Christopher Littlefield wrote a book called 75+Team Building Activities for Remote Teams and he sent me the email above a couple of weeks ago.
That’s $20,000 in royalties from his first book.
Emails like these make my day because I love hearing success stories, but there are a couple of hidden lessons about this.
First, success is more random than we think. Chris’s book actually competes with one of mine.
We both wrote a similar book around the same time.
Here’s Chris’s book
And here’s my book:
His book was published shortly after mine. So technically, I had a bit of an advantage given that we covered the same topic.
His book is also more expensive (more than twice the price of mine), so I also have an advantage there.
Yet his book is way more successful than mine. It has more reviews and has sold way more copies. My book is nowhere near $20K in sales.
The second lesson is that there’s value in helping other people, even your competitors.
I even had Chris as a guest on one of my podcast episodes, and I even promoted his book.
The world is abundant, and creating digital products (especially books), is not always a zero-sum gum.
You might also get a referral years down the line when you least expect it.
If you’re interested in writing a book yourself, check out the link below to download my book, “Write Your Book on the Side” (it’s 100% free on Gumroad and Amazon).