Amazon Publishing

My list-building plans from under a large oak tree

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5pm today. Forsyth park. Savannah, Georgia.

I found a large oak tree. Rolled up my jacket. Put it on the ground. Lay down on it in the shade under the tree.

It’s been two-plus weeks of non-stop travel. Changing five cities along the way. Over 5k miles traveled. And more talking with people in real life than I have done in the past six months combined.

I’m tired. I had a chance to lay down today. Under a tree. So I took it.

Tomorrow, I head back from Savannah to New York. After an afternoon layover at JFK, I will have an overnight and most likely sleepless flight back to Barcelona, to the safety of my cave, the comfort of my own bed, the routine of my regular work day.

All that’s really just to prepare you for yet another Q&A email, the third this week. Came a question in reply to last night’s milk-themed email:

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I bought SME a few weeks ago. I’d love to hear more about how you grow your list or “add cream”. I’ve started daily emails and unsubscriber rates are up. I’m currently using FB ads. I was relying on SEO, but that’s proven volatile this year.

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After 10+ years of trying to grow various audiences online, I’ve come to believe there’s no magic to it beyond time and persistence.

​​Whatever you do consistently to grow your list will work in time. And almost nothing will work if you jump around too much too quick.

That said, I will tell you one specific cream-getting/list-building strategy I personally plan to focus on. And that’s books, either ones I put on Amazon or that I sell on my own site and drive paid traffic to.

Books in my mind are the highest-quality leads you can possible get.

They create customers right away.

If you tack on some upsells, it’s possible to use them to break even on paid ad spend on day zero or soon after.

Plus books are immensely shareable and influential. People will gladly and actively recommend or hype up your book, much more so than a course or a coaching program or even a community.

If you want to see how this works in action, take a look at my 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters.

It took me about a month of on-the-side work to complete this book. It has been driving subscribers to my list ever since.

The only real problem is this is my only book and I should have written more suc books. I’m working on fixing that.

Meanwhile, if you want to see how I organized this book, how I sold my email list within it, and even learn something valuable about copywriting and marketing in the process, the 10 Commandments is only $5 on Amazon.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

How to sell 100,000 books with no audience, fame, or endorsements

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Yesterday, I wrote about Andrew Kap’s book 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books.

​​That book talks about the marketing behind Andrew’s law of attraction book, which has sold 100k+ copies since 2019.

One thing Andrew has done to promote his law of attraction book is start a YouTube channel in which he answers reader questions, highlights testimonials, and shares additional stories to illustrate points from his book.

In the chapter of the 3 Words book about that YouTube channel, Andrew says you shouldn’t worry too much about the production value of your YouTube videos. He gives an example:

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A perfect example of not needing high production value if you have high quality content is Alex Hormozi. You look at his content on YouTube, and a lot of his stuff seems like he’s filming inside of a closet. And the funny thing is — that’s because he actually is!

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I don’t agree with Andrew that Alex Hormozi’s inside-the-close videos stand on their high-quality content.

They stand because Hormozi is rich, successful, and now famous.

But that’s actually a good reason to read Andrew Kap’s 3 Words book.

Because Andrew made his law of attraction book a genuine bestseller without any of Alex Hormozi’s advantages.

He sold 100,000 copies of his book on his own — without a previous audience, without fame, without headline-worthy personal success stories, without celebrity endorsements.

And so, this point about Hormozi notwithstanding, it’s well worth reading Andrew’s 3 Words book about how he made his law of attraction book such a success.

By the way, YouTube is only one of the things Andrew is doing. So if you object to going on YouTube to promote yourself or your book — and if you do, I’m right there with you — then you’ll find lots of other strategies Andrew has used to promote his book and sell many metric tons of it.

I encourage you to read Andrew Kap’s book. In fact, I’m offering two free bonuses if you get it by tomorrow and write me:

Free Bonus #1: How Andrew Kap Wrote His Last Law Of Attraction Book in 60 Days

This is an interview I did with Andrew this past week.

His 3 Words book talks about book marketing: titles, covers, reviews, etc.

