Frodo: “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.”
Gandalf: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.”
(Scene from Lord of the Rings (Part 1) – ‘The Fellowship Of The Ring’ - 2001)

I’m a successful, full-time, professional writer. Wow. Are you already impressed? Read the rest of this tragedy, of this true story, and find out.

I’m a lousy writer, but I have one reader, who likes what I do, so that’s why I’m successful.

I’m a full-time writer because I don’t have a job. I have nothing else to do. First, I used to scratch the bottom of my bottom full-time, but that soon became a pain in the butt, so I decided that I had to invent something else or try artificial nails. I decided to become a writer. Writing was the only work I could think of that you can do with your eyes closed while you float in the pool with a drink in one hand and a snack in the other.

The last element in that first statement is the ‘professional’. I make money with my writing. Well… to be honest… I’m on my way to make money with my writing. I hope you realise that my former books are in Dutch and the Dutch are world famous for beating the Scots and the Catalans in being tight-fisted. Do you want to know the secret of the Dutch? You have to give me one euro first. No, really, you have to transfer one euro to my bank account or I can’t tell you that secret. You make the transfer while I finish this story, okay?

My first book cost me an investment of 170 euros (a drawing for the cover, printing the manuscript and sending it to all those publishers and agents, costs of registration of my own publishing company and finally the costs of the ISBN). The book is for sale in almost every bookstore on the internet, but… nobody wants to buy it before reading it. The interest for downloading it for free was better: over a thousand people have the book, but so far nobody reacted: no income.

My second book also made a thousand downloads, but I got one reaction from one reader and I received 3 amounts on my bank account: 5 euros 50. The costs were limited to 10 euros for the ISBN, so… things are getting better.

My third book was a success story: in one month 250 people downloaded the book, I got 2 reactions, both very positive, and the total amount of contributions was… 10 euros, exactly the amount of the costs, the registration of the ISBN.

And the best news is: things can only get better. I haven’t done any marketing at all. Even when I do absolutely nothing, the money will keep coming in. I only need some patience and in… let’s see… if things go like they go now… I’ll be a millionaire in 7.633 years. And imagine what this fourth book, full with Campfire-stories, will do to that timetable: things can only get better. I’m not only a successful, full-time, professional writer, but I will become rich too.

I promise you: no secrets. I will confess how I managed to become this successful, so you can use my tricks and do it better. You can learn from my mistakes.

The first mistake I made was to send my manuscript to publishers and agents.

Andrew Matthews, the author of ‘Happiness Now’, my favourite book of all times, sent his manuscript to 60 different publishers. While waiting for the reactions, he already started making his plans: “Probably 50 publishers will reject the book, so it will leave me 10 to pick from. I should study which ones are the best, to make the best choice…” He got… 61 rejections. One publisher wrote him twice. Thanks for not giving up, Andrew. I like your book so much. I read it almost every day.

Imagine you send your work to a publisher or an agent, that work that cost you a whole year of work. Your work is so important to that publisher or agent that first it takes him three months of doing other things before he finally starts to pay attention to it, and all that attention leads to that final result, that short letter that starts with “We are sorry, but…”. That is a lie. They are not sorry. If you feel sorry for someone, you try to help him, you try to make him feel better. If this publisher had been honest, he should have written: “We have experience with other unknown writers: they cost us more and let us earn less, so we’re not interested in your story, unless you become a famous writer first.” He doesn’t tell you how to become famous, he doesn’t tell you how to improve, he doesn’t give you the address of his friend who will help you, no, he only sends you this standard letter and most of the time includes the line that he will not even return your manuscript because he doesn’t want to pay for the costs.  Why would you have ANY respect for someone who treats you like this? Because he makes you believe that he can make money with your work? He can’t. He just told you…

Lawrence Block gave his readers this tip: instead of sending your manuscript to every publisher, send a letter first (or an email, faster and cheaper) in which you write something like “Hello, I’m Ronaldo7. I wrote a great book about <...> and I would like to ask you if your company would be interested in reading it, and, if you like it, publish it.” Lots of publishers don’t want unsolicited manuscripts or rely on the contacts that they have with agents. Reading manuscripts is expensive (They can ask me! I’m without a job! I like to read and I’ll do it for a small fee!). Sending a letter first might save you money for copies and shipment.

