10 PASSIVE INCOME FOR WRITERS // passive income opportunities that authors/writers can consider

this is a topic i have been thinking about a lot as i get closer to maternity leave i'm a few months away now like four months away this shirt is so not made for a baby bump it doesn't really fit but just go with it okay because look what it says so we're making it work anyway what was i trying to say as i've been thinking about maternity leave and how it'll go this idea of passive income has definitely been on my mind and i have a feeling that it's on other writers minds as well if my last video on my 12 income streams as an author is any indication i would say that yes this is something we all kind of think about so really quick there's two things that i want to share before i get into these 10 different i think i have 10 different passive income streams that i want to share with you guys some of them i do already and i've talked about a little but i want to talk about them more and why they're passive and how to make them passive but then also there are some that i haven't tried or at least not yet we'll get into that in a second but first i think it's kind of important that i actually say what passive income is because i was looking on the internet when i was kind of getting ready for this video kind of like brainstorming how what exactly i wanted to share which is what i do for most videos i'm like how do i say this in a helpful way and make sure that i've covered everything so the one thing that i noticed almost right away is that i define passive income very differently than most of the places that i found online and on top of that there's not that much out there for writers specifically you know no shade to them because it means different things to different people but to me passive means you are not actively doing it you're not going to a nine-to-five job and putting in the hours to get the money like you might you will most likely have put in a ton of time and invested a ton of energy because i'm not saying that passive income is bad quality it still should be high high quality really good stuff but at a certain point after you've created this awesome thing or we'll talk about more all the different things that it could be but at a certain point you don't continue to be active on it and that to me is the difference so my definition in particular is really unique because as i'm going into maternity leave to me passive income means something that is still going to be making me money while i am not working at all that's my definition okay so i'm gonna share some things that you could still be semi-active while you have them also being passive income if that makes sense let's just get into it so books are my absolute favorite example of passive income don't worry i have a lot more examples but this one has to come first because it is just the perfect perfect example of what i mean by a high quality item that you don't have to do anything on after a certain point so for example you might spend months or even years upon years writing something like this and making it the absolute best it can be right but at a certain point the book is published and once it's published it can start making money passively without the author doing anything like i said at the beginning you could technically be semi-active with this one because you could be marketing your book you could be still talking about it which i mean i would if you can but i'm going to use my maternity leave example as like my filter for all these things because if and when when i go on maternity leave these books will still be making me money and i know this from experience because unfortunately in the past i've had to completely step back unexpectedly life has happened and it's been really really hard and these books still made me money because of you guys and i am so so incredibly grateful for you guys like you don't even know how much it means to me this is supposed to be like a happy video get it together what i'm trying to say is that books are a perfect example of passive income because at a certain point you're no longer actively writing and editing them basically other people by being excited about a story are going to sell it for you and they can come and find it on a print on demand company like amazon for example kindle direct publishing which is owned by amazon and this company sells the book for you and gives you the royalties okay so that is books but if you are already an author if you're published you know that the average royalty per book meaning the money you make per book at least for an indie author is like less than three dollars i did this video right here about how many books it would take to make 50k 50 000 which you know would be an awesome income and you can watch that if you wanna see the fun breakdown i'll link that below as well but let's just say that if you've been around the block then you know that it's really really hard to solely make money from books and still make a good income it's not impossible i have made more money this year from books than ever before and i think every time you add a new book you are giving yourself an opportunity to basically reach more readers who will then read through your backlist and it's just the income continues to grow right it's a snowball effect so it's not impossible but there is that facebook group for example called 20 books to 50k which is a simple way of saying it's going to take more than one book so if you're starting out and you don't have that many books out even if you have like five to ten books out you're probably still going to want other streams of income so let's talk about that next so my second passive income stream that i