It doesn’t talk much about his writing process. But Andrew wrote his 200-page Last Law book in two months. And again, it has a 4.6 rating.

So I sat down with Andrew for an hour, grilled him on how he writes, how he prepares, researches, organizes his writing, the tools he uses, etc.

I also chimed in with my own thoughts and experiences. You might wonder why. I checked just now. I haven’t sold 100,000 books. But adding up all the books I have published on Amazon, I have sold 69,500 books.

Free Bonus #2: 4 Proven Hooks To Sell More Books

This is a short presentation I recorded a few days ago. It will give you the hooks, three examples for each, and how-to advice for coming up with each of the hooks for the book project you are working on.

These hooks are what I reach for when I’m thinking of writing a new book. They are also what I advised someone recently after he came to me and asked for help with writing his book. ​​​​

Hear me now:

​​You can get Andrew Kap’s book any time. But if you’d like to also get the free bonuses above, the deadline for that is tomorrow, Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET.

​​Here’s what to do:

1. Buy Andrew Kap’s 3 Words book on Amazon. You can get it in Kindle, audiobook, paperback, hardback, used, new, or collectible versions — your choice. The link to the book is at the end of this email.

2. Forward me the receipt email that Amazon sends you, and do it by the deadline (tomorrow, Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET).

3. I will then send you the free bonuses, the interview I did with Andrew, and the 4 Proven Hooks presentation.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/3words

My book recommendation for book marketing

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Today, I have book to recommend to you. It’s called, 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books.

I came across this book because I saw it hovering in the Amazon direct response bestsellers above my 10 Commandments book.

I looked up the author. His name is Andrew Kap. He’s the author of The Last Law Of Attraction Book You’ll Ever Need To Read. Facts about this book:

* Publication date: Nov 24, 2019

* Amazon rank as of today: 17,819, which means it’s selling around 220 copies per month, almost 5 years after its publication

* Number of reviews: 3,898, of which 79% are 5-star

I got curious. I bought Andrew’s 3 Words book. I started to read. I finished. And now I’m recommending it to you.

Actually, before recommending, a few disclaimers.

First, the “3 words.” They are not magic. They are not last, not law, not attraction. They are not words you can put in your title or anywhere in your text and automatically sell 100k copies.

Second, the book is written in a kind of sales copy style.

​​The first few chapters, which build up to the reveal of the three words, might sound like a video sales letter teasing you about the three health foods in your fridge you should never eat if you hope to lose weight.

Except Kap doesn’t keep teasing you for an hour and then tell you to buy something else. Instead, he reveals the three words, and pretty soon into the book.

He then unpacks the three words throughout the rest of the book, and tells you all the tactical and strategic things he did to sell and keep selling his Last Law of Attraction Book to 100k copies and beyond.

So get Kap’s book. Read it. Apply it. Or apply a part of it.

Because as you will see, Andrew Kap is rather obsessive in his determination to get his Law of Attraction book into as many hands as belong to humans that could benefit from the ideas he has to share.

But even if you don’t implement all of what Kap has to tell you, and even if you apply only 10% of it, you’re still likely to outsell 99% of self-published authors, and I imagine the majority of traditionally published authors as well.

Final disclaimer:

​​I wrote to Andrew and told him I want to recommend his book to my readers. I also asked if he would be willing to do the same with my 10 Commandments book to his readers. He agreed.

So not only am I telling you about this book, but I am actively promoting it. For that, I’ve got two free bonuses in case you get Andrew Kap’s 3 Words I Used To Sell 100,000 Books:

Free Bonus #1: How Andrew Kap Wrote His Last Law Of Attraction Book in 60 Days

This is an interview I did with Andrew this past week.

His 3 Words book talks about book marketing: titles, covers, reviews, etc.

It doesn’t talk much about his writing process. But Andrew wrote his 200-page Last Law book in two months. And again, it has a 4.6 rating.

So I sat down with Andrew for an hour, grilled him on how he writes, how he prepares, researches, organizes his writing, the tools he uses, etc.

