Yarco

You don't have to participate in their game any more. You can make your own game. Find something that seems meaningful or worthwhile to you, and then do that. Do whatever brings you joy and happiness, regardless of how society looks upon it. If you need to play video games for 6 hours every night to be happy, do that. If you need to quit your job to play guitar full-time or something, it's going to be difficult, but it's better than being totally miserable and hating life for the next 40 years.

At the end of the day, this has to be a business for the message to be sustainable for the next 30 - 40 years. Unfortunate nature of the system we're in. I don't know if the 1% can fund this.

If you look up "ideal woman body type through the decades", there are times in history where this woman would've had the "perfect" or ideal measurements. Is the tweet really stupid? Yeah Is this the end of JP's reign? What reign, and why would this in particular be the end? His ultimate downfall was a tweet saying a chubby chick wasn't beautiful.... what??? Out of all the dumb stuff he's said over the years, THIS is where you draw the line? Personally I don't have a problem with saying this woman is beautiful. She looks quite toned and athletic despite being a bit overweight, which is fine. What I have a problem with is people like Tess Holiday, "healthy at any size", people with rolls on rolls, people telling doctors they refuse to get weighed because it's discrimination. There are real problems with the fat acceptance movement. A thicc but hot Sports Illustrated model is probably the worst spot to take a stand on it.

My initial reaction to the latest video was genuinely "Leo's finally lost it". Of course the obvious counterpoint is that I'm not spiritually enlightened and I'm not actualized enough to understand. I'm open to that. But realize how extremely cult-y this sounds to even a moderately interested subscriber, let alone someone coming across the work for the first time. Let's assume what's said in the latest video is completely true. Even so, some things are so crazy to say that they aren't worth saying publicly. All it does is destroy credibility and make Actualized.org as a whole look insane. If the first solipsism video was too advanced and dangerous to release to the masses, this latest one absolutely is. Not because of danger to the viewer but just because it's optics suicide. We're definitely at a point where even hardcore non-enlightened followers can no longer follow along. "I'm talking to other Gods and technically they're real but also I'm the only one that's real and I created them, also all of this can only be realized on drugs" Like what is the average person to make of this. If the goal is to niche down to only the most hardcore followers, or leave something behind to be recognized for your genius hundreds of years down the road, then this is the right path. But if I considered myself the most awakened being in reality, I would personally want to put more emphasis on bringing non-enlightened people up to Sadhguru, Peter Ralston levels first. Instead of trying to elevate the top 1% even higher. I feel like appealing to the masses would make a more meaningful and needed shift in consciousness in the short term. Otherwise it's like trying to have a stage coral conversation with a medieval peasant. A long time ago there was an analogy of holding a mirror up in front of a donkey and saying "this is you!" No matter how many times you try to explain it, the donkey's mind is not capable of understanding. With this latest video, 90% of us are donkeys that literally can't comprehend. 9% are taking it as belief and mental masturbation. Far less than 1% who ever watch it will ever understand and experience it for themselves.

How are you planning to balance a simplistic minimalist life with a high-tech one? I ask because this sounds like my ideal lifestyle as well. Now Starlink exists to solve my high-speed internet problem. I'm fine heating with wood if needed, and using either septic or composting toilets, and well water. The big problem is electricity. To have enough solar panels to produce all my electricity would cost at least $50k. Also if a property doesn't have an existing well, or your well dries up (which happens), it's another $30k to drill another one. Plus a skid-steer to plow a long driveway in the winter if you live up north and want to leave your cabin between December - March and lots of other things. Living off-grid is more costly than most people imagine, especially initial startup costs. And it might end up a lot less simple and minimalistic than you first imagine. Not saying it can't be done. I've been watching a guy on Youtube create his own homestead on a mountain for the past year. Just that it'll probably cost well over $1M to get everything set up in most places nowadays, and it's extremely hard to get a mortgage on undeveloped land in the middle of nowhere. I'm curious about the same thing. Especially after Hussein's made a couple posts talking about falling behind in education and pursuing a PhD. What's the point of spending money on 7 years of schooling just to go to a monastery? If you're serious about the monastic life and it's the end goal, then just drop everything and go now.

