Self Publishing Success Story | The Jason Bracht Story

About this video

Dale Roberts interviews Jason Brock (jasonbrock.com, now mainly hustleproject.org and a free Facebook group), whom Dale credits as his mentor and says built an income, in Dale’s words, from zero to as much as $220,000 per month. Brock says he grew up below middle class, raised by his mother and grandmother, both waitresses, served in the Army, held many odd jobs, and had been a full-time entrepreneur for about ten years. After his son’s birth in September 2013, he found Kindle publishing videos that November, wanting more income. His first book, Drop Shipping Made Easy — a topic he knew from Shopify e-commerce — was about 25 to 30 pages, written in Pages on a Mac, with a roughly $5 Fiverr cover; it sold modestly and taught him the process; he later took it down, and stresses immediate action. Much of the conversation warns against gaming Amazon: they discuss the ‘10x’ loophole era, in which, as they describe it, publishers stuffed books with up to 10,000–20,000 pages and hyperlinks jumping readers to the end to harvest page-read payouts — Brock calls it stealing, and it got many accounts closed. His doctrine: protect your account, play the long game, provide real value, and treat one book as a product and a series under one brand as a business — the ‘slow burn’ rather than a lottery-ticket home run. Advice includes: start in a niche you know (his early hits were gardening and natural remedies such as coconut oil; he claims a medicinal honey book reached about #4,000 in the store, selling dozens of copies a day); use pen names to build separate niche brands; if a book works, ‘go back to the well’; set an assessment point (he gave himself 50 books before judging Kindle); prefer one good book from a quality, ideally native-English, writer over five cheap ones, because poor quality is destroyed in reviews; and put every book into print (CreateSpace) and audio (ACX/Audible) from the start — formats he delayed by months and over a year and claims made him a lot of money.

Key takeaways

• Protect the account and play the long game: the speakers describe the ‘10x’ page-stuffing loophole as stealing that got accounts closed, versus smaller steady earnings compounding over a book’s lifetime.
• Treat a single book as a product and a branded series as a business — expect a slow burn, and when a title works, ‘go back to the well’ with more like it.
• Start in a niche you know enough to judge quality (his early wins were gardening and natural remedies); experiment with unfamiliar niches only once income allows it.
• Quality beats quantity in outsourcing: one good book from a strong writer outperforms five cut-rate books that will be killed by reviews.
• Publish in every format from day one — ebook, print and audio — and set a concrete assessment point (Brock gave himself 50 books) before deciding whether to continue.

Episode details: published February 7, 2017 · 45:39 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

Next: How to Increase Book Sales on Amazon →

All Dale L. Roberts videos · Dale L. Roberts profile · Dale L. Roberts on YouTube