I also chimed in with my own thoughts and experiences. You might wonder why. I checked just now. I haven’t sold 100,000 books. But adding up all the books I have published on Amazon, I have sold 69,500 books.

Free Bonus #2: 4 Proven Hooks To Sell More Books

This is a short presentation I recorded a few days ago. It will give you the hooks, three examples for each, and how-to advice for coming up with each of the hooks for the book project you are working on.

These hooks are what I reach for when I’m thinking of writing a new book. They are also what I advised someone recently after he came to me and asked for help with writing his book. ​​​​

Hear me now.

​​You can get Andrew Kap’s book any time. But if you’d like to also get the free bonuses above, the deadline for that is this coming Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET.

​​Here’s what to do:

1. Buy Andrew Kap’s 3 Words book on Amazon. You can get it in Kindle, audiobook, paperback, hardback, used, new, or collectible versions — your choice. The link to the book is at the end of this email.

2. Forward me the receipt email that Amazon sends you, and do it by the deadline (Monday, Jan 29, at 8:31pm CET).

3. I will then send you the free bonuses, the interview I did with Andrew, and the 4 Proven Hooks presentation.

Here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/3words

Write 10 books instead of one

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A few months back, I made an offer to help people on my list write a book — if they already had a catalogue of content such as daily emails, blog posts, or secret diary entries.

Some people who expressed interest had too little such content.

Not good. That means too much writing for me personally, and I’m not interested in becoming a full-time ghostwriter.

But some people had too much good content. A million words written or more, across thousands of emails.

Where do you possibly start with that? Or where do I?

I don’t have a great answer. But I will claim one thing:

It’s often easier to write a series of ten books than to write a single, one-off book.

Hear me out.

First off, it’s important to remember that the definition of what makes up a book in today’s world has changed.

A collection of words no longer has to be as much of a blunt weapon as Gone With The Wind in order to count as a book.

My own 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters book, which has brought me hundreds of high-quality readers and tens of thousands of dollars in new sales, runs all of 12,266 words.

Ben Settle’s first Villains book, the book I believe has done the most for his positioning, has 118 tiny pages, and that’s with a giant font and US-national-debt-sized margins.

And yet, I never had nobody complain that my book is too short. I doubt Ben has either.

Today, in books as in sales letters, it’s not really length that makes the difference either way. Rather, it’s the concept, the headline or title, the “big idea”.

That’s why I say it’s easier to write, or at least honestly commit to write, 10 books rather than one.

Writing 10 rather than one forces you to be more specific, concrete.

It forces you pump out more decent ideas, rather than trying to come up with a single brilliant breakthrough.

And of course, it forces you to keep each of your ten books, including that crucial first one, short and manageable, rather than trying to squeeze in too much out of some subconscious guilt or worry.

Anyways, something to keep in mind if you want more influence via book publishing.

It definitely helps to have a big catalogue of previous writing, which you can then shape into a new book, or perhaps more easily, into five or ten.

In other news about influence:

Tomorrow, inshallah, I will make available my Influential Emails training. That training reveals some of the tricks I use to make my emails more interesting and influential than the average email writing bear.

It’s how I’ve produced content that could easily fill 10 tiny but effective Kindle books.

If you’re interested in Influential Emails, you will want to get on my email list first. Click here to do so.

Maybe I can help you publish a book fast

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Yesterday, I got on a call with Rob Marsh and Kira Hug of The Copywriter Club to record a new episode for their podcast.

To kick off the interview, I repeated my Peter Parker origin story, of getting bitten by a radioactive spider and becoming imbued with incredible copywriting powers, and then squeezing into a tight red and black spandex outfit, and renaming myself Spider-Bejako.

What’s that? I hear you groaning?

Fine. What I actually told Rob and Kira was my origin story, but it looked more like the following:

1. Nine years ago, I quit my IT job to write content on the cheap as a no-contract freelancer for The Motley Fool.

2. Things were going smoothly for the first two months, at which point they suddenly got rough. From one day to the next, the work disappeared forever due to changes inside the MF business.

