French Newsletter Earns €60,000 From Republished Content

Inbox Collective has the story of Bulletin.fr, a French email newsletter 🇫🇷

Recent editions discussed fondue, the practice of pruning trees, and the social history of cycling.

Each edition of the newsletter ends with a section called “Le Mot De La Fin,” which roughly translates to “The Final Word.” 

And in 2022, Bulletin founder Jean Abbiateci launched a fascinating project: He took some of the best editions of “Le Mot De La Fin” and turned them into a book, The Dictionary of Extraordinary Words. Since launch, Bulletin has sold nearly 4,000 copies of the book, at a price of €20 each (about $21.50 US) — an impressive profit for a book featuring republished material from a newsletter!

Apparently that works out to €60,000 in profit since the book launched last year (about $64,500 USD) 💰

Which is all the more impressive when you consider that Bulletin currently has only 30,000 email subscribers.

This is a good example of Daniel Vassallo’s “sell your sawdust” philosophy…

Sell your sawdust (stuff you already created as a side-effect). Many times you can sell your sawdust for money (on @gumroad) or for attention (on @github) with very little extra effort.

Jean notes however that you need to build trust with your audience to pull off something like this…

you have to keep in mind the question of longevity. For two years, I’ve put together projects that people have become attached to. You can’t just show up out of nowhere and say “go ahead and buy my book.” For two years, I didn’t ask my readers for anything but their opinion.

What sawdust do you produce as you go about your regular work? 

Could you package that nicely and sell to your existing audience?

(Hmm, maybe I should consider putting my Momentos in a book and selling it 😜)

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