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Comment by onion2k | Hacker News Reader

A few examples of Fastlane projects: write a book (lots of work, but then it makes money forever without you having to put in more work), make an invention (lots of work, but then you get royalties for a long time).

The median average annual earnings for an author in the UK is about £12,330 ($20,300). With the ease of self-publishing platforms like Kindle and the proliferation of promotions and sales at traditional booksellers (bookshops, supermarkets, etc) that figure is falling. If you want to be financially wealthy writing a book is a really bad way to go about it.

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Few people that get wealthy off books do so from the book sale royalties.

They sell seminars, keynote talks, services etc, it is a form of lead generation and an expert positioning tool.

Yet that is the exact opposite of the "Fastlane", because your seminars are not detached from your time. Sure, it could turn out to be good good hustle income, but he's not saying to do this as your end point.

There is a cap on how many hours anyone can work in a day/year. If you are charging hourly for your time, you are capped.

If you want to make it more Fastlane, you'd turn it into a sellable seminar video series that can be created infrequently and sold forever via memberships, DVDs, etc.

Note that I'm not for or against books or seminars. Not my area of expertise. I'm just stating that a lot of people in this thread are misunderstanding what MJ means by Fastlane.

The average technical book (for instance) sells 2000 copies. That's not going to provide a whole lot of lead generation for most authors.

By your logic, few people get wealthy off their businesses, so hey, don't start a business.

The reality is you have to figure out what is going to sell. I have no interest in writing books, but if I did, and I wanted to make money. You can bet it's not going to be a technical book. I'll be going after a market that is large and hot, think books like Harry Porter or 50 shades of gray.

Make no mistake about it, the business doesn't start until the book is done, the business is not writing the book but selling the book. Most authors just write and then sit and hope it get's popular. You have to hustle and push and sell and sell, so it get's popular.

I watched MJ write this book, he mentioned he was going to write it on his forum, then he did. Did he make any money? Nope! Then he got into marketing/sales mode and pushed it, and it sold. Got lot's of review on amazon and sales took off, I don't know his numbers but I betcha it's much much larger than your average technical books.

I won't be surprised if he is well into the 5 digits. He also self published, so he's collecting pretty much most of the income. How did I reach 10k? 4 hour workweek has sold about 1,350,000 copies and has almost ~3k reviews, amazon MJ's book has a little bit 1/6th ~500+ reviews on amazon. They both have 4.5/5 stars.

Not to mention how few books remain in print or sell new after only two or three years.

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