3. I sighed and said, “Well that sucks, now what.” After making a list of my options to make money now, I decided to start a new career, writing tiny alternative health books and publishing them on Kindle, one or two or three per month, which is what I did for a year.

Whenever I tell this story to other writers, their ears always perk up and they ask me for more on my experiences writing little books and self-publishing them on Amazon.

I always tell them the same, as I told Rob and Kira yesterday:

I managed to sell a lot of books on Amazon, but I couldn’t make it work as a business because I was an idiot.

Back then, I knew nothing about marketing, email, back-end offers, all the stuff I take for granted today. I was selling hundreds of copies of my books each month, but I didn’t build a business out of it.

That’s why I eventually dropped the self-publishing and got into copywriting for direct response clients, which is the path that’s led me to where I am now.

Which brings me to my offer to you today:

I still think self-publishing on Amazon is an incredible opportunity. There’s cachet to having a published book — even self-published — that cannot be replicated by anything you do on your website. Besides, book readers are the highest quality leads you could ever get. Plus Amazon is free traffic — or even traffic that makes you money.

That’s why I have my “10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters” on Amazon, and why I’m putting together a new 10 Commandments book, tentatively titled, “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Spirit Mediums, and Stage Magicians.”

But back to my offer:

Odds are, you knew some or all of this before. You knew it’s good idea to have a book out there… but you still might not have one.

Perhaps you have no time to do it, or you have some other hangup that’s keeping you from creating a book, even though you realize it would be valuable for the authority you’re trying to project, for the product or service you’re trying to sell, for the business you’re trying to grow.

My offer is simply to help you get this all done fast — book, optin, emails. Or even to do it for you — in case you already have good content that could be combined, molded, and repurposed into a book.

I don’t have a formal offer defined yet because I want to first hear if there is any interest in this, and if there is, I want to hear what your situation is.

So if you have a business, or better yet, if you have a business and a bunch of content you’ve created — videos, podcasts, blog posts, emails, courses — then hit reply, and we can start a conversation about where you’re at and and how I might be able to help you.

Would you look at this table of contents and give me your thoughts?

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In my email yesterday, I posed a kind of persuasion riddle based on the movie The Sting. I asked, “Can you identify this persuasion strategy?”

I got a buunch of responses. Some were flat-out wrong. Some were part of the way to the answer I had in mind. But only one or two people got all the way there.

That’s good.

It makes me feel hopeful about the book I’ve been planning.

I talked about it a few times already. The tentative title is “10 Commandments of Hypnotists, Pick Up Artists, Comedians, Copywriters, Con Men, Door-To-Door Salesmen, Professional Negotiators, Storytellers, Spirit Mediums, and Stage Magicians.”

I decided to sit down today and write up a possible table of contents for the book. In case you’re curious, you can find my proposed 10 Commandments below, along with a representative quote to give you a flavor of what each chapter will be about.

Commandment I: Thou shalt mind the event boundaries

“The bathroom is a great place to negotiate.”

Commandment II: Thou shalt flip the script

“I don’t even know you!”

Commandment III: Thou shalt pace and lead

“Give me your hands.”

Commandment IV: Thou shalt push and thou shalt pull

“Get off me, jeez.”

Commandment V: Honor the magical number seven

“This purple telephone was a gift from four graduate students, two of whom were passing their major course and failing their minors, and two of whom were passing their minors and failing their majors. The two who were passing their majors and failing their minors passed all. The two who were passing their minors and failing their majors, passed their majors and failed their minors. In other words, they selected the help I offered.”

Commandment VI: Thou shalt set the frame

“Can 31 Pages Transform Your Financial Destiny? It seems rather remarkable.”

Commandment VII: Thou shalt interrupt your adversary’s pattern

“Every man you’ve ever known, loved, and trusted has lied to you.”

Commandment VIII: Thou shalt take the winding path

“I’ll tell you about that in a second, but first…”

Commandment IX: Thou shalt agree and amplify

“Is this what you want? Bunch of fucking losers. Fucking Rocky is your hero. The whole pride of your city is built around a fuckin guy who doesn’t even exist. You got fuckin Joe Frazier is from here, but he’s black, so you can’t fuckin deal with him, so you make a fucking statue for some 3-ft fuckin Italian you stupid philly cheese-eatin fucking jackasses. I hope the cheese melts your faces off.”