Only 2% of all manuscripts that are sent to agents or publishers will make it into print. Only 2% of all those published writers earn more by the hour than the minimum wage of a 17-year-old who works in the supermarket, filling the shelves with the stuff the clients buy. Only 1 out of every 2500 manuscripts gives a reasonable return on all the work that the writer puts into it. Investing your money in lottery tickets will give you a better chance of more income and is hardly any work at all. All this is not the fault of the writer or the publisher; it’s economy, the law of Offer and Demand, the law of Costs and Income and the fact that all those professionals will get paid before they give you what’s left: a 7 to 12% share of all the income is for the only one who is creative in this whole process. Without the creativity of the writers, the whole book industry (and movie business and newspapers and magazines) would be broke in a week, but everyone in the industry earns at least the minimum wage, while most novel writers only share when the industry turned them into a success. Is the success of Harry Potter caused by a) magic, b) the publisher, c) investments in marketing or d) J.K. Rowling who wrote a great story? Are you really sure that you want to be part of that world? Are you still convinced that your story will be the next number one on the New Joke Times Bestseller List? Impossible: my story will be there first, ha, ha!

Once I visited a master class about success. There was a self-made millionaire, not even 30 years old, who got a nice fee for his speech. His message was: “If you want to become a millionaire, like me, you should spend 1/3 of your budget on the product and 2/3 of your budget on marketing.” The man got paid for that. That was the reason why he was a millionaire: he got paid for his words. If I were a speaker there, my message would be: “Everybody spends 2/3 of his budget on marketing, so you should spend 3/4 of your budget on marketing, or 9/10. What would be even better: spend your whole budget on marketing. Sell air (spoken words are a nice example).”

First: nobody invites me to give lectures and nobody pays me for my great advice. That’s my own fault: I give it away for free. Good advice is expensive, as you know. You should therefore not believe me, but you should follow the advice of the millionaire. Everybody else does. We watch TV, see a message and run to the shop to spend our money. People don’t think. They react. Their reaction is the result of the successful brainwash repeat-the-message of successful young millionaires who spend their budget on marketing instead of products. I should not concentrate on the product, the advice, but concentrate on how people start paying me money. That’s professional behaviour. That’s what a professional millionaire would do.

Second thing is that this advice makes it very clear how this successful self-made millionaire thinks about his clients, the consumers who paid their money to make him a self-made millionaire: he despises them from the bottom of his heart. He does not think about them as intelligent people who work hard for their money and would like a decent product for a decent price, no, on the contrary: he sees his clients as stupid cows that only have to be convinced to buy this product, consisting for 67% of air and for 33% of something that others can make for 1/3 of the price. Who cares that the product could have been 67% cheaper, the same product, just without the advertisement and the TV-spots and the effort to build the brand and the sponsoring of all those rich sportsmen and movie stars? Nobody cares. They all want to be cheated. Believe the millionaire. Don’t listen to me.

OK, there is one trick that’s even better than selling air: sell products (like great books and great stories) and let others produce those products for free. Just promise them a share, a small percentage, and keep the rest. People who find out that they’ve just bought air will not do that again. People who bought a story have already spent their money and when the story disappoints them: they will not reread the book but buy another book instead. Two sales of bad books instead of selling one great plot… And the publisher can deduct the costs of marketing from the small percentage he pays to the author, so… They sell air and they spend other people’s money on the marketing. THAT’S doing business.

All they have to do is make sure that they have the rights. When you have the rights, you can do what you want. People can read free books, shareware books and classic masterpieces but they are thrilled to have the latest thriller from the New Joke Times 100. Thank you, Great Marketing.

The system of publishers gives you a chance from 1 out of 2.500 to get a decent payment for your work. The decision to publish or not to publish has nothing to do with quality but everything with other people making money or not with your work. I call that Commercial Censorship. The commercial publishers give the readers less to choose from and threaten them with 5 years prison when they possess copyright protected content without paying for it. The only work they do for 90% of the income is: they filter on what sells and what does not, as if readers can’t decide which books they like. 30% of all released books go almost directly to the dump stores because the publishers made a mistake and the reader is not interested.

All those commercial publishers are in a war with the consumers: publishers (companies in general) want more money, while consumers (readers are consumers) want to pay less. Wars cost money. Every cent the industry invests in protecting themselves is not available for the writers. The latest weapon in the hands of the greedy companies is called: Rights. Publishers claim that they lose millions, billions, because all those movies and music and books are available for free on the internet. Let me make one thing clear: these losses are FICTION! These are IMAGINARY COSTS! Imagine I have 100.000 eBooks on my computer. Each book might cost $10 when I buy it, so the law can accuse me of stealing 1 million from the industry, for not paying for those books. I am without a job. My job was… selling music copyrights of small artists throughout the whole world. I lost my job because of the piracy. I am NOT defending pirates! But it should also be clear that it will take me 7.633 years of patience before I can earn 1 million to buy all those books. If those books were not available for free on the internet, I would never buy them. The industry has not lost one cent. What’s next? Will they sue me when I watch a movie on TV or hear a song on YouTube because now I won’t buy the DVD or the CD? The industry uses fictional sales to put people in jail. The publishers have invented a (legal) system, Commercial Censorship, which makes it possible that 98% of the writers of manuscripts get nothing for their work and 98% of the 2% of published writers are underpaid. The Pirate Bay, on the other hand, helps me to distribute my shareware book for free, to get readers and income, but they are illegal… Who’s the bad guy in this story?