Either cops are semi-regularly emptying full clips into totally innocent black people or they aren't. One of us is deluded on this issue and I'd like to figure out who. I have the ability to admit I might be the one with the wrong worldview here and I'm open to having my mind changed.

Do you think any evidence of such a scenario exists except eyewitness testimony from biased family members or friends? The closest I've ever seen to an unjustified shooting was Daniel Shaver. White guy shot in a hotel hallway, even in that case I'd argue it looked like he was reaching for something.

If you can find me bodycam or bystander footage of this scenario, I'll change my profile pic to the BLM logo for 30 days. I need at least 30 seconds of context before the shots are fired, and their hands have to be solidly up for 5+ seconds before the shots are fired. And they can't be walking away toward a vehicle or bag or anything while their hands are up.

Freedom to me is essentially agorism. All relations and exchanges in society being entirely voluntary and non-violent in nature. A good number of people here have negative connotations about the word "anarchy" and think it can only mean complete societal breakdown and that the world would basically devolve into The Purge overnight. To me, True Freedom is has to be some form of anarchy. I think there are some forms of anarchy that could plausibly be achieved and result in a peaceful and stable society with maximum freedom. If you have any form of authority or government dictating things you can and can't do (especially via threat of violence) then by definition you can never truly be free. We don't even have to go all the way at once. The book "Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal" by Joel Salatin is a real eye-opener to how crazy some of our laws are just regarding food and farming alone.

I guess it was confusing when I said nobody would watch ads on the hybrid model. What I really mean is they would be forced to and not be happy about it or think it's a worthwhile tradeoff. Option 1 - Pay $19.99/month Option 2 (Coming soon) - Pay $9.99/month but watch a 30 second ad before each episode I propose an option 3 that's entirely free, but with 12 minutes of unskippable ads per hour. It's within the Netflix app so you wouldn't be able to use AdBlock or similar to avoid them. They can use ad banners as well. People are bad at evaluating time/money tradeoffs so if Netflix is gonna go with ads I think they should go all the way. I pirated stuff a lot as a teen and in college. But now it's not worth it. I'd rather pay $10/month for the convenience of instant streaming in HD. No need to wait for 2 GB downloads, no risk of malware ruining my computer, or getting a low-quality recording or in another language or with subtitles I can't turn off. No need to bring my laptop downstairs and plug in an HDMI cable. So for me the convenience is enough of a value proposition to pay instead of pirate for shows. I would still probably pirate software, especially something outrageously expensive like Photoshop.

It sounds like you're a bit in denial and just need to grieve about the reality of the situation and then accept the facts. It doesn't just feel like you're behind on your education, you objectively, factually are behind. Don't use weasel words to try and lighten the blow on yourself or delay the realization, just accept it. Most people start college at 18 and you're 20. There are some situations in life you can create for yourself where once the decision is made, you can't go back. This is one of them. You can't just fast track and do 2x as many credits in half the time to make up for it. You aren't a time traveler and there's nothing you can do about this now. If fixing life regrets was as easy as realizing you made a mistake, then nobody would have them. You can't change the fact that the earliest you can possibly get a PhD is 27 now, assuming no further falling behind. Then using that information decide if it's still worth pursuing, or if you should shift to another strategy that doesn't involve a PhD. No matter what you do, starting your career early and at 27 are mutually exclusive. Although I'd also say that the difference in your career between starting at 25 and 27 is probably very small. If academic performance is part of the reason for the delay at all, then I'd reconsider the idea of a PhD or even an MBA. It's only going to get harder from here. Don't fall victim to sunk cost fallacy... know when to hold em and know when to fold em.

