Nicolas Cotto

Grand reporter | Auteur & Réalisateur

[A-T Pietrera @atpietrera]

Une acquisition indispensable : Litteratura ! Coordonnée par Marc Biancarelli et Jérôme Luciani, une revue d’une grande générosité : articles, dossiers, interviews, parole aux éditeurs ou aux libraires… Le tout dans un style sobre et percutant 📖

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

Pour apprendre à écrire, laissez tomber les ateliers d'écriture bidons.
Lisez des livres.

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@lesmakers_fr Ah bon ? On peut apprendre en lisant des livres ? C'est incroyable.
Ne confondez pas écrivain et rédacteur.
Et surtout, pourquoi votre liste ne contient pas les seuls ouvrages où l'on apprend réellement à écrire ?

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

Arrêtez de lire vos conneries de développement personnel et lisez de vrais auteurs.

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

Vous aspirez à devenir rédacteur numérique ?
Voici les étapes essentielles :

• Créez du contenu de niche
• Optimisez votre bio et définissez votre domaine de prédilection
• Apprenez à créer des titres percutants et des accroches efficaces
• Lisez, lisez, lisez !

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@Chuuupz @FlorentinDorea1 Merci pour ta réponse, Geoffrey.

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@Chuuupz @FlorentinDorea1 Quand tu dis "rentabiliser rapidement", tu penses à quel genre de délai ?

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@FlorentinDorea1 D'accord. Merci beaucoup Florentin.

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@FlorentinDorea1 D'accord. Tu confirmes donc que pour la vente de liens, rien ne vaut les expis ? Je travaille sur un domaine neuf en ce moment mais je pense que c'est une perte de temps...

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@FlorentinDorea1 D'accord. Merci Florentin. Ce sont tous des expis ?

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

Un youtubeur que j'accompagne depuis un moment m'a dit : "On s'en fiche des fautes de grammaire dans les synthés. Personne ne les lit..."
Grosse erreur.

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

2/2. C’est qui Bill ? Pourquoi entre-t-il dans cette pièce, et qu’est-ce qu’il y a dans cette pièce ? Et qu’est-ce qui attend Bill dans cette foutue pièce..?

Essayez la prochaine fois que vous sécherez devant votre page.

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

1/2. Voici comment Hemingway luttait contre le syndrome de la page blanche ; il se forçait à écrire la phrase la plus vraie possible : « Bill ouvre la porte et entre dans la pièce… »

[Nicolas Cole 🚢👻 @Nicolascole77]

A decade ago, I was a broke copywriter living in a run-down studio apartment in Chicago.

But today, I run a portfolio of writing businesses doing over $6,000,000 in annual revenue.

So, if you actually want to make money as a writer, then you need to hear these 8 brutal truths:

Brutal Truth #1: If you want to earn a full-time living as a writer, you have to work twice as hard as everyone else to get there.

You’re competing against people like me who, now, spend 8-10 hours per day writing.

But for a long time, that’s not how it was. Instead, I was working a full-time job doing work for someone else for 8-10 hours per day, and the only time I had to work on my own writing was from 8 or 9pm to midnight and weekends.

So, the first step is you need to get yourself in a position where you’re writing or practicing writing all hours of the day. And my recommendation to accomplish that as quickly as possible would be to start ghostwriting. It’s a very lucrative side-hustle that can quickly eclipse whatever you’re making from your full-time job.

Then, once you’re ghostwriting and basically getting paid to practice, you can start to invest more and more hours each day into your own writing.

But the brutal truth here is: you need to recognize that to earn a full-time living as a writer, you need to invest as much of your extra time as possible into practicing your craft.

There’s a great documentary on Netflix about the Dallas Cowboys’ Cheerleaders, called America’s Sweethearts, and it’s a great example of the kind of work ethic you need to have to live your dream.

• These girls don’t get paid a full-time salary to dance
• They work other jobs
• And then spend every other waking moment training and practicing dance—either with the team, or by themselves.

That’s the sort of work ethic you need to have to become successful at anything, including writing.