want to share would be youtube and obviously we're here you know what youtube is we're here hanging out on it it might sound strange because making a youtube video is very very active at first like i take time to plan out the videos do the research for them recording obviously takes time and then editing takes like five times as long as recording did and then on top of that you have to upload the video you know put in the seo the thumbnail creation the title everything that goes into it and then of course publish it and answer comments so i spend on average anywhere between like 10 to 20 hours on a youtube video i'm pretty detailed i really really like creating videos and it's pretty active right but once a video is out you'll have to be monetized so that you can put ads on it and all that good stuff but once a video is out it is now passive income if it's making you any income that's fully passive you could be doing nothing and the youtube algorithm is promoting this video telling people about it getting people to watch it and therefore putting money in your pocket like i have videos from years ago like uploading to kdp which is one of my top videos still to this day and i haven't touched it in years and it's still making me money every single month youtube is an evergreen platform unlike i don't know say instagram where you put up a post and then it just like slowly fades into non-existence and nobody ever sees it again but youtube because it's a search engine people can continue to find helpful content for years and years after you've put it out there the third passive income stream that i'm actually not that good at but i do have a tiny tiny bit of experience in it is affiliate income and i'll explain in a second why i could be a lot better but as far as affiliate income i have exactly three companies that i'm an affiliate for and i think you guys all know at this point what an affiliate is right but it's somebody who you're promoting somebody else's product and you're saying that hopefully you love it and you back it and then you get a percentage for promoting it it's as easy as it sounds like all three of mine i link below all of my youtube videos and i don't really do anything else like every once in a while i'll talk about them just because i want to and i have like a reason to but for the most part i don't do anything and i get affiliate income so for example i'm an affiliate for the publish and thrive course which is a self-publishing course that i absolutely love took it years ago and that's just like below all my videos and i pretty much don't do anything at all except that i talk about it maybe once or twice on instagram before the course goes live that's it so i guess that's semi-active but let's use my next two affiliate ones as better examples because the second one is epidemic sound which is just the platform where i get all of my music for like you know underneath these videos or when i'm doing fun b-roll and i'm not an official affiliate for them or anything but they do have a link that i put below all my videos where basically if somebody clicks that link to check them out i get a free month which is awesome and then the third company where i'm an affiliate right now is through my good friend and my co-author mandy lynn because she actually has a whole shop and she sells things like her book launch planner hold on oh my gosh i almost fell over right here and i'm an affiliate for this obviously but also probably my favorite product which i just got in the mail actually is her stickers so we're gonna just show you oh my gosh i love it so here is um honestly probably my favorite one she's done yet she creates bullet journal stickers like this which i am a huge fan of and i'm about to set up my bullet journal but also writing stickers i got this for writing coming up this is a good example of how affiliates should be something you believe in and you want to work with them anyway like i love everything that i'm an affiliate for but let me explain why i'm not like the greatest and i could be better at being an affiliate not for those guys because i hope i'm a good affiliate for them and i try really hard but more so there's so many other things that i could be an affiliate for and i have applied to amazon's program like three times and i keep getting rejected which is super annoying because there's so many things that i talk about in these videos like my camera that i'm filming on i've talked about that or books that i'm enjoying reading or you name it and i could be getting affiliate income and whenever you're talking about any product really that's not yours there's an opportunity there to maybe get affiliate income and the problem is that amazon keeps rejecting me but i've recently found out that there are other great companies that also offer affiliate programs so i'm currently looking into it if you want to know more about that let me know also just comment below and let everybody else watching know because i think we could all learn from each other being an affiliate is literally the most passive passive income ever because you're just being excited about something you were already excited about and already going to talk about and then you're making money off of it it's that easy let's come back to my desk to look at my notes because we're about to get into some income streams that i don't have but this next one is another passive income stream that i do have and it's newer to me but i love it and i kind of hinted at it already because i've got this on but that is my merch store and so let me show you another example that just happened to come in the mail today so pretty there we go this is a phone case and then obviously i have a t-shirt no