I've made enough 5 and 10 year plans to say... the only thing I know is there's no way I can accurately predict that far out. I'm in a different country, relationship, and career than I was 10 years ago. And none of it was planned. I'm never in the place I thought I would be 5 years ago, and it's not even usually something I wanted or could've foreseen as a possibility. If my life becomes that predictable then it means I've stagnated

I don't think Blockbuster vs Netflix is a fair comparison. Blockbuster is more like Kodak film refusing to get into digital cameras, it's all about the medium. Netflix is still in the right medium. They just have to offer enough value for people to go back. I cancelled my Netflix subscription in February (I like to think I'm a bit of a trendsetter ). Here's my reasons for cancelling in order: Price increase. At least in Canada it's pretty much doubled. Other services. Amazon Prime has most things I want to watch so it's redundant. And we have a shared Disney+ account for free. Lack of stuff I want to watch. I really only liked Stranger Things and Black Mirror. Wife watched Friends on it 80% of the time and they removed it I didn't want to financially support an increasing amount of social justice (Don't underestimate how many nerds got mad at black elves in LOTR and cancelled their subscription.) Netflix is rolling out a cheaper ad-subsidized plan but it'll be a year or two before it comes out, and by then I think it'll be too late. Amazon Prime has too much value to compete with and I could see them getting a monopoly. IMO Netflix would be better off going completely free with 5x as many ads (comparable to cable television). They could create an entire new paradigm for streaming services - free / ad supported. Nobody wants to watch ads in exchange for a slightly cheaper subscription.

First step is exposure therapy. Whatever you're scared of, start gradually forcing yourself into situations where you have to do it. For example if you're scared of driving, just drive more. I know somebody this worked for. But for me it didn't work. I drove an hour to and from work all day for over a year and I didn't become desensitized. While I became a bit more risk-taking, the underlying feeling of powering a multiple-ton vehicle that could kill yourself and others if you lose focus and concentration for just a couple of seconds never went away. My workplace anxiety never went away either. It sounds like mine wasn't as bad as yours, but it was pretty bad. I have an extremely avoidant personality. Whenever the phone on my desk would ring it'd make me jump and fill me with adrenaline. I hate the fact that it's so time sensitive, you have 3 rings to pick it up. Then you don't know who is calling or what they want, so you can't be prepared and it's very easy to be caught off-guard or not knowing how to answer. I would save all my emails during the day and send them at 4:59 pm on my way out so nobody could call me about them. Just one example of my workplace anxiety. So what I did was just start my own business so I didn't have to leave the house any more LOL. Especially after covid it's 10x more accepted that you can work from home now, either at a job or working for yourself. Just find a position that doesn't require video calls and all correspondence is via text chat or email, or whatever will help you to not be anxious. Nowadays with UberEats type delivery services you don't even have to ring the doorbell, 80% of my drivers just set my stuff down and leave. Get creative and you will find lots of solutions that allow you to survive and thrive as someone with severe anxiety, even agoraphobia. At the end of the day, anxiety is a survival defense mechanism that is very hard to shake. If you're genetically predisposed to have it strong enough, then nothing short of medication, years of ongoing therapy, or somehow convincing yourself to stop caring so much will make it go away. You just kind of learn to set it aside during the critical times when you need to function, and then you can pick it up and be anxious the rest of the time.

Corruption, lack of checks and balances or limits on power. Wisest person in humanity decides they want to make themselves a dictator and they hold all the power to do it, what then? What if this wise person had a secret prejudice against a certain group and decides the best thing for society overall might be to wipe them out? Might be the wisest decision for the world but not the smartest. How do you determine wisdom? I don't think people would accept IQ, although personally I'd be fine with Chris Langan being world dictator I think. If we are going for the smartest and wisest, then why not AI instead of a human at all? It can make decisions better and faster, taking more into account, do more calculations, and doesn't let emotions factor in.