Brutal Truth #2: If you want to become a successful non-fiction writer, you need to become a world-class marketer. And if you want to become a successful fiction writer, you need to become relentlessly prolific.

If you notice, all the most successful & highest-paid non-fiction writers aren’t just “writers.”

They are entrepreneurs—or at a minimum, entrepreneurial. They also have other lucrative businesses that allow them to throw money at marketing their books:

• James Clear, author of Atomic Habits, has other businesses and is an amazing marketer.

• Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck, has other businesses and is an amazing marketer.

• Ryan Holiday, author of The Obstacle Is The Way, has other businesses and is an amazing marketer. He’s even said he makes more money selling his little Stoicism coins than he does his books, and he’s one of the most successful non-fiction authors of the past decade.

• Even Malcolm Gladwell, the author of The Tipping Point, has other businesses and is an amazing marketer.

Becoming successful with non-fiction has a lot less to do with the quality of writing or how many books you pump out, and much more to do with your ability to build a content engine around your chosen non-fiction topic category. There are many, many (including NYT best-sellers) that are mediocre when it comes to the writing. What matters is the outcome the reader gets from reading it.

On the flip side, all the most successful & highest-paid fiction writers actually aren’t that great of marketers.

It’s a huge deficit for them. And yet, they still rake in huge amounts of money.

Why?

Because they relentlessly publish new books.

An author like Matt Dinniman, author of the LitRPG series Dungeon Crawler Carl, is a great example.

• He has almost no social media following.
• He’s not a world-class marketer.
• He has no complicated funnel.

But he’s published 6 books in his Dungeon Crawler Carl series, each one 500+ pages.

And a quick sales search using Publisher Rocket shows that between print books, ebooks, and audiobooks, each book in his Dungeon Crawler Carl series is currently doing over $200,000 per month in revenue.

So his series is generating over a million a month in top-line revenue, of which he’s probably taking home 10-20% (between Amazon fees and publisher fees). But he only get there by publishing a lot of volume, and being prolific in a specific category.

To summarize:

• Non-fiction writers: you need to invest heavily in becoming a world-class marketer (and ideally building a business that can fuel your marketing efforts).

• Fiction writers: You need to do whatever you have to do to write and publish a LOT of fiction. If you don’t, good luck achieving your goals.

Onto the next brutal truth.

Brutal Truth #3: Making money exclusively as a “legacy writer” is unnecessarily hard.

I’m using the word “unnecessarily” on purpose.

A lot of writers romanticize what it means to be successful, thinking that you’re only a “real writer” if you earn money exclusively from selling books. This one hurts because for years I struggled with the same thing.

But the reality is, that’s a very unnecessary way of looking at:

• Your career
• And how you should measure success

Here’s why, as a product, books are far from the most lucrative way to monetize your talents:

• They’re price capped—a reader isn’t willing to pay more than $20 maybe $30 for a book.

• And they’re one-off - there’s no recurring revenue and most people only buy books once (and the only time they buy them twice is if they lose the original copy, want a different format, or gift to someone else).

You unlock so much more upside for yourself as a writer when you change the definition of “what it means to be successful” from “I can only write books” to “I can monetize all of my writing in all sorts of different ways”

Books are part of this, but so are:

• Courses
• Paid newsletters
• Consulting, (e.g. on positioning)
• Services, like ghostwriting
• 1:1 coaching, helping other writers or helping businesses with their writing

There are so many other ways to monetize your talents as a writer. And there’s a reason why non-fiction writers like James Clear, Mark Manson, and Ryan Holiday all monetize their skills in a variety of other ways.

So, if you only measure success by “selling books,” your path is not only going to be harder and take longer, but you’re going to leave a lot of money on the table.

And this is also true for fiction writers.

With fiction, you’re primarily making money selling books and audiobooks, but there are so many other ways you can monetize too:

• You can monetize other content, or content-in-progress behind a paywall on Patreon.

• You can monetize again with a paid newsletter, “writing about the writing” and giving readers a behind-the-scenes look at your process.