it got the wrong size pregnancy brain it's so real this is making me really sad i was so excited for this shoot well maybe i'll have to do a giveaway on instagram now come follow me on instagram i've got definitely some other giveaways that i wanted to do these coming months for my book releases so now here's another one but anyway now i'm all sad and distracted from my whole point here which was merch stores they are very similar to print on demand with books where you create a product and you put it in a store but it's technically somebody else's store still like they are making the product for you and so you don't have to do the work of creating it or mailing it which oh my goodness those two things can take a lot of time and those would obviously be very active income so having a merch store becomes passive income where you spend time creating a beautiful product that you absolutely love which i've bought way too much of but then you don't do anything actively after that besides maybe promote it and tell people about it i use spring and i am not going to pretend to be an expert i actually did a lot a lot of research i looked into there's also redbubble i think amazon has a store as well like you can actually create a store on amazon and it's on my to-do list to eventually set that up and oh my gosh there's so many more i can't think of them right now because pregnancy brain but do your research if this intrigues you because they offer like every store is a little bit different but they usually will offer obviously t-shirts and usually mugs and like phone cases as well as stickers hold on i do oh my gosh i also got a sticker this was going to be one of my giveaways but i kind of also want to keep it and hold up i have so much merch i've obviously been spending a lot of merch income putting it back into my own merch store so i can have it which is not really the best use of money but i just love it so much so stickers pen pouch so those are just some examples but obviously every merch store is going to be a little different so you can do your research figure out what type of products you enjoy because that's going to help you create something beautiful as well like if you want to wear your own stuff and buy your own stuff that's a good sign that you're making a good product and it's not just you trying to scam people out of money because that is not at all not at all what i mean when i say passive income i feel like passive income sometimes gets compared to sort of scammy income or people think of it as not as good and it should still be good it should still be awesome it's just that you don't have to actively work on it after you finish okay we're on number five now in this next one i actually let me show you have been working on it behind the scenes uh i have more gear here which i've just kind of been keeping in the background but that is courses horses obviously i think you guys know what those are but they could be about so many different things but usually it's an area that you have expertise in and so this is much more high scale than anything that i've done before but i did technically create a small course i call it kind of like a mini course on instagram for authors as well in the past and i put that over on my patreon page and it's just lived there it's two and a half hour it was a live stream that i put together where i created things that i wanted to teach on specifically like how to write captions and hashtags and how to take good pictures and so on and so forth things to do with instagram if you want to go over to patreon it's always linked below but a course can be mini like that or it could be a big production like this setup that i've got going on here which you will hear more about in the future i'm not quite ready to share just yet but once again hopefully you are putting a lot a lot a lot of effort into making the highest quality possible and yet once you complete that product or in this case the course you are done you are making passive income and this is something that i hope to be having over maternity leave we'll see how long it takes i'm not going to make any promises just yet and i hope to be able to give you some examples in the future if you want to know more let me know in the comments okay this next one i actually have done as well and so i thought i'd show you these are two separate things but i'm gonna say first of all notebooks but then second of all workbooks and so i don't know this is technically i wrote this notebook is for planning my novel but if you look on the inside it's technically a workbook and so it gives you this is me i was using it for invisible souls and you can outline it and then you have um word sprint trackers and things like this and here tbr books read character profiles outlining checklists things like that so again i had a passion for this particular thing i don't know if i would make notebooks again in the future it's not that they're not easy to do because honestly they are but i don't want to do something unless i have a passion for it so this was a passion project for sure and i don't know if it falls under notebooks that's more like line stuff like what i have there's like a couple notebook pages in the back that are just lined pages um and if it was like really cute usually you'd probably do spiral bound if you're going to figure out how to do those like an actual notebook notebook oh that's not always true you could you could do so many things workbooks are a different breed but very very similar in how you would maybe design them and come up with them and those two things are really really fun for writers specifically the next one on my list is audiobooks and once again i have actually dabbled