We can play that game if you want, but it quickly devolves into a situation where nothing means anything. Everybody is a nazi, everybody is a cultist, everybody is a groomer... it doesn't help either side. People are already way too divided. This is the way you make it so that nobody can ever talk to each other again.

To someone who is anti-Bitcoin this is just going to sound like cope, but here it goes... Until I sell, I haven't lost anything. Even if I sold, I'd still have capital losses to carry forward indefinitely and offset future gains. Obviously I don't own any Luna. Although I'm overinvested in some other alts and should probably become more of a Bitcoin maxi, but I don't want to do that as a loss so I'll wait. I already made nearly as much from crypto as my business income in both 2020 + 2021 so I don't care if it's temporarily down. I withdrew all my profits, bought $10k of worthless NFTs, and I'm still breaking even. It's just fun play money for me now really. When Bitcoin drops to closer to $20k I will probably buy more. IMO the current dip is market manipulation and it's market-wide. The NASDAQ is also down from $16k to $11k in the past 6 months. Even if you have a reasonable risk profile but bought in at the top, you're still getting shafted and experiencing 30% losses right now. Manipulation was an inevitability from as soon as they chose to issue a futures-based Bitcoin ETF instead of a spot one. I see this as billionaires who were late to the party intentionally crashing Bitcoin price so they and all their friends can load off before it finally takes off. The manipulation is everywhere. To me it seems like the elites want to squeeze as many people as possible out of owning homes, or even having a business or a job. Make you entirely dependent on the state and willing to settle for less. I want the wealth of the Boomer generation, but I also have the Millennial entitlement of only wanting to work 0 - 20 hours a week for it. So crypto is the only viable option for me. If Bitcoin goes to $0 I lose 5-figures but my life isn't really any worse off. If I'm right about Bitcoin then I can pay off my mortgage and probably upgrade to my "forever home" in the next 5 years and then I'm done with crypto. That's a gamble I'm still willing to take. Bitcoin is a pyramid scheme, gold is a pyramid scheme, gasoline is a pyramid scheme. Even the food you buy at the grocery store is a pyramid scheme. The store buys it from a wholesaler hoping they can sell enough of it to turn a profit before it goes bad and becomes worthless. Manipulation is a part of every human system and it's only getting worse, but these are the parameters of the game that we were plopped into and need to play within. If you recognize the patterns of the elite, then at least you can play along with your own peanuts instead of just having them extract all your wealth from you.

Just the 1-click install of Wordpress is probably good. I looked at their Website Builder page and I'm kinda confused what it is, or what it really offers beyond the functionality already in Wordpress. It seems like maybe their own Squarespace-type builder layered on top of Wordpress. Personally I would rather go with plain Wordpress and learn the general principles so you can apply them to any future sites, with or without BlueHost. But if you're just making this one website it might be a little faster and easier. Possibly also a little more restrictive. I guess I would watch a Youtube video or two looking at the pros and cons, and see if you're able to disable it (or add it on later) if you change your mind. Since the lowest cost version of both options is the same amount, I feel like you must be able to switch it on and off. I've heard BlueHost has really great customer support, so I wouldn't hesitate to email them any questions you have, even as a prospective customer before signing up. It's usually free indefinitely, but they might renew it for free each year. That's how it is with my Namecheap domains. WHOIS protection is "free forever" but you have to add it on each time you renew the domain even though it's free. When I click the little "read more" link on the home screen it sounds like it's forever, but you could email them to confirm. Free plugins to help prevent your site from getting hacked: Limit Login Attempts Reloaded - Locks people out if they try to guess your password X number of times for X amount of time you set. WPS Hide Login - Changes your default Wordpress login page to whatever URL you want, so people can't even find your login page to try and hack you. Disable XML-RPC - I don't fully understand what this is, but it seems to be an exploit hackers use, and I haven't been hacked again since I started using it. My sites kept periodically getting broken into no matter how secure my password was (30+ characters of random lower/upper case letters, numbers, symbols) until I started using all 3 of these plugins. I don't know how they managed to do it, I just know how to stop it Really Simple SSL - To activate SSL on your website you just install and it's done. If you care about stats for your site then you'll want to watch a tutorial video on how to set up a Google Analytics account, then link it to a plugin like Google Analytics for Wordpress by Monsterinsights If you don't want comments enabled on your pages and posts, I would go into Settings > Discussion in Wordpress and just disable it, or else you just get lots of spam. I get a lot of spam through my contact form too, to the point I've actually disabled it temporarily. You probably want to look for a contact form plugin that includes a Captcha or similar "I am not a robot" type test to cut down on that. Settings > Permalinks I choose the "post name" option, otherwise Wordpress names all your pages random numbers. I heard it matters for SEO, although I don't know how much you'll have people finding you through search engines vs. direct links from your videos. Personally I add the Classic Editor and Classic Widgets plugins to all my sites because that's how I learned Wordpress. If you have trouble wrapping your head around their new editor, you might want to try the classic version. It makes creating pages or blog posts on your website more like the WYSIWYG editor for comments here on the forum, or when making posts on Reddit. So for people who have been on the internet for a while I think it's more intuitive the old way. I feel like there's about a dozen other things I find myself doing whenever I create a new site, but I'll have to think about it because nothing else is coming to mind.

