Musician Makes $50K Passive Income From an Ebook

Emmett Cooke tells his story in a recent video…

Back in 2008, I worked in a call center taking AOL tech support calls from the elderly who needed help with their dial up internet connection, which as you imagine was about as fun as sticking cornflakes in your ears. But luckily we all lost our jobs and so I began following my real passion which was writing music

He started composing stock music 🎶 and licensing it to various projects. After a few years, Emmett had established himself as a bit of an expert in the industry.

He was active on forums and social media, answering questions and writing blog posts about the topic. As a result, he started getting emails from other composers seeking his advice.

It got Emmett thinking: could he package up his knowledge into an ebook product? 🤔

He knew he first needed to validate the idea before investing significant time into it.

So he did just that…

I made a mockup of the e-book, bought a domain and used a free service called LaunchRock to build a quick and easy email signup form where I could direct users to so they could enter their email address and get notified when I had a product ready.

Within a week, Emmett had 300 email signups from people interested in the ebook. This validated there was demand 👍

Then it was time to create the content. Emmett turned the common questions he received into chapters and outlines. He continually asked his email list and social media followers for more feedback on what to include.

After a month of writing, the ebook was complete: The Business of Music Licensing 🚀

By the time he launched in 2013, Emmett had over 2,100 subscribers waiting for the product.

The results?

The ebook brought in over $10,000 in sales its first month, $46k over the first 4 years, and more than $50k overall 🤑

(The book was priced at $9.99 initially but later increased to $24.99.)

Emmett’s total costs to produce and market the product = $839. 

So his profit was probably more than $50k as well 😎

The main things Emmett did to market the ebook…

1. Email: In the first month, my email marketing plan was to email everyone [multiple times]… almost 50% of the list purchased using this method within the 1st month.

2. Facebook ads: At the time, Facebook trialed a feature that allowed you to show an advert to your friends and their friends, so I used that really successfully… Unfortunately this was a temporary feature that Facebook killed faster than a sneeze in a library.

3. Continued posting on my social media to my pretty small following

4. I reached out to as many blogs and reviewers as I could find asking them to write about the release and offering them review copies. 

That was it.

If Emmett could do it over again…

I should have set up a blog on the website, taken content from the eBook and re-write it into more digestible content which could be used as a traffic source from Google, resulting in more sales from organic traffic.

My key takeaway here is the value of building an audience before creating a product.

As Emmett’s story shows, it’s fairly easy to validate an idea and pull off a successful launch once you have a tribe of people who see you as an expert 👀

Reminds me of that tweet by Jack Butcher…

Build distribution, then build whatever you want.