I read Tim Ferriss’ “The 4-Hour Workweek” a few years back and periodically read his blog. If you are not familiar with “The 4-Hour Workweek”, it’s basically about setting up highly profitable, hands-free businesses so that you can spend most of your time doing what you want to do, i.e. traveling, and not working on your business or job full-time. I take this info with a grain of salt but it is interesting reading. The funny thing about these businesses or “muses” as he calls them, is that he just glosses over this subject in the book when in reality setting up such a “muse” is the most important and by far the hardest step in attaining the 4-Hour Workweek. The blog shows some examples of readers who have supposedly set up these “muses” but most of these businesses seem like they would be full-time jobs to run at the least and probably take a staff of people to maintain. Many are products that people invent and sell themselves on their websites – not really something that takes no time to run. Maybe I am wrong (I hope I am), and all these people have created highly profitable “muses” and are out enjoying their lives with all of their extra free time.
In the meantime though, I read books and blogs (anything I can find) about passive income and ways to make my life and businesses easier and less time consuming to run. How does this all tie in to online bookselling? In two ways:
I originally started selling books online a few years back because I didn’t need much investment to get started (I think I started with less than $20). Also, the profit margins seemed to be great – my average cost per book is 50cents and my average profit per book is $3.24 – 600%+ isn’t bad when multiplied many times over. I already had some experience selling on eBay, so I read a couple books about online book selling and I was on my way. I made some decent money pretty quickly selling on eBay and Amazon and never had a problem finding cheap inventory. I had a full-time job at the time so my free time was becoming less and less with my successful new side business. There was a mailman who would stop by my job and I would often have to run out to my car and grab 5 or 10 books in bubble envolopes for him to take.
So I had a fairly successful small business rolling, but I could see the future of the business and it was not what I wanted: a building rental, employees, long work days, and fighting with 100s of other book sellers at library book sales for rare and valuable books.
I knew I needed to change something so I started looking for another less hands-on business I could start. I decided to pursue affiliate marketing – it would give me the freedom from a location that I wanted and also more flexible hours. I messed around with it for several months (and still do) but made NO money. I was still selling books online but not with the same passion and vigor that I had once had.
Then one day I read Selling on Amazon’s FBA Program and the light bulb went off! (If you are new to FBA I encourage you to click on the link and read the ebook (it’s free), it will give you a good understanding of how FBA works and the advantages to selling with it). Of the many advantages to selling with FBA, the most important to me was NO INVENTORY! This was an incredible revelation, I could buy books and not have to worry about storing them long term or even shipping them to customers! Yes, the fees are higher than selling books yourself, but the fees are much lower than hiring employees and renting storage space.
The huge advantage I could see with FBA was freedom of location – it is possible to travel and make money from wherever you are. You can ship books to FBA from wherever you are and Amazon will store them and ship them to customers for you, in addition to handling customer service emails. My mind was racing with possibilities.
Although I do not yet have the total freedom that is described in the 4-hour Workweek – I do have more freedom. I live in a little beach town where good jobs are hard to come by and I have taken some “work” vacations – visited family in other states and made money with FBA while there to cover my expenses. If you want, you can ramp up your FBA efforts before and after your vacations and not need to work while you are away – somewhat “passive” income – you send books in and they are selling while you are doing other things. While it’s not a 4-hour week “muse” that will support a lavish work-free lifestyle – it can give you some freedom if you work hard on it.