And who’s the bad guy in this story: I herewith confess that I found a free (shareware) book on the internet, with the title ‘Agent to the Stars’, by John Scalzi, I read it, liked it, put John Scalzi on top of my Most Favourite SF Writer list and… never paid the shareware-contribution for that book. But I bought another book of John Scalzi and I give him free publicity here, something I would never have done if I had to pay for his first book. And the unhappy end of this plot is: I had these two eBooks on my computer, but some company made some Windows 10 that started to install itself without my permission and… In the process, I lost these two great eBooks of John Scalzi. The shareware book was no problem: I could easily download it again, for free. The book I bought was another story: I have the right to buy it again. As a consumer, it would have been impossible to start a lawsuit against this big company for the loss of my investment in legally bought eBooks… This is what the law calls Rights. I have the Right to pay and I have the Right to remain silent. I don’t want those rights.

Is it right that the only thing that an author can do with his rights is giving them away to others for a small percentage of uncertain sales?

What is more important: the income of the few who have the right to have all rights, or the education of everyone?

Do you have any idea how many chances free shareware books mean for unemployed and poor people, everywhere in the world, to study and improve their own future?

There is no need to fight the system of copyrights. We can use the alternative of shareware books.

(…space to think… use it well…)

Are you still there? The question was: “Do you write to be read or do you write to be fed?” You wanted to make money with your books and so far all I do is annoy you with a stupid story that can only conclude in you being disappointed and broke. Sorry. I’ll make it up with you. I will give you the last chapter of every book I write (in every book it is exactly the same chapter) and… I give you the right to copy it, use it and even make money with it. Here’s my final chapter:

Shareware book

This is a shareware book. You have permission to download it, to have it, to print it, to copy it, to read it, to send it to others and to use the texts in it. You can do almost anything, except make money with it because that is the right of the author who wrote the text. When you have finished this book, and you liked it, it would be nice if you would send me, the author, your thanks, for instance by transferring 1 (one) euro to bank account <<fill here the number of your own account>>> of <<fill here your own name>>, stating the title of the book, or by forwarding this book to all your friends and giving it a little bit of (free) publicity, or by just sending an email with “thanks” to <<fill here your email address>>. See <<fill here the address of you Facebook page or your website>> for more info.

With a happy ending like mine, you can spend your whole budget on marketing and, if you’re smart (like me), you can think of ways to do a lot of marketing without spending one cent. HA! You thought this was a collection of short stories? It is not. The end of this story is that you’ll become a successful, professional writer who will tell his readers: “I owe it all to Ronaldo7. You should read his great plots.” This is just a creative marketing tool from a broke lousy writer. I told you I write great plots. You didn’t see that one coming…

And there’s more.

Search on the internet for “print your own book” and try to find a deal where you pay less than € 7,50 (US$ 9,00) per copy. Invest some money in printed copies and… give one copy away to a drifter, a tramp, a beggar who sits before the supermarket or the train station with his hand in the air, waiting until the money will drop in. Explain him the truth about money, that you have to earn it, that you have to do something to get it, and you just gave him that opportunity: he can sell your book for € 10,00 (US$ 12,00) so he makes a 25% profit and can use the rest to buy new stock… He’ll contact you and will pay you €7,50 for the next book, and the next and the next. He’ll become your sales agent and will make you a successful professional writer while making money for you and for himself. You give a job, social contacts and a training how to start your own business to a homeless and jobless person on the street. Your novel will solve poverty and unemployment at the same time, and you’ll be read too and even make money with it. Is that a great plot or what?

You don’t even have to take the risk with your own novel. You can sell mine, this one, the Campfire stories. I herewith give you permission to print, distribute and (if you’re homeless) sell this book, under condition that you respect the rules: the Tomorrowland-logo on the cover, sales by homeless jobless people, sales price € 10,00 or US$ 12,00 with 25% margin for the sales agent, you have to email me for the ISBN before you start and promise to report the amount of sales after each trimester via email, so I can publish them on the Facebook-page of this book to give confidence to everyone that this really works. You can make money with my work. You’re not only my reader, but you’ll become my publisher, my business partner and my friend. Working together on this project will lower our costs and give better exposure.

Together we can solve unemployment and poverty in the world while we give mankind education in return. This is what Nelson Mandela tried to explain us, but we didn’t listen because we were more interested in the news of terrorist attacks and police of Milwaukee shooting at the people they’d sworn to serve and protect. Lord Nelson tried to tell us: there is another way. Violence is not the solution. We have to do it together. They gave him the Nobel of Peace for that message. Perhaps it’s time we start to follow the lead of the good people in this world instead of paying attention only to the ones who try to kill others. You should not believe my words: I’m a lousy writer. You should believe my numbers: I’m a great economist. In fact you don’t even have to believe anything: this science; all you have to do is understand and decide what gives you the best future. I think you’re intelligent. You’ll know what to do.