10. Remember that you’re playing a numbers game

“As a marketer you only have one power, and that’s to anticipate what people are going to think.”

I’m trying to anticipate what you might think of this book.

So let me know if any of these chapters sounds too obvious, too obscure, or could be replaced in your opinion by something that’s more interesting or relevant.

Keep in mind my goal is to say something fresh and new — I don’t want to rewrite Cialdini’s Influence. That book is great, but it’s been written, and I don’t need to rewrite it.

And if you found yourself made curious or even excited by my outline for this book, feel free to write in and tell me that also. It’s always good to get a bit of extra motivation for the work ahead.
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Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

I already have one 10 Commandments book, 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

If my second 10 Commandments book above sounds interesting to you… there’s a good chance you will like my first book. Here’s where you can get it, for a rather staggering price:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

I’ve been a bestselling author for years and I didn’t even know it

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A few days ago, I went on Amazon in search of ideas for “pocket change” offers. That’s after I went through a training that Ning Li put on last week about the same.

I don’t think I’m giving away a huge spoiler for Ning’s course by revealing that a part of his research process is going on Amazon and seeing what else is selling in his niche.

So there I was on Amazon, looking at best-selling books.

As I’ve hinted a few times, this year I’ve started a new newsletter in the health space. I was doing research for possible “pocket change” offers I could create to grow that newsletter.

I was stabbing around various categories and following random hunches. I scrolled down in one highly specific but popular category to about rank 40…

… and then I guffawed, snorted, and chuckled.

I saw a familiar book among the bestsellers:

One o’ mine own.

I wrote this particular book about 9 years ago. I hadn’t really seen it or thought about it since. It was part of about a dozen alternative-health how-to books that I wrote at that time under various pseudonyms.

All these books are still up on Amazon, and some continue to rack up reviews and sales. This particular book is the best of the bunch, and is doing well enough to make me a best-selling author in a fairly competitive category, without any effort, without any promotion, and without even being aware of the fact.

But let’s get biblical:

The only book I currently have on Amazon under my own name is the 10 Commandments of A-List Copywriters.

It’s currently only #96 among best-selling Kindle books in the “direct marketing” category.

But there was a brief period last December when my 10 Commandments book was ranked higher among Amazon bestsellers than Gary Halbert’s Boron Letters and Dan Kennedy’s Magnetic Marketing.

Maybe, with your help, I can get my book back up in the rankings, to the top of the charts where it belongs. Plus, it’s only 5 bucks. If you’d like to take a look:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments

My recipe for writing a book that influences people and sells itself

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I just spent the morning reading statistics about the best-selling books of the 20th century so I could bring you the following curious anecdote or two:

The year 1936 saw the publication of two all-time bestselling books.

The first of these was Gone With The Wind. That’s a novel that clocked in at 1,037 pages. “People may not like it very much,” said one publishing insider, “but nobody can deny that it gives a lot of reading for your money.”

Gone With The Wind was made into a 1939 movie with Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable, which won a bunch of Oscars. Without the monstrous success of the movie, odds are that few people today would know about the book, even though it sold over 30 million copies in its time.

On the other hand, consider the other all-time bestseller published in 1936.

It has sold even better — an estimated 40 million copies as of 2022.

And unlike Gone With The Wind, this second book continues to sell over 250,000 each year, even today, almost a century after its first publication.

What’s more, this book does it all without any advertising, without the Hollywood hype machine, simply based on its own magic alone.

You might know the book I’m talking about. It’s Dale Carnegie’s How To Win Friends And Influence People.

One part of this success is clearly down to the promise in the title. As Carnegie wrote back then, nobody teaches you this stuff in school. And yet, it’s really the fundamental work of what it means to be a human being.

But it can’t be just the title. That’s not reason why the book continues to sell year after year, or why millions of readers say the book changed their lives.

This includes me. I read How To Win Friends for the first time when I was around 18. It definitely changed how I behave.

