In Louis L'Amour’s historical novel Fair Blows the Wind, the hero Tatton Chantry amasses a personal fortune by writing and selling short stories, then reinvesting the profits into New World trade routes.

Not a bad idea, I thought.

The next month, I picked up a random Stony Man novel where the elite commando unit squared off against South American drug dealers in an ultra-violent adventure full of guns and gore.

If you tried to review this mass-market book, I thought, you’d be demonetized on most major social media platforms.

YouTube was forcing creators to say things like “unalived” instead of “killed” or risk losing ad revenue. Yet here was a book series full of nonstop gunfights and explosions that had sold over 200 million copies.

In December, while reviewing bank statements for tax purposes, I made one final realization. Despite doing very little self-publishing for almost a decade, I was still collecting a steady stream of monthly royalties. Not J.K. Rowling or Stephen King money, but more than I earned from Medium or YouTube after the AI takeover.

Books and short stories I had written years ago were still selling. Meanwhile, recent videos and articles vanished into the ether as AI content drowned out traditional creators.

These three realizations motivated me to get serious about fiction writing.

This year, there hasn’t been a morning where I’ve woken up to less than $10 in overnight royalties. With the United States being the world’s largest consumer market, sales pick up throughout the day and generally peak an hour or two after most people get home from work. It’s fun to walk to the corner store for an iced tea and come home to see another $3 in royalty income on the Kindle Sales Dashboard.

This isn’t meant to be a naval-gazing article. Instead, here are three insights you can benefit from. Each is useful if you’re looking to create side income, are curious about self-publishing, or want marketing ideas for your own business.

Stephen King has written 67 novels. James Patterson has published over 150 books. There are seven main titles in the Harry Potter series. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle authored more than 30 books. Most celebrities eventually pen memoirs or autobiographies.

I bring this up to highlight how many well-known authors there are, which is why it may surprise you to learn that one of the 300 best-selling books on Amazon is titled The Accidental Sext. It’s about a mousy female office worker who mistakenly sends nude photos to the wrong number — a number that coincidentally belongs to a hunky billionaire industrialist “silver fox” with mob ties.

If that doesn’t already sound silly enough, the book opens with a line that goes something like this:

“If sighing was a crime, [main character’s name] would be convicted of corporate manslaughter.”

It’s a dull opening and a metaphor that doesn’t make sense.

The point is that while you need to be a coherent writer and produce something that appeals to your audience’s interests, you don’t need to be the best writer.

Nonfiction readers are often critical of what they read. Fiction readers pick up a book to have fun. They want to be surprised, entertained, or vicariously live out one of their personal fantasies.

To quote comic book author and screenwriter Grant Morrison:

“Adults... struggle desperately with fiction, demanding constantly that it conform to the rules of everyday life. Adults foolishly demand to know how Superman can possibly fly, or how Batman can possibly run a multibillion-dollar business empire during the day and fight crime at night, when the answer is obvious even to the smallest child: because it's not real.”

Speaking of things that aren’t real…

Drew Eric Whitman’s copywriting book Cashvertising describes the “Life Force 8,” eight fundamental human desires that motivate people. These include instincts like survival, protection of loved ones, and being superior to others in a competitive environment.

These are primal motivations that have existed since the days of cavemen.

In nonfiction (especially high-IQ content) it’s often difficult to tap into these desires. Writing honestly and objectively about dividend stocks and investing, for example, is a hard angle to market because it doesn’t automatically trigger any base-level instincts. This is why so much investment content ultimately degrades into screaming about a “market crash” or speculating on “10 penny stocks to 10x your money.”

With fiction, on the other hand, you essentially have a built-in Life Force 8 marketing system.

You get the idea.

While fiction still requires marketing skills, it often sells itself.

Unlike social media, which thrives on an endless stream of low-quality AI-generated content, Amazon and other publishing platforms impose hard limits on how much you can produce each week.

Amazon has a strict limit of 10 books per week. This significantly reduces the number of AI-generated titles that can flood the platform.

Likewise, while readers are forgiving of clunky dialogue and the occasional unrealistic event, they aren’t stupid. Customers notice glaring factual errors, repetitive plot points, and AI’s tendency to sand down weirder or more offbeat ideas that a human writer might incorporate.

Here’s a simple example.

I tried using several AI tools to help with a story idea about a group of helicopter pilots who maintain law and order in a post-apocalyptic setting. In my version, the apocalypse was more of a general breakdown in infrastructure and civil order. Tthere were no clichés like nuclear war or global pandemics.

Yet, every AI platform tried to insert something about “wastelands.”

Two platforms also generated a sequence that anyone with basic knowledge of helicopters would recognize as wrong: a scene where a character flies more than 1,000 miles without refueling.

AI is useful for outlining, editing, and generating blurb and keyword ideas. But the long-form nature of books (and even many short stories) makes self-publishing an unattractive venture for AI sweatshops that can make easier money by posting fake movie trailers to YouTube or uploading 12-second videos to Instagram.

I enjoy reading genre fiction, and I enjoy writing it as well.

At the risk of setting a limiting belief, fiction writing does have the downside of being a low-ticket business. A self-published author earning Amazon’s 70% royalty rate will make at most about $7 per sale.

The upside is that storytelling is an extremely well-established business model, and you can make money from it even if you’re only a decent writer.

Fiction connects with audiences’ more primal desires, meaning many novels and short stories can sell themselves. And the low price of books means plenty of readers will impulse-buy a $5, or even $10, story simply because the blurb sounded interesting or the cover looked cool.

This isn’t a business model for everyone. But it is an asset-light, location-independent way to make money. And if you enjoy writing or telling stories, it’s a venture worth pursuing.

AI promises speed and efficiency, but it’s leaving many leaders feeling more overwhelmed than ever.

The real problem isn’t technology.

It’s the pressure to do more with less — without losing what makes your leadership effective.

BELAY created the free resource 5 Traits AI Can’t Replace & Why They Matter More Than Ever to help leaders pinpoint where AI can help and where human judgment is still essential.

At BELAY, we help leaders accomplish more by matching them with top-tier, U.S.-based Executive Assistants who bring the discernment, foresight, and relational intelligence that AI can’t replicate.

That way, you can focus on vision. Not systems.

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Disclaimer: This article is for entertainment purposes only. It is not financial advice, always do your own research.