Post 1: The Day Jeremy Clarkson Became My Co-worker
So I am back in South Africa. Been back for 3 months. Thing is, I didn’t care much for the job I had on the other side of the world. The money was good and I very much enjoyed living there but the job...well it was slowly killing me. Just woke up one day and it hit me, I am miserable. Went into work, had no passion, clients starting realizing and telling on me. Snitches. Anyway, the boss called me in and told me to improve or they’d sent me packing. I looked that bastard square in the eyes, and with Patrick’s stories of F-You Money ringing in my ear (and my own stories of F-You Just Plain), I told him to go ahead. Fire me. Put me out of misery. Set me free.
Anyway, long story short, here I am. Here I am. And I’m determined to do it right this time round. No distractions. No more f*cking around. But how? How do I get what I want? I have been thinking about it since before I could think and I am yet to find a way. How do I get that which I want it more than I want Taylor Swift? Yes, yes, I know, her music, but, you know, she’s really pretty. So sod off. But, anyway, what is it that I want so much that I would even turn away Jennifer Lawrence if it meant that I could get it? Well, my freedom.
There is nothing I value more in life than knowing my time is mine. I can do with it as I please. Wherever I please. Whenever I please. I get a hard on just thinking about it. But that’s just it. I don’t want to think about it anymore. Thinking has never done anyone any good. Thinking has given us atom bombs and Marxism. Too much thinking has given us SJWs. And I don’t mean the good kind of SJW. No, I mean the Millennial kind. Thinking is for the birds and I have no more use for it. I don’t want to think. I want to have.
It all.
And there is only one way to gain my freedom. It’s not pretty, but I am going to have to go ahead and get rich. I know, I know, it is so crass and vulgar but I don’t have a choice. Time is freedom and time costs money. You go to work, you sacrifice your time and get paid in return. You quit, or beg to be fired, and you keep your time but you sacrifice the pay. I am an atheist. I don’t believe in making sacrifices. I want to have my cake and eat it.
But how?
Well, I tried the JSE. It’s not a bad place. I could not have found myself in a more welcoming atmosphere. But again, time. The JSE was a bit short on that. It asked me to hand over some patience, the currency of time, and I was almost all spent out. No, thank you, JSE, close but no cigar. So I had to ask myself, if I leave the tower of Babylon, where could I go? Well, I spun in a circle and went in the direction I ended up facing. I headed into the wild west.
This was roughly 6 months ago, in case you’re wondering.
It was a long journey with not much to tell about. But when I finally got there I found these four very rich fellows on the TV box. Well, they were supposed to be on the TV box, but I found them, much to the dismay of the fat cats who run said TV box, on the Internet. But I digress. These four fellows sat on four chairs and brought in smart people with stupid ideas. These people would pitch said ideas in front of these four fellows and the four fellows would decide if they want to invest in the stupid idea. The answer was usually no. Sometimes, however, a stupid person with a smart idea would come in and the four fellows would fight each other to throw their money at the stupid person with the smart idea and buy up 20%, 30%, 40% or sometimes even 50% of the stupid person’s company.
I couldn’t help but watch and think, How nice that must be? You give someone a lot of money and they do all the hard work of getting the company of ground and then you sell out later for a one thousand gazillion billion percent return. I want to do that. So I started looking at turning myself into an angel. I swooped high and low looking for someone at whom to throw my ex-JSE money. I knew there was a lot of risk involved, it was the wild west after all, but I promised myself that I would invest my last bit of patience wisely and take my time before signing on the dotted line and handing over a six figure ( six, the number of the devil) sum to any old fool. Turned out that I had less patience in the bank than I thought and I soon ran out of it. Now some dude in Cape Town is sitting with a lot of my money. I went in too quick and I came out to slow. Oh well, what are you going to do?
It was a very risky thing I did but I knew that going in. I had to make a choice and bite the bullet. Eleanor Roosevelt apparently once said that you should do one thing a day that scares you. Well, that’s what I did, something scary. Proper scary. So scary that I had to throw my pants away that day. But it is not all doom and gloom. To, kind of, make sure that I get my six figure sum back I had it put into the contract that the dude from Cape Town needs to start paying me back a certain four figure sum for a two figure period of months starting after a one figure period of said months. So as long as the business does not fall flat on its ass in that two figure period of time, I will get my money back.
It has provided me with some passive income while I get myself onto the straight and narrow. It isn’t much, but it’s enough to cover my rent and put food in my belly with some spare change left over to fill up my car. But it is not enough. It is not it all, and it is all that I want. So while the dude in Cape Town got cracking on with his thing, I needed to get cracking on with my own thing. I needed to increase my passive income.
But how?
Well, I thought I would try my hand at writing. How hard could it be? As hard as Jacob Zuma around Dudu Myeni, that’s how hard. And what made it so hard was again patience. I was all spent out after my life as an angel. I just didn’t have the patience to sit there the whole day rewriting and then writing again one little sentence until it was perfect. Money moves fast and I needed to keep up. I cracked out two novels, and I am being very cavalier with that word right now, in the space of six months. One was 60,000 words and the other 90,000, and they were both completely and utterly sh*t.
It was not the sh*ttyniss of my novels that was the biggest problem, though. The biggest problem was getting past the gatekeepers who refer to themselves as literary agents. Without them, you cannot gain entrance into the halls where the vultures known as publishers roam. So what to do? I spent some time conversing with the oracle they call Google and came up with a plan. I would self-publish through Amazon. But publish what? My stories were no good. Then it hit me like a ton of bricks right between the legs. I should make other people write the stories and then I just buy the rights from them.
It was/is a perfect plan. But what would I make them write? It was a problem I only had to think of for the shortest of whiles. Go for the lowest common denominator. Sex sells. Write erotica. So I went on the Internet and posted a position for a freelance writing position. You write me a story and I buy it from you. Now, I am not going to lie, I screwed them over with the price. I’m not proud of it, but it’s just how it is. Only the brave survive in the world of entrepreneurship and I was feeling brave enough to save the world. Unfortunately, however, you get what you pay for, and I got even worse sh*t than my own. Of the ten or so submissions I got, only one was half-decent. So I paid the person, made them sign over their time to me, and got down to it. I went through the thing and edited and rewrote it as best I could, marginally improving its quality.
I then started reaching out to graphic designers to hear what they will pay me to design the book cover and very quickly told them all to go make love with themselves. I headed back to the oracle and quickly found a website where you could design your own professional, well professional enough, looking book cover. With that sorted, I uploaded the book to Amazon and signed it up to their Kindle Select program. I am not going to go into too much detail as to what Kindle Select is, save for telling you about a feature it has where you can give your book away for free for five days. Now why on God’s green earth would I give it away for free you might be wondering. The answer is marketing.
I do not have money for marketing. It’s just a trade-off. I give up the income I would make from the sale, but save the money I do not have on marketing. If your book is free, you can also upload it up to some websites which will feature your book and list it in their mailing lists of thousands of people. It was a no-brainer. Or at least let’s hope so.
Yesterday was the first day of my free book promotion and I only moved seven books. It is not the greatest of starts but it is better than nothing. And better than nothing is what I am going to leave you with for the time being. Talk soon.
P.S. This thread is not just for me to babble on. I hope you will join the discussion and give me some words of wisdom as I try and build up my publishing empire. I am sure there are more than a few successful entrepreneurs on here who have succeeded in starting up a business or two. I would love your advice and guidance.
