How I (Could Have) Made Millions Off My Cat

If you have an idea or some special wisdom, act now. New technology lets you reach any audience, and at a low, low price! BY JAY HEINRICHS

I JUST WROTE , photographed, and published a book in two days. And I’m not bragging, believe me. My success, if you can call it that, owes not so much to my speedy work as it does to a big change going on in the media. Thanks to a combination of technology and marketing trends, you can become your own media mini-conglomerate. If you have information that people might want to pay for, then it’s easier than ever to make money off your wits.

Not that I’m likely to make any money off the book I just wrote. Titled Sniff It First, and 15 Other Things I Learned From My Cat, it won’t win a National Book Award. In fact, according to international publishing standards, Sniff It First fails to qualify as a book at all, since it contains only 36 pages. (A book should be a minimum of 49.) But by all means buy it. At $15 for softbound and $28 for hardcover with dust jacket, it might seem a real value to you, especially if you like wasting money on stupid cat stuff.

After I thought up 16 wise things I learned from my cat, I wrote copy that was as meaningful as I could make it—which, frankly, wasn’t very much (“When dazzled by beauty, remember: If it’s as cute as a bug, it probably tastes like one”).

But I consider the experiment a successful one, because it shows how much power now rests in the hands of do-it-yourselfers. We’re talking about information marketing, the democratization of the media, and the “Long Tail”—the economic Long Tail, not the cat’s. It’s the beginning of something big, and it could make you rich. No kidding. All you have to do is be smarter than most people, including me.

THE CAT BOOK was the fourth one I wrote; major publishers put out the first three. The one I did before the cat book took two years, if you don’t count the 15 I spent researching it. I quit my job to write it, reducing our household income by 100 percent. Selling the book to a publisher required a New York literary agent, a 30-page proposal, and a single editor at Crown Books who didn’t laugh at my idea—which was to write a book about argument using the philosophies of Aristotle, Cicero, Lincoln, and Homer Simpson. The advance I got totaled somewhat less than the money I would have made working the same hours at McDonald’s, and it came in three installments over a year and a half. But I’m really lucky. I got first-rate editing from a pair of brilliant guys, the publisher did a good job with publicity, my agent wrangled a wealth of international rights (who knew the Koreans love argument?), and the book has actually sold well. Speaker’s fees, consulting work, and the grudging admiration of my siblings made the whole thing worthwhile. So that’s the good news.

The bad news is, I must have been insane to quit my job. The odds against selling a book to one of the big publishers lie somewhere between ridiculous and impossible. I just didn’t know it.

So I’m one of those rare people who have explored the terrain of both the big publishing houses and the phenomenon called Print on Demand—the way I hope you’ll try to publish a book. Why? Because of all the possibilities it offers:

Whip up a book as a gift. It’s easy. Or write a short biography of your parents. Suck up to your boss. If you really have nothing better to do, write a book about your cat.

Publish an entertaining manual for your company or profession. Many years ago, I was editor of an alumni magazine, and I thought back then about writing a manual for editing alumni magazines. Sound crazy? Suppose I could sell it for 50 bucks, and suppose a third of the alumni magazines in the country bought a single copy. Given that there are more than 3,000 alumni magazines in the country, I could have made $50,000. Back then, though, it wasn’t easy to publish a book. Now it is.

Do a guide to an obscure but growing sport. Dan Poynter was a writer who took up the brand-new sport of hang gliding back in the ’70s. He looked for a book on the subject and didn’t find any, so he wrote one in four months and published it himself. The book sold 130,000 copies—so far. Tip: I couldn’t find anything on Amazon having to do with underwater chess, competitive tree climbing, or distance spitting.

Gather an audience and sell a book to it. Four years ago, I launched a website on figures of speech, figarospeech.com. Not exactly a bestselling subject, you’ll say. But back when I kept up a daily blog on the subject, the site had an average of 38,000 monthly unique visitors. They formed the core buyers of my argument book. Crown Books helped me sell it, but there’s no reason why you couldn’t publish on your own. If you can do a blog on anything they study in high school, teachers will require their poor students to read it. And after you publish your book, they just might order it in bulk.

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