Self-Publishing in 2020 - Interview with Alex Jordan

About this video

Alex Jordan interviews Sean Dollwet about his path into self-publishing. Sean says he started in multi-level marketing at 18 after high school, which introduced him to passive income, and worked sales jobs including Cutco knives, door-to-door Kirby vacuums, retail sunglasses, telemarketing solar, and selling tours and activities in Waikiki, while doing MLM on the side for years without making money. Living frugally, he searched YouTube for how to make money online, found Stefan James discussing Kindle publishing, bought K Money Mastery, found part of it outdated, joined Facebook groups, and bought another course that led to early sales. He describes his biggest obstacle as a mental block and limiting belief after four years of failure, which eased after his first book made a sale and later books sold more. The host introduces Sean as a six-figure earner who made $69,000 in October, and Sean says he has done over $10,000 a month for about two years, a claim presented as his own account. Sean says he later lost money investing everything he had saved into an expensive marketing company that crashed and then into a $25,000 coach he describes as a scam. He now says he is refocusing on self-publishing, building a stronger brand and email list, and saving publishing income to invest in index funds via a Roth IRA and in real estate because Amazon can change rules or close accounts. His advice is to pick one business and master it, learn obsessively, and focus on book quality that actually solves the reader’s problem, read and checked by him even when ghostwritten, so books can be bundled, translated, and built into a series.

Key takeaways

• Pick one business model and master it rather than jumping between models, learning from courses, mentors, videos, and blogs while taking action
• Focus on quality from the start: a nonfiction book must actually solve the reader’s specific problem, not just be grammatically correct
• Low-quality books get bad reviews and die quickly, and bundling or translating them does not fix them; high-quality books can be reused as lasting assets
• Sean attributes his early progress to persisting past a limiting belief after years of MLM failure, with a first small sale proving online income was possible
• Sean says he saves publishing income and diversifies into index funds and real estate because a business dependent on Amazon lacks full control

Episode details: published January 20, 2020 · 21:34 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Sean Dollwet’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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