Welcome to The Free Self-Publishing Course | Introduction | Video #1

About this video

This is the introduction to Sean’s free step-by-step self-publishing course. He says he discovered self-publishing in 2016 — his first online business that worked — built it to $10,000 a month in 10 months, has earned six figures a year for the past few years, and has published over 100 books, 99% under a pen name. To establish credibility (he says he once paid coaches $25,000 who had lied about their income), he shows account screenshots, saying an Audible dashboard showed $46,000 and that across his two KDP and two ACX accounts (personal and LLC), plus aggregates like Draft2Digital and IngramSpark and back-end affiliate income from his email list, he made over $190,000 from self-publishing in 2019; he adds that he also earns a few thousand a month from real estate and stocks and teaches on YouTube. He contrasts self-publishing with traditional publishing: you keep far more royalty (his example: roughly $2 per sale on a $2.99 book versus 10–20 cents traditionally), publish immediately instead of waiting years, and keep full control — and non-writers can do it by outsourcing, since the marketing strategy is identical. The course is aimed at people wanting a passive income business (a published book is ‘real estate’ on Amazon that sells while you sleep), aspiring bestsellers, existing business owners who can use a book as a credibility-building business card, people who want a book as a launchpad into coaching, services, or speaking, and pen-name publishers. The money model is Amazon keyword research: find topics with high search volume and low competition, optimize the title for those keywords, and show up organically or via Amazon ads. On costs, he estimates about $500 per book if you write it yourself and up to roughly $1,400 if you outsource everything at premium quality, with cheaper alternatives at each step and a free low-content route for tight budgets — though he notes high-content books generally earn higher returns. He stresses this is not a get-rich-quick scheme, says ROI typically takes a couple of months to a year, and notes one book can be extended into bundles, aggregates, and audiobooks.

Key takeaways

• Self-publishing beats traditional publishing on royalty share (his example: ~$2 vs 10–20 cents on a $2.99 book), speed, and creative control.
• The model runs on Amazon keyword research: high-search, low-competition topics with keyword-optimized titles, sold organically or with ads.
• You don’t have to write the books — outsourcing production is his own approach, and the marketing process is the same either way.
• Budget roughly $500 per book writing it yourself, up to about $1,400 fully outsourced at premium quality; low-content books are the low-cost entry route.
• A book is a durable asset and a credibility tool: it keeps selling, and can feed bundles, audiobooks, aggregates, an email list, and client businesses.

Episode details: published March 11, 2020 · 14:57 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.

← Previous: I’m Creating a Free Step-By-Step Self-Publishing Course · Next: How Long Should a Self-Published Book Be | Free Self-Publishing Course | Video #2 →

All Sean Dollwet videos · Sean Dollwet profile · Sean Dollwet on YouTube