertheless, there are some great Korean authors having sold over 1 million copies of a book only in South Korea. Again, I am talking about ordinary writers like you and me. Thirdly, I think it is important for a book title to include certain numbers: How many points will an author cover in his book? I know this since I have written millions of articles online. The number in titles always attracts people to click my articles. I think “80 Reasons Why” is good as in this book. These are two titles as examples from Amazon top 10 bestsellers in 2022: “The 48 Laws of Power” and “12 Rules for Life”. Another example can be “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. It seems readers love to know how many points they will cover exactly in advance. I like Rolf Dobelli, but his book, “Art of thinking clearly” was not a big hit. If he wrote the title as “99 ways to think clearly”, I believe the sales could have been much better. Lastly, I think uniqueness matters. I do not know if this book will be a success or failure. But, I can make people say, “I have never seen a book like this.” There are over 2 million new books published every year. But, I feel like too many books have contents that I have seen somewhere else before. Most do not include unique ideas or experience, not to mention unique style. For example, I think that “Art of thinking clearly” written by Rolf Dobelli failed because it does not have much personal experience. It includes so many theses and experiments from other books that happened years ago. Simply, he read a lot of books and collected them in line: I do not see much of his own ideas. The book was boring as hell without his own story and I could not finish one third within six months. I think we have to put our own unique ideas and experience to make a book vivid. There are a lot of books written in a rushed way. These are usually less than 250 pages. Maybe they have jobs other than a writer or do not have much money to win some time to write in a calm way. I feel very lucky. I feel sorry for them, too. Coco Chanel once said, “The best things in life are free.” Writing may not be exactly free, but it is a great hobby to relieve your stress and arrange your thoughts. When you say what you want to say, it relieves stress a little bit. And, sometimes, it can bring you some money or even fame. Currently, my favorite hobbies are walking, riding a scooter and reading books. None of them costs a lot of money. I walk all day for probably one day a week in 2022: And, the total distance is up to 30 miles a day. I usually walk to the big bus terminal behind malls three miles from my home. There used to be a local bus to get there every hour, but the village canceled it two years ago after a corona pandemic came in 2020. I hope they will reschedule it soon, but now I just have to walk or use a scooter to get to the terminal for now. Once I get to the terminal, it has millions of buses going everywhere. Probably, it has 20 gates for buses having different routes and many of them go in the east direction to Chicago. I got this long distance walking habit when I was a teenager thanks to my brother. He is two years younger than me and had walked a surprisingly long distance. He made me realize that a human can walk a very long range. Seoul is different from any cities in America; it is designed very ideal for walking. The population including the vicinity is almost 25 millions and the entire area is packed: 300 subway stations and 400 local bus lines; this city is hell of hell for car owners, but heaven for walkers. The streets in Seoul are like never ending shopping malls: coffee shops, restaurants, stores, entertainments, etc. If you combine 1,000 American shopping malls and align them in line, that would be like the streets in Seoul: A never ending entertainment center. Even if you walk all day, the streets with shops will never end; you can walk the whole week and these still will never end. In fact, I had walked for over twenty years everywhere and still I was not able to cover the city at all: Not even once. When you check the streets of Seoul on YouTube, you will see that many people are skinny. Believe me that it is not because of their food. They just walk a lot. Plus, it has a world class subway system. My wife said it is ten times cleaner than that of Chicago. Plus, the weather is mild, so walking is quite pleasant there. On the contrary, I do not see any long enough streets in America. The longest fun street on the west coast could be Hollywood Boulevard in LA. I have been there probably three times since I used to visit my brother who used to live in San Diego. It was long, but I remember about four hours were more than enough to cover it all. Downtown San Diego was nice, but I think three days were enough to go everywhere in the city. In the Midwest, Downtown Dells, Wisconsin was pretty similar to the Niagara area including the “Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum”, but the walking on the street was over after two hours. I heard one Norwegian guy visited Seoul 18 times only to walk around on the street in Seoul: A never ending shopping mall as I mentioned. Weather is milder than Nothern America, so it was healthy fun without costing much money. Depending on the situation, a hobby costs a fortune. I saw a sports car accident on the news the other day. The guy must have blown $240,000 for nothing and got a criminal record. You can live like that, but you do not have to. Bond prices have dropped significantly in America as in 2022. A lot of my CDs in Capital One bank are getting matured this year. And, I will probably have $150,000 cash in my hands in May, 2022. Personally, I plan to put all that money in bond ETFs as “getting more and more interest every month brings me pleasure”. There was one person who said exactly the same thing two hundred years ago: John D. Rockefeller. It is really up to you how you live your life. I agree to the terms of service Comment