in this and so i do have a tiny bit of experience and i wanted to talk about it because people ask me about it and i have done this one video on audiobooks but i feel like i don't know i'm kind of getting my feet under me still i get people messaging me and saying why haven't you done an audio book for the rest of the series and here's the issue it's still passive income to make an audio book because once it's out there just like a regular book just like everything else we've talked about it's done and you don't have to do anything else but oh my word the workload involved on something like this it's the same amount of work as like writing the book itself keep in mind as i say this that i'm not really a fan of audiobooks i know a lot of people are but i personally like to hold books in my hands so it was not enjoyable for me at all to work on the audiobook i did not enjoy it on top of that besides the time commitment it was also a huge huge financial investment and i talked about that in the video which again i'll link below because making an audio book is expensive now keep in mind there is a royalty share option and someday i think it'd be really fun maybe maybe i'll do this over maternity leave i have a lot of things that i would like to do but we'll see maybe i will begin that process for other books of mine and try royalty shares where you partner with a narrator you both put the work in and then you both begin to make money when the book sells because i spent this is the short version over a thousand dollars on the audiobook for the stolen kingdom and while i have sold almost 200 i still haven't made my money back the royalties for an audiobook are super super super tiny i don't like it i do not and i don't know how to market it let's be real that's a field that i could also get better at and maybe someday i will but i just haven't really had the passion for it so if you have a passion for making audiobooks or even better if you happen to be a writer who's also really good at say the technical side and you have maybe the gear and you can record someone else's book for them if you are good at being a voice actor as well this could open up a really really cool avenue for passive income for you because you could do royalty share with other authors and make money off of other authors books as well okay we have two left on our list for passive income streams for writers the ninth passive income stream is one that i have not actually touched at all i mean i think i was on a podcast like once but anyway it's podcasting and podcasting from what i gather is very similar to youtube where you are you know investing a lot of time planning the content and then creating the content but then once that content is made as far as i understand just like youtube you can advertise there and make money from advertising as people continue to listen into what is basically evergreen content that they still want to listen to long after you've finished making it i don't know if i would ever do podcasting i love dabbling and things don't get me wrong i like trying new things but i do think you have to have a passion for things if they're going to stick so like i said with the notebooks like that was a one-time thing i don't really have a passion for that i have a passion for so many other things and there's only enough time in the day so i would rather put my energy into making more books and making more youtube videos because i love those things but if you love creating podcasts if you love creating content that way where you don't have to be on camera you can share content and you enjoy talking about things that could be a fantastic passive income stream for you as a writer i honestly think more people should podcast because i could see that industry just blowing up it already kind of is but like even more so there's not that much out there for writers from what i gathered and then the last one but keep in mind i do have also a bonus passive income stream but the 10th pass of income stream for writers that i wanted to share with you is digital products and i know it sounds like books and the other things we have been talking about but it's different let me show you this is my website and i'm going to actually show you a couple examples of digital products i'm going to go to my whole store and if i hover over this tab down here past the notebooks and planners is the printables and downloads and that is more what i'm talking about is digital products they don't really fall into a box anywhere else but they can be really valuable and they're also a one-time creation aka passive income so for example i have that 50 000 word count tracker that i created originally for that notebook that i showed you but then i just took that one page i was like let's make it like just a one page option so you don't have to get the whole notebook and you can just print this out or another favorite of mine which took a little bit more work but again once i made it it was done and that is this story bible template this one i'm gonna click on it to see if i can show you yeah if you look at the close-up on the right here was my actual real-life story bible and back when i called it princesses and castles that's the stolen kingdom series in case you're wondering if you're newer here and then there's like a table of contents that you can see in there and it has templates for the characters world building notes outlining sections sections for important dates and so on so it's like a template where you can fill in everything that you need to fill in and it's like a guided thing so it's sort of like making one of those workbooks but online and keeping it digital and offering them something that they can just print