For $15 I think it's very good. It's not Leo's life purpose course but it's a stripped down version. They compliment each other nicely even if you've already done the LP course, as it lets you hit some similar ideas from different angles. You need to give it the full attention it deserves though. If it says to spend 10 - 15 minutes brainstorming answers to a question, give it the full time it requires. Don't half-ass it and give up after 2 or 3 minutes. If you can, set aside several hours uninterrupted or an entire afternoon to work through it. What really amplifies the program and gets you the most out of it is really allowing yourself to daydream about all the possibilities for each question. I can see how people would say it's too shallow and they didn't find it useful, but I would suggest that those people probably half-assed it. Getting into that daydream mode is critical to get something valuable out of it. It's very practical, so if you're looking for something very spiritual and lofty then it might not be what you're looking for. You'll look at what you want your career, social life, hobbies, etc to look like. In terms of self actualization it's more mundane stuff. Knowing what your life purpose is, I think it could still help you though. It will take it from an abstract idea to something more concrete. What your actual life will look like day to day while living out your life purpose. I don't know if I would say that it was "profound" but for me it was very deep and I definitely had some realizations. One example, I realized I have one uncle I really want to emulate most aspects of my life after, as opposed to my parents. I like how his house was when I was growing up... in structure, layout, how things where organized inside, how it looked and smelled and felt, what kind of activities went on there, how he interacted with his family and friends. That's what JP's future authoring program is best for. Designing a life you will be happy with, both in the present moment while you're living it, and looking back at it on your deathbed. Life purpose is just one aspect of that, but it will slot in nicely.