• You can monetize again by hosting writing workshops, showing other writers how to write like you… like hosting a paid webinar, for example. I did this showing other writers how to use ChatGPT and we did over $63,000 in sales in 72 hours.

• You can even monetize again by putting together a fiction writing course, sharing your process and frameworks for writing fiction.

So many writers don’t do any of these things, and they leave so much money on the table as a result.

And I always find the reason they don’t do any of these things is because of some version of the faulty belief:

“If I do that, I'm not a real writer.”

Which is never, ever true.

Brutal Truth #4: You can’t measure success over days. You have to measure it over decades.

It is very, very, very hard to unlock massive success as a writer in:

• Year 1
• Or Year 2
• Or even Year 3

Sure, you can start unlocking small wins.

For example, anyone can start ghostwriting Year 1 and start earning $5k or $10k+ per year. I’ve seen it happen over and over again in our Premium Ghostwriting Academy.

But it’s very rare for a writer, Year 1, to go from 0 followers to tens or hundreds of thousands of followers online, and $20k+ per month in revenue—whether it’s from selling a service like ghostwriting, or selling their own books or digital products.

So you have to really internalize that if you want to “make it” as a writer, you’re not playing a year-long game. You’re playing a decade-long game—ideally a multi-decade long game.

If you stop 3 months in, or 6 months in, or a year in, you have to realize you’re not allowing any of this compounding to occur. And a lot of the biggest rewards as a writer don’t get unlocked until year 5, or year 10.

And it’s so easy to point at people who have the level of success you want and say:

“Well it was easy for them.”

No it wasn’t.

The first few years of me trying to get going as a writer were BRUTAL:

• I was making like $15 per hour.
• I didn’t have AC or any furniture.
• Commuting an hour to work each way.
• And could only work on my writing from 9pm to midnight.

I had a desk and a bed and that was it.

So don’t get confused. It’s hard for everyone.

The question is whether or not you have the patience and the determination to gut through the first few years where progress is slow. Because I promise, Year 3, Year 4, Year 5, when momentum starts to pick-up, you’re going to feel the complete opposite: you’re going to think, “Wow, that didn’t take so long.”

I’m living that right now.

Back when I was 23 years old, every day felt like a year. It was so hard. It felt like it was taking forever. Now, I’m 34 years old, and I just bought my dream house from the money I’ve made writing, and monetizing my writing in a dozen different ways. And now, looking back, I’m actually shocked how fast it happened. The past 10 years flew by.

So you just have to gut through the first 3 years. And trust that the longer you stick with something, the more your chances for success go UP.

Brutal Truth #5: Writing is a lottery, so optimize for volume.

This is true for pretty much every creative industry because you never know what’s going to resonate.

Generally speaking, I’ve learned that the piece you spend 100 hours on is probably going to flop. Whereas the piece you spend 10 minutes on and just hit publish on (even though you hate it or think it isn’t your best work) ends up going massively viral.

You have no idea what’s going to hit and what’s not.

And so the best approach is to actually forgo control and stop trying to plan it all out.

• The more shots on goal you take, the more likely you are to succeed.

• The less shots on goal you take, the less times you spin the lottery wheel, the less likely you are to succeed.

So, don’t over-complicate it, and don’t think you know better than the market, because you don’t. The market is fickle. You never know what the market is going to like.

Just let your ideas rip, and let the chips fall where they fall.

Brutal Truth #6: Reading doesn’t make you a better writer. Writing makes you a better writer.

This is a hard one to understand as a beginner, but I’ll tell you the moment this clicked for me.

Back in like 2014, I was watching the Lil Wayne documentary about him making The Carter III album. And there’s a clip in there where an interviewer asks him who he listens to for inspiration, and he says, “Myself.” And then the interviewer, confused, clarifies and says, “No but I mean, who else, what other artists do you listen to for inspiration?” And he just looks at them with this dead-faced stare and says, “I don’t. I record all day. I listen to myself. I hear what I want to improve. And then I record again.”

And that was the moment I realized that if I wanted to become a professional writer, I needed to write a LOT more than I read.