out and then they could get hold on omg so full this is my story bible filled out so no it won't be this thick when you get it it's just a template and then you fill in all the other stuff it's probably only like 15 or 20 pages i don't even know there you go i have to add that in at some point so those are the 10 passive income streams but like i said i have a bonus passive income stream to share with you let me show you guys penny right now you are seriously the cutest and i love you so much okay all right focus bethany before i share with you the bonus passive income stream let me just say there's this quote that the average millionaire has seven income streams so if you ever have somebody coming around you know giving you a hard time because you don't just want to write the books which i mean if if you do that's totally fine too but like if you want other streams of income never let anybody make you feel bad for that because not only is it an amazing amazing creative outlet and we do need more than one thing in our lives like we are built to be creative we are all very unique individuals nobody's going to be exactly the same so if you ever have anybody giving you crap for wanting to explore other income streams whether they're active or passive don't even worry about it because it's none of their business you do you if you are excited about passive income streams then i would definitely encourage you to explore them i will link everything i've talked about in the description box below like always and i just want to encourage you not only is it really really fun to create all of these things that i've talked about like i at least personally love it but on top of that you get to share something that you poured your heart into and that you're so proud of and then continue to make money from it for potentially a very long time so again filtering all of this through my own experience as i'm about to go on maternity leave in a few months i'm just so thankful that i've gotten a chance to create so many different things and that i can continue during maternity leave to make just as much or possibly even more money than i have in the past years in my career because as i've built these things up i have just layered on more and more potential income streams and so the last one i'm going to say that it starts out very active and i if you're going to even consider this last bonus income stream i would keep it active when you start but if you are pouring into it making something super valuable eventually it can start to become passive income and that is patreon let me try to explain what i mean by what i personally think that it's better to start out active and then eventually it can become passive and that is the patreon is something that some people view it as like a a tip jar i mean in a way they kind of created it that way but i personally believe that you also need to give value and so for me when i started out i was super super super active on patreon and whenever i created a tear i tried to make it a tier where i knew that i was giving back value i spent months upon months upon months creating resource libraries so i now have a resource library in one of the smaller tiers and that tier took me honestly i still work on it sometimes but i think it took like a full year to really build it up and then i continued to add to it i added all of those downloadables that you saw there as well as a few other things and i think there's like 600 links as of recording this video and i still add to it but it's just a library of information that helped me get to where i am today as i am going into maternity leave i'm trying to figure out i think i've talked to you guys about this before how i can make the rest of it passive so that it still has value and so that's my goal that's my heart personally let me know in the comments if you agree and if you appreciate when creators do that because i do i think it's really important and when other people do that and i see that they've put effort into their stuff that makes me be like i absolutely want to support you i'm sidetracked again by this cutie like seriously this is what i'm looking at as i'm talking to you guys i don't even know how i focus also i promised myself ice cream and the baby really really really wants ice cream like right now so i'm gonna end this video but i hope you liked it i hope you give it a thumbs up if it was helpful for you share in the comments if anything surprised you that you didn't think of because i would love to know and again if you ever have haters just remember that everybody who's actually going someplace has a hater the only person whose opinion matters when it comes to passive income and whether it's the right fit or not is yours so don't worry about what other people think do get feedback from people you trust to make sure that you're you know creating a valuable product like we talked about but in the end if you know you're bringing value that's what matters and people are gonna see that so i hope this encouraged you and i'll talk to you guys again very soon bye [Music] you

Channel: Bethany Atazadeh - YA Fantasy Author

Views: 23,233

Keywords: how to write a novel, bethany atazadeh, self publishing, how to write a book, writing advice, authortube, authortuber, writing a fantasy novel, writing fantasy, how to make passive income, passive income ideas, passive income, passive income ideas for writers, passive income for authors, passive income for writers, passive income 2021, passive income for creators, passive income streams, passive income streams for writers, author income, author money

Id: NKMSAcESZBo

Length: 26min 47sec (1607 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 01 2021