Extremely easy, basically copy and paste the link into a box and it's done. I would upload them as unlisted videos on Youtube and then embed them, instead of taking up hosting on your own site. Most modern website themes are dynamic and they'll automatically adjust the player size based on the device someone is viewing your site on, so you don't even have to worry about resizing it. I've always liked Namecheap. Never had any issues, and it's popular enough that there are Youtube tutorials to walk you through any common questions like linking your domain + host together, creating redirects, etc. You can do a quick search for "best domain providers 2022" or something to see if there's anything revolutionary out there I've missed in the past few years, but I don't think so. Right now Namecheap has a deal where new customers can sign up for 2 years of domain registration for $0.98. I don't know when it ends but I would jump on that. (Most domains are about $10/year ongoing after that regardless) Shared hosting is good enough for what you need, until you're getting about 30,000 or more views per month. Basically your stuff is stored on a server with 10 - 20 other sites instead of its own dedicated server to cut down on cost, but it's all kept separate and secure and you won't notice a difference. This is the base plan most hosts offer, starting from about $3/month. I personally use HostGator and it's fine, but if I was starting again today I'd use BlueHost. You only need one hosting account unless one of your sites gets huge. I have 10+ sites running on one shared hosting plan. Don't buy your domain and hosting from the same company, so if you ever want to transfer it's easier and your domain can't be held hostage. Both the domain registrar and hosting company are going to try to upsell you on a lot of stuff you don't need to pay for: WHOIS protection is free (make sure you get it to hide your address and personal info) SSL certificates are now free from most hosts as a standard practice. Enable this early on to make your site HTTPS instead of HTTP and avoid headaches converting over later, especially if you plan to take payments through your site. (Gives you the little lock in the URL bar, and will make sure people don't get a "This domain is not secure" warning from their browser when they visit your site) Wordpress installation is free and easy. You don't have to pay for it or pay someone to do it for you. Don't confuse Wordpress.ORG (An open source software that millions of websites run on) with Wordpress.COM (A mediocre web host) You can create infinite email accounts with infinite storage with your host (@ yourdomain.com) for free. Don't pay for email. Anti-spam protection, DDoS protection, backups, and most security stuff is free When you first link your domain and hosting together, it can take up to 24 hours for them to sync up (called propagation.) Don't freak out if your website is showing a blank page or some random ads at first and you can't seem to fix it, it's normal. Once you point your domain at your hosting nameservers, just leave it for at least a few hours to propagate and avoid obsessively refreshing or trying to work with it before it's ready. You'll pretty much pick up what you need as you go. Coding is not required. If there is some little customization you want to do that your theme doesn't cover, someone has probably written the CSS for you to copy and paste in somewhere on the web. Assuming you will use Wordpress, there are a lot of little initial setup things and recommended plugins I can list out if you want. Platforms like Wix, Squarespace, etc are easiest to set up. But you end up overpaying for what they offer in the long run, and they tend to nickle and dime you for little extras. You also don't want to waste hundreds of hours coding a website from scratch. I suggest the middle option, which is paying for your domain + hosting, then do a free 1-click install of Wordpress on your site. Then everything you do on your site is within Wordpress, all GUI and user-friendly, no coding or moving stuff through folders. Wordpress has thousands of free themes to choose from, which basically offer all the out-of-the-box customization you could want. Especially for just a basic website with a home page, contact form, testimonials, a blog, maybe 10 pages in total. In Wordpress, the only "managing and maintaining" your site you really need to do is updating your plugins occasionally with 1 click when it tells you there's a new version. Avoid using website builders like Elementor, especially drag-and-drop stuff, as it tends to break over time and eventually you'll end up having to redo your whole website anyway.

They passed a law that theft under $950 is basically decriminalized. So yeah, basically stealing has been made legal, or at least, they don't bother to pursue it. What do you expect to happen. Walgreens has closed 22 stores in San Fran. Less people with jobs, more people get desperate, looting goes up, more stores close, more looting... before long all of California will be looking like Detroit. There's a reason Joe Rogan, plus Tesla and about 50 other big companies left California last year.

So like a university professor or something? Gatekeeping for the publishing industry because they were lucky enough to break through and their ego is invested? Imagine my shock Fuck your "friend / authority figure". You are already an author. You shouldn't have even put "aspiring author" in your title. You're a straight-up AUTHOR. You already put in the work and you have a completed manuscript. Imposter syndrome is a bitch, don't fall into it. You are good enough. I knight you into the honorable society of totally legit authors Stephen King's Carrie got rejected 30 times, now he's one of the top horror writers and has 60+ novels published! Agatha Christie got rejected. Doctor Seuss got rejected 27 times. It seems harder to find a famous author that actually did have their genius immediately recognized. It really seems to me sometimes like publishers and agents are just throwing darts at a dart board and picking whatever it lands on haha. Take the pressure off yourself -- Assume your first book is going to be terrible, take a deep breath, and then put it out there anyway. You can cringe afterward, but put it out. Painters don't get famous off their first painting. Computer programmers don't create a best-selling piece of software on their first attempt. Like you said, you are called to write. You're going to do it anyway, so who cares if it takes until your 5th or 10th book to finally see success. You know mastery requires you to do the thing. Don't be like 90% of writers who just have a box of unpublished manuscripts under their bed, go all the way.