Okay. I’ll be honest. I stole this whole shareware-idea from ‘Agent to the Stars’ by John Scalzi. He IS a great writer and he deserves all credit. But every detective writer stole the idea from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, so I do hope for some sympathy here…

As a writer you are already the scriptwriter of your story, the casting who picked the actors, the camera person who decided when to focus or when to pan out, the lighting engineer who put the spotlight on the right details, the sound engineer who made sure the tone of the story was right, the studio who put in all those great special effects, the producer who found all those great settings, the director who told everyone how to behave, and the bank who financed everything with… exactly, without one single cent of costs. You did the same work as the film crew with a 30 million dollar budget, all by yourself. You don’t need a professional manuscript corrector, editor, cover designer or marketing agent if you do that work too. If you’re human enough to see that homeless person who needs help, now you know that he can become the best salesman you’ve ever wished for, if you help him to help you.

You can find tools that help you to correct your manuscript from errors (Hemingway or Grammarly for example). You can find websites where you can publish your story for free (Smashwords.com for example). When you can find readers who give you their opinion for free (at Wattpad.com for example) you won’t need expensive professional help. You can save all those costs. The only thing you really need is an ISBN, which costs about… 10 euros (and when you want to start your own publishing company, it will cost 50 euros more for registration). In Europe selling your own texts is free of V.A.T. and you can earn up to 1000 euros per year income from your writing without paying income tax. Taxman Winston Wolfe will not be the bad guy in your story (he is in my story, oh, no, sorry, Winston belongs to Quentin Tarantino… and I didn’t pay him the rights to use his character in my book… pfff, that’s going to cost me…) Oh, yeah, that’s right, I almost forgot: you have to do the work. That’s why it’s called ‘work’. But you’re creative and you like what you do and you can work it out.

One thing is hard: marketing. You have to be famous to draw the attention. You can do that by shouting your message from every rooftop and on every billboard: “Look at ME! I’m FABULOUS!” The second-best marketing is: quality. Let the book do the work. Everybody likes to have a free book and everybody likes to share a great book with their friends. Rely on the snowball-effect, on word-of-mouth advertisement (or, better, mail-to-mail advertisement). If your book is available for free, you will be read. In my case, less than 1% of the downloaders made a payment, but I have one reader and he sent me the message “What a great story”; that message paid for every minute I spent on writing and there are years of credit left to go on with it. That one ‘Thank you’ was so much better than all those ‘We’re sorry, but…’-letters. I write because I want to be read.

You can save the costs of shipping your manuscript to publishers or agents and invest that money in your own success. You, we, can share info about how to do it on Wattpad.com. We can help each other, open an account ‘Sharewarebook’ and do it together. We, the next generation of writers, can make the first step, offering our work as shareware. Readers are smart. When they discover shareware books and the big advantage that they offer, the knife will cut on all sides and will always stay sharp.

What’s the worst scenario? You will invest 10 euros and nobody will read your story? That’s only possible if you ship your work to the agents and the publishers. When you publish a shareware book, your mum will read you, and your friend, and they’ll tell others. The worst-case scenario is that nobody says ‘thank you’, which does not make you a bad person, it won’t even make you a bad writer; it just says something about the bad manners that all your billions of readers have.

When I admit my books to be available as shareware books, I decline the Copyright. I still own the right to make money with the texts. When one of my versions of the story of Snow White goes to Hollywood, I have the right to say that I want Angelina Jolie in the role of the main character (hm… perhaps I should do some research first about her bum before I make that decision). I don’t care about the copyright. I don’t care how many people copy or download my work. I write to be read. More downloads: more readers. More readers: more success. More success: more money. It’s just simple economy. The readers will get great stories for 10% of the amount they pay for it in the shops, they will get the money-back-if-you-don’t-like-it-guarantee on every shareware story and if they reward all that noble effort by the writer by paying him his share, voluntarily, they will get more shareware stories in the near future. If the readers prefer to be cheated by the publishers, that’s their choice. You have to respect the choice of readers, you know. They are not cows that act without thinking…

Wow. Is that a great plot or what? And the best part is: you can be part of it. You can be read by millions, by billions, as long as you write that great story that I see in your potential. You don’t even have to be a full-time writer. You just have to be a good writer. But that’s another story, perhaps I’ll tell that one later…

Did you already transfer that euro to my bank account? Okay. Now I owe you the secret of the Dutch. It’s simple: they don’t know anything, they don’t do anything, they don’t have anything you want, they don’t tell you anything useful but… they know how to make money with your curiosity. Thanks for your euro…