For example, take Carnegie’s dictum that you cannot ever win an argument.

​​I’m argumentative by nature. But just yesterday, I kept myself from arguing — because Carnegie’s ghost appeared from somewhere and reminded me that I make my own life more difficult every time I aim to prove I’m right.

This kind of influence comes down to what’s inside the covers, and not just on them.

So what’s inside? I’ll tell ya.

Each chapter of Carnegie’s book is exactly the same, once you strip away the meat and look at the skeleton underneath. It goes like this:

1. Anecdote
2. The core idea of the chapter, which is illustrated by the anecdote above, and which is further illustrated by…
3. Anecdote
4. Anecdote
5. Anecdote
6. (optional) Anecdote

The valuable ideas in Carnegie’s book can fit on a single page. But it’s the other 290 pages of illustration that have made the book what it is.

In other words, the recipe for mass influence and continued easy sales is being light on how-to and heavy on case studies and stories, including personal stories and experiences.

Maybe you say that’s obvious. And it should be, if you read daily email newsletters like mine. But maybe you don’t read my newsletter yet. In case you’d like to fix that, so you can more ideas and illustrations on how to influence and even sell people, then I suggest you click here and follow the instructions that appear.

Spanish A-list copywriter makes me an indecent proposal

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Last year in September, I kicked off the third run of Copy Riddles, my program for learning copywriting by practicing bullets.

As part of that September run, I had a little each week for the best bullet. Anybody who wanted to could send me their bullets. The winner got a prize, usually a book on marketing and copywriting.

(The contest has since been shuttered, since I spun off a complete coaching program to go with Copy Riddles.)

Anyways, the very first week and the very first contest, out of something like fifty submissions, the winner was Rafa Casas, a Spanish-speaking and Spanish-writing copywriter.

Rafa’s first bullet won because it was so simple and promised such a clear and desirable benefit.

But Rafa kept submitting bullets for later bullet contests (no dice, you can only win once). Still, he had such clever and persuasive ideas that I was sure he will be a big success soon.

And it seems to be happening.

Rafa is now writing copy for a number of clients in Spain.

He’s also offering his own email copywriting coaching to a few clients, based on his experiences writing two daily email newsletters.

And from what I understand, he recently won some kind of fancy award in Spain, recognizing his wizard-like copywriting skills.

Put all this together, and I think it qualifies Rafa as an A-lister in the Spanish copywriting world.

And if you wonder whether Rafa really has the hard results to back up being called an A-lister… then I’ll tell you that copywriting stardom is more about endorsements, legend, and mental shortcuts than it is about results.

That’s something to ponder if you yourself have aspirations to become an A-list copywriter.

But back to the indecent proposal I promised you in my subject line. A few days ago, Rafa sent me the following email:

It turns out that this afternoon while I was waiting for my daughter to do her yoga class, I read, as I always do every Thursday afternoon with a coffee, the book I always read while I´m waiting for her: The 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters, and I have come up with a business with which we will not become millionaires (not for now) but it will not cost us money either.

What do you think if I translate your book into Spanish and we try to sell it to the Spanish-speaking world as well?

Of course I wouldn’t charge you anything for doing it, well not in money at least. The idea is that while I translate it and we try to sell it, I can learn from you the strategy that we implement to sell it, for example.

Immediately upon reading Rafa’s message, I drifted off into a pleasant fantasy. I saw myself being interviewed on CNN, with all the different translations of my book on a shelf behind me.

“So Bejako,” the CNN anchorwoman asked me, “what can you tell us, as an internationally read copywriting expert whose books have been translated into multiple languages, about the recent news of monkey pox? Is this something to worry about? Is washing our hands with soap enough? And are there influence and persuasion principles we can learn from this?”

My dream balloon popped. I fell back to reality.

I realized was that Rafa’s proposal was indecent. But only in the original sense of that word, meaning not suitable or fitting.

Because while I would love to have a Spanish-language version of my book, it’s probably not worth Rafa’s time to translate it. Either for the money we could make together, or for the learning experience of how I might promote that book.