If you haven't finished the course, then you haven't solidified your life purpose yet. You really need to do all of the "Making It Real" section to bring it all together, inspire yourself, and put it into action. If you can't bring yourself to finish a 30 hour course, how do you think you're going to focus on your life purpose for the rest of your life? Remember some of the lessons from earlier in the course... go back and re-watch them if you have to: Accept The Cost, Accept Drudgery. Even if engineering is your true life purpose, there are still going to be days where working on it sucks. Your problem might not be your life purpose, but productivity and motivation in general. If your purpose is to be an inventor, then you have to act like an inventor. Can you be like Edison and fail at creating the lightbulb over 1,000 times before you finally succeed? Can you be like Elon and watch your rocket explode on landing 3x in a row, knowing you only have 1 shot left before your business goes bankrupt? If music is your true passion then switch to music. But I suspect you'll find that it gets harder and harder to keep making better and better music too.

I suspect (baseless conspiracy theory incoming) that most of Washington politicians have dirt on all the other politicians. Whether it's Jeffrey Epstein type stuff, nudes, recordings of them saying the N-word, or whatever other kind of blackmail. It's like a big Mexican Standoff where everybody has a gun pointed at everybody else's head. If they took down Trump then they'd probably have to take down Hillary, Biden, maybe even Obama, a bunch of senators and congressmen in the process. They have developed a clever form of mutually-assured destruction, kind of like nuclear bombs for personal reputations, that strongly discourage people from using dirt on each other, or else they'll all come down. I don't feel criminals are significantly encouraged nor discouraged by the prosecution of others. It comes down to when an unethical opportunity gets dropped in your lap, do you take it or no? Especially when it comes to HUGE crimes involving millions or billions of dollars -- the reward usually outweighs the risk. Enron happened. They even added a bunch of laws to prevent it happening again. But there are still tons of companies out there still cooking the books. Lots of them get caught, lots of them don't. Bernie Madoff got arrested for running a ponzi scheme, Conrad Black got arrested for fraud. That's not really a deterrent, white collar crime is presumably just as prevalent as ever.

