I am a full time leather craftsman who has created an income stream out of writing about leather crafting. At the same time, I continue making a living crafting leather products for customers.
Purpose of this post
The purpose of penning this post is to remind myself of the proper expectations of the road ahead, in expanding this income stream. The current stream was solidly built on sharing my years of experience in crafting leather products.
Definition of a book
Cutting to the chase, with guidance from a mentor or a publisher, I could have published paper books or ebooks with these specific titles:
- Leather crafting for hobbyists
- History of belt trends
- 20 years of Gucci belts
- etc etc.
Admittedly, the idea of writing books, together with the idea of seeing them on bookshelves in major book stores, massages the ego a great deal. But considering my personal pattern of information consumption, which I must assume to be just as average as 90% of the world population’s patterns, books in the traditional sense is likely to be a disaster, monetising-wise. Hence, I had to rethink the idea of authorship.
Challenging the definition of a book has the same undertones as challenging how incomes are made. I wouldn’t have sought an alternative income stream outside of exchanging my crafting for money if I hadn’t questioned the institution of work.
Network of blogs
It wasn’t with intent that books I wrote were presented in the form of a network of blogs, and their material are cross linked to each other.
I really only made the connection that I have written a series of books when an entrepreneurial friend of mine asked if I have ever contemplated writing one.
“Have you thought about writing a book?”
“Yups. But I don’t know what to write about… waaiiit a minute…”
On hindsight, this manner of publishing rides the patterns of how one generally searches for information online.
Definition of passive income
If one has seen advertisements about making $30,000 from home, I have already done it many times round indeed but not yet, in principle, to the tee.
I do no real marketing and yet new potential customers perpetually land on my websites. If my products and services didn’t require my presence to make them, I would really be making the desired passive income.
But no, my presence is required to make the products which my traffic sees and hence my income is at best partially passive.
Again, the purpose of penning this post is to remind myself of the proper expectations of the road ahead, in expanding this income stream. The current stream was solidly built on sharing my years of experience in crafting leather products but I have to move away from products that require my attention.
Keching 