My feeling on these Kindle books is that they are valuable for credibility and as lead magnets.

They siphon people from Amazon into your world. They sit there, more or less passively, and do their work. In my experience, most of their value comes without any added promotion, outside of some very basic Amazon ads and occasional mentions in this newsletter.

Maybe you think that’s a cavalier attitude about promotion for somebody who calls himself a marketer.

Perhaps. But perhaps it’s about the best use of your time.

So in case I haven’t piled on the value in this email sufficiently, I will give you one last practical tidbit. It comes from James Altucher.

James is an interesting and quirky Internet personality. He has written and published 20 books, both fiction and non-fiction. And he’s doing something right, because he has amassed a huge audience… sold truckloads of books… and even had a WSJ bestseller with a book he self-published.

Here’s the book-marketing tidbit. James asks:

What’s the best way to promote your first book?

Simple.

Write your second book.

That’s what I’m planning to do to promote my 10 Commandments book. Along with, of course, occasional mentions in this email newsletter.

So if you don’t have a copy of the 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters… and you want to find out why a star in the Spanish copywriting sky like Rafa might want to read this book every Thursday afternoon… then take a look below:

https://bejakovic.com/10commandments​​

Opportunity doesn’t come in a sales letter

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A couple weeks ago, I sent out an email about my history making a living, for a few months at least, by writing and selling $2.99 books on Kindle. To which a reader wrote in and asked:

Every day, I get inundated with ads about ‘building passive income with kindle ebooks.’

​Is this one of those overblown opportunities that resembles a once pristine reef teeming with life that’s now been trampled into oblivion?

​Curious to hear your thoughts, as you’ve actually been in that space.

My answer is something marketer Rich Schefren likes to say, which is that opportunity doesn’t come in a sales letter.

The implied or overt promise for any make-money thing is to get rich in just 78 days or less, and then retire if you want to, so you can start worrying about how to spend all that free time you’ve suddenly saddled yourself with.

It makes sense to sell this promise to people because that’s what we all respond to. But it’s not something you want to buy yourself.

That’s not to say that Kindle publishing has become a dead and fossilized reef, with only a few pale and hungry blobfish still swimming around and trying to eek out a bit of nourishment from it.

It doesn’t even mean that it’s not worth paying for a course to guide you through the technical work of picking a niche, writing up and formatting your first book, getting the cover done, etc.

That information can easily be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars to you, if it saves you time that you would have spent to figure out the same stuff.

Or it​ can be worth infinitely more — if it makes the difference between you getting overwhelmed and giving up on a project and sticking with it and ultimately having success with it.

My bigger point is that if you decide to buy a book, course, membership, mastermind, coaching program, whatever, be mindful of what you’re buying… and figure out how to make that thing pay for itself.

​​Apply the ideas you’re getting exposed to. Work harder. Do things you wouldn’t have normally done.

​​It might not be as sexy and colorful as a pristine reef teeming with life… but it’s a guaranteed opportunity to succeed, in just 78 days, or a few months more.

But back to Rich Schefren. I have a offer for you today:

Last year, I regularly promoted Rich’s Steal Our Winners. That’s where Rich interviews a handful of successful marketers each month, and gets them to share a tactic or idea that is working for them right now. You can think of it as a bunch of opportunities, but not in a sales letter.

Steal Our Winners used to be an attractive offer and an easy sale to make — you could try it out for just $1 for the first month.

But then they changed the offer. The $1 trial disappeared, and was replaced by a lifetime-only subscription. So I stopped promoting Steal Our Winners.

But now, the $1 trial is back. So I’m promoting it again, because I still think Steal Our Winners is a valuable source of new marketing ideas.

The only issue is that the layout of the Steal Our Winners site has changed, and for the worse. It’s been redesigned to become more confusing, more YouTube-like, and less monthly newsletter-like. I personally find that annoying, but maybe it won’t be an issue for you, particularly if you didn’t get used to the old site.

In any case, if you are curious to find out more about Steal Our Winners, or even to try it out for $1, here’s the link:

https://bejakovic.com/sow