How To Write And Sell Simple Information For Fun and Profit by Bob Bly, A Review
As I wrote in the last post, most writers never expand their boundaries. You’ll be a fiction writer and only write novels, or a copywriter who only writes flyers and sales letters. It doesn’t have to be this way.
Writing is the technical skill of putting words in an order which elicits a reaction. If you can create one reaction in a person, then you can create a whole plethora of reactions.
Most people never get exposed to that idea though, and even when they do, how many times have you heard, “I don’t know what to write?” How many times have you said that to yourself?
How To Write And Sell Simple Information For Fun and Profit by Bob Bly is a great book filled with simple information that you can use to create a wide range of money making projects.
The Good Parts
Firstly, a throw-away line in How to Write And Sell Simple Information For Fun and Profit was a wake-up call for me. It was about publishing rights. It said that you should only ever sell first-use rights for freelance clients. Until the point that I read that, I’d never even thought about my work for freelance clients as my own intellectual property. I just sold exclusive rights forever to my client without charging them for that privilege or anything.
Immediately, I spend a few hours going through and changing my agreements. This has netted me more money per order (clients have to pay extra for exclusive, forever rights) and increased my intellectual property “estate.” Now, the thousands of words I write per day belong to me, and can be used elsewhere when I need them to.
The subject of rights is one which is pretty extensive and exhaustive once you get into it, so I’ll talk about it more in another article. Suffice to say though, that one line has meant that the purchase of the book paid for itself thousands of times over.
Secondly, the book contains a list of projects for you to try. Some will take a lot of effort and some won’t. Some will apply to your work, and some won’t. For instance, selling seminars and having a member site with all your materials is probably not an option for a writer starting off.
Bob Bly’s How To Write And Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit Contents Page
But even with the projects that won’t be relevant, you can still get information on building a website, running a subscription site, writing books and writing articles. Any one of those could be your main source of income, so How To Write And Sell Simple Information For Fun and Profit is useful in both building a career and for making side-project money.
Thirdly, (and we’ll come back to this in the negatives section,) Bob Bly really shows you how you can write a seemingly-honest how-to book, and chock it full of sales pitches. For every chapter, he’ll have several links to either his websites/businesses or a business by a friend of his. Each chapter goes something like this:
- You want to make money? Try an X website.
- An X Website is great because you’ll make loads of money. My friend Billy made ten million writing about X’es in three months!
- Here’s how to do it.
- Go to my site if you need more information on X.
A lot of negative reviews on Amazon and around the web focus on this as a negative, but if you’re not looking to win a Nobel Prize for morality, any sales material is valuable for the lessons you learn from it.
The Bad Bits
I’ll talk about the above first. Make no mistake, half of this book is not-so-concealed sales pitches. Bob Bly is a copywriter, and How To Write And Sell Simple Information For Fun and Profit is a sales pitch for his various schemes. To combat this, skim the bits where he tells you to check out his friend’s website or his member’s only site.
Secondly, How To Write And Sell Simple Information For Fun And Profit is what it says it is – it’s simple information. You aren’t going to get in-depth information from this book. You aren’t going to read this book and suddenly make thousands over-night. The testimonials all say that this $10 book will add six figures to your income straight away. It won’t. It’s simple information. That said, following simple information is all you need, and it will add value when you work on it. Like all books though, you do have to work on it.
Thirdly, testimonials. They take up pages and pages of the book. I’ve already bought it, god-damn-it. There’s absolutely no need for this, except to make the book look more substantial in terms of page count, which is a stupid (and costly) reason to add pages.
Fourthly, I guess I should address the fact that you can find a lot of this information on the internet for free. That’s a common objection that I’ve seen in online reviews of How To Write And Sell Simple Information For Fun and Profit.
I don’t really agree with that though – I paid for the information in book form because I wanted it in book form. You can find everything for free on the internet in terms of information, but there’s an opportunity cost to spending hundreds of hours tracking things down.
In How To Write And Sell Simple Information For Fun And Profit, you have a list of possible writing projects to try that won’t cost you much but could potentially bring you in a lot of money.
Final Thoughts
I read this book a couple of months back. That was before I designed this site. So when I thought about creating case studies and examples for JamieMcSloy.co.uk, I realised that How To Write And Sell Simple Information For Fun And Profit is where I should start.
Each chapter is basically a quick summary of a range of portfolio projects for a writer. If in doubt, I could (and you can) spend a month going through each chapter and creating an example of it.
This will build you a massive portfolio of writing really quickly, and it’ll be better than that two-year internship at a local newspaper where you make coffee in exchange for getting to put “experience in a writing environment” on your CV.
If you want to get a hold of Bob Bly’s How To Write And Sell Simple Information For Fun and Profit , and it’s probably a good idea to, you can get it from the following Amazon links:
How to Write & Sell Simple Information for Fun & Profit: Your Guide to Writing & Publishing Books, e-Books, Articles, Special Reports, Audio Programs, DVDs, & Other How-To Content in the United Kingdom
How to Write & Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit: Your Guide to Writing and Publishing Books, E-Books, Articles, Special Reports, Audio Programs, DVDs, and Other How-To Content in the United States
