📺 How YouTube Gurus Make You Poor by Promising Huge Incomes

A few days ago, while out on my daily walk, I listened to Daniel Priestley's ideas about incomes distribution. I realized that I had often seen this in the KDP space.

The income generated by self-published authors is extremely unevenly distributed. A massive majority of authors earn very little, while a small, elite group of Superstars earn the bulk of the revenue.

Newbies and Moderately Successful authors (The Base): The vast majority of authors fall into the lower-earning brackets. Estimates of HMD Publishing suggest that:

Around 46% of self-published authors earn $100 or less per month.
The overwhelming majority (80–90%) earn less than $50/month or nothing.

2. Superstars (The Top): A small fraction of authors capture disproportionately high earnings.

The top 10% of self-published authors are reported to earn 71% of all self-publishing income.
A small percentage, estimated to be less than 1% or around 10% in some surveys, earn over $100,000 per year, proving that exponential income is possible but extremely rare.

The functional skills of writing and publishing are common, but the breakthrough success belongs to the elite group who master the added skills to become the Superstars.

🎠 But the craziest things starts with the Merry-Go-Round of Distraction. For KDP authors, it is the perpetual cycle of niche-jumping and chasing viral trends, which prevents them from building sustainable authority in one area.

Moderately Successful authors see a new shiny niche, recommended by some guru and jump in it, dreaming about success. And immediately they become a Newbie in this new niche, loosing all their skills and experience, accumulated in they current niche.

How it works:

A Moderately Successful author in Niche A sees a Superstar in Niche B. They are distracted by the exponential success of the Superstar.

2. The person jumps to Niche B. They reset their progress and become a Newbie in the new niche.

3. They work hard to learn the new niche's skills. They return to the Moderately Successful level in Niche B. They realize it's still not the exponential success they expected. They see a Superstar in a new niche (niche C) and jump again.

4. Result. The Merry-Go-Round: They constantly bounce from being a Moderately Successful to a Newbie in a new niche, never achieving exponential income because they keep starting over.

📈 The solution is to break free from the merry-go-round and focus on advancing within your existing niche and skillset. Accumulate marginal gains instead of chasing lucrative but unattainable promises.

I apologize for the lengthy text, but it could save you a lot of effort and make you a Superstar.

Do you agree? Would you like to add anything?

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