Now, obviously reading can be a great supplement to your writing. I am always studying other writers, and I know the value in reading.

But I find the vast majority of writers over-rotate here. They have do two things:

They start using reading as a way to productively procrastinate.

They use reading as a vehicle to AVOID writing—because writing is hard, and it’s much easier to just read other people’s work and tell yourself, “I’m studying! I’m improving!” No, you’re not.
The more you read, the more you get better at reading. But not writing.

The way you get better at writing is BY WRITING.

Which is why, to drive the point home, I like to say very bluntly to beginner and even advanced writers:

Reading doesn’t make you a better writer. Writing makes you a better writer.

But perhaps you’re worried your writing won’t be any “good” once you start.

Here’s where the next brutal truth will help.

Brutal Truth #7: There’s no such thing as “good” or “bad” writing. Only effective and ineffective writing.

Remember: good and bad are entirely subjective.

Your favorite writer might be somebody I really don’t enjoy, and my favorite writer might be someone you really don’t enjoy. And that’s fine.

The subjectivity of writing is what makes it so fun to consume.

Which means, as a writer, you really need to understand that there’s no such thing as being a “good writer.” Because good is entirely subjective.

Instead, a much clearer aspiration for yourself is to be an effective writer.

And when I say effective, I mean is:

• Are you able to speak to your target reader?

• Do they see themselves in your writing?

• Are you EFFECTIVE in reaching them, helping them, or entertaining them?

Because if you are, then you are a great writer.

Because your writing is effective, and it is causing the outcome you (and your reader) desire.

Which also means it really doesn’t matter who, outside of that target reader, doesn’t like your writing. That’s a subjective decision.

The only thing that matters is you are reaching the sort of person you want to help or entertain, and you are doing so EFFECTIVELY.

Brutal Truth #8: If you aren’t achieving your goals as a writer, it’s your fault.

Before you go, “Hey Cole, you’re going way too far…!”

This as an empowering statement, not a demoralizing one.

There is always a reason why something isn’t working. There just is. Which means, objectively, if something isn’t working, or resonating, your ONLY job is to figure out what it is.

Because let me tell you a 100% guaranteed way for you to not succeed:

• Blame the platform
• Blame the industry or niche
• And blame the customer / reader

You gain nothing when you blame “external forces” for something not working. And it is a 100% guaranteed way to make sure you don’t improve.

Whereas if instead of pointing the finger, you pull the thumb, and you ask yourself how you need to improve, well, now you have a path forward.

Ask yourself these questions:

• “What DON’T I know how to do?”
• “What do I think is true, that isn’t?”
• “What am I not doing enough of (volume)?”
• “What am I doing enough of, but need to do better?”
• “What am I doing enough of, to the best of my ability, but might not actually be the thing that moves the needle for me?”

These are the self-reflective questions you have to ask to find your path forward.

And I can tell you after mentoring thousands of writers in our writing programs, a lot of writers don’t do this. Instead, they just kick their feet up and say, “This doesn’t work for my niche” or “That worked for them but it won’t work for me.” They defer responsibility.

Which is why I always laugh when people look at me and say, “Oh, you were ahead of the curve” or “Oh you have it easy because you have a better niche than I do,” or whatever the excuse is.

Because I can promise you, 10 years ago, nobody was saying any of that to me. In fact, everyone was saying the opposite:

• “Nobody is going to pay you for that.”
• “You’re never going to make a living as a writer.”
• “All writers are overworked and underpaid.”

So stop blaming external circumstances you can’t control, and start focusing on the 1 variable you CAN control, which is yourself:

• Your habits
• Who you learn from
• And the actions you choose to take

All of these will determine whether you stay on your journey of becoming a successful writer.

Check out this clip where I explain the first of these brutal truths:

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@Elliott_bobiet Et les jours où tu gagnes 9€, tu manges un sandwich dans un PMU gastronomique ?

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@Elliott_bobiet "De magnifiques hôtels parisiens"...Avec 200 balles par jour maximum tu vas te retrouver à l'