Yeah things were probably different in the 90s... self-publishing wasn't really an option. At least not the Amazon model. I think Lulu.com started up in 2002. I self-published my first book in there in high school lol. And with that, I believe you had to order a whole bunch of books at once and physically store and sell them yourself instead of print-on-demand. Before Amazon bought Createspace, there was an option where you could enable bookstores to buy in bulk at a slightly reduced price, and I remember seeing bookstores buying 10 copies of my books at once. So self-publishing isn't necessarily mutually exclusive with having your book in bookstores. Maybe with Chapters or Indigo it'd be harder, but I bet you could approach any locally-owned bookstore (if they still exist lol) with 5 or 10 copies of your book and ask if they'll put them for sale in their shop. For me that's the main appeal of being traditionally published, is the sense of prestige that comes along with it. But you can still get most of that with self-publishing. The binding and cover/print quality of Amazon paperbacks and hardbacks has really gone up over the years too. As long as you upload your files with all the correct settings, I think you'd have trouble telling it apart from a mass-produced book. I guess the fact that JK Rowling got rejected by publishers 12 times puts a bad taste in my mouth. Like they wouldn't know a quality book (or at least one with potential to be a bestseller) if it hit them in the face. Not the first time I've heard stories like that. Not necessarily their fault, most publishing houses seem so overwhelmed that they can mostly just keep up with their existing authors with a proven track record and hardly take a chance on new authors. So I worry if you try to go the traditional publishing route (unless your friend can put in a good word for you) I think there's a good risk of spending years getting rejected and disheartened. I feel like marketing is the hardest part of selling a book, and I've heard some bad stories from authors about how publishers basically make them do all the promo work on their own. I'd be sooo bitter. The amount you earn from self-publishing vs traditional publishing is basically inverted as well. Amazon takes a 30% cut which seems like a lot, but you still get 70% and they take care of all the printing, shipping, and just having your book listed on Amazon is decent free marketing. I believe a traditionally published author on the other hand will only get like 25% from the sale of each paperback on average. RE: Marketing: If your goal is to sell copies of fiction books, then yeah short stories would be good. Reviews of similar books isn't a bad idea either. What I see a lot of successful self-published authors do is to give away the first chapter of your book (or even the entire first book in a series) in exchange for signing up to your email list. I agree it's hard to make searchable fiction-related content though. Something like "Top High-Fantasy Books of 2022 / All Time" would probably do quite well. Put yourself in the shoes of a reader and think if you were looking for a new book to read, where would you go, what would you search for. https://www.panmacmillan.com/blogs/science-fiction-and-fantasy - A lot of these blog posts aren't good titles/topics for searchability, but there might be some inspiration in there. Eg. "Beginner's guide to Stephen King", you could write a similar article about a top fantasy author. "How to advice" is a big mistake. I made this mistake myself... I wrote 30+ blog posts and made 46 Youtube videos on how to become a freelance writer, when really I should've been targeting clients. (My plan was to create a freelance writing course.) Similarly, I think it's a mistake to target other authors with your blog posts instead of readers. One big thing SEO thing to learn is how to use H1/H2/H3 header tags. Basically H1 for your title, H2 for sections, H3 for sub-sections in your article. https://clictadigital.com/how-to-use-h1-h2-and-h3-header-tags-for-seo-effectively/ If you have a Wordpress site I'd recommend installing the Yoast SEO plugin, it's free and basically guides you through optimizing your post for SEO. For more general marketing stuff I'd check out Chris Fox on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/c/ChrisFoxWrites/videos - If you want to learn from a person who makes $100k/year self-publishing fantasy books, this is the guy. And check out some of his non-fiction books on Amazon: https://www.amazon.ca/Chris-Fox/e/B00OXCKD2G/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_ebooks_1 EG. Write To Market, Six Figure Author, Launch To Market, Ads for Authors are probably the most relevant ones. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Full disclosure so you can decide if I'm even worth listening to or not... I'm definitely not claiming to be a full-time author or expert at publishing. It's just something I dabbled in for a couple months before deciding to move on to freelance writing instead. I've made about $4,500 USD "passive income" in the last 5 -7 years from some non-fiction books I wrote mostly back in 2017 . That's with basically 1 - 2 months writing in the evenings after work in total, and 0 advertising. I wrote one book in 2015, a bunch of books in 2017, and basically done nothing with them since. I still get about $30 in sales every month. The vast majority of sales came from 5 books that are about 10,000 words each. The other books below where I only made a couple bucks is where I was experimenting to see if I could write erotica, cookbooks, and other random stuff for quick/easy money. So admittedly I'm coming at it from a non-fiction mindset and I haven't published any fiction myself, so maybe it's an entirely different market. I do have an idea for a novel I'd like to write one day to prove that I can be an "artistic writer" and not just a "content writer" But just haven't had time yet. Part of me wishes I sat down and wrote like 100 ebooks back in the day, it might still be generating a decent monthly income now. If I wrote a 100k word novel and marketed it properly, and didn't make $10k from the launch I'd be pretty disappointed. I don't think that's as huge of a goal as most people think though if you do a good amount of research beforehand. ^ This pattern of having a big spike in sales that gradually tapers off after a book is released is pretty normal in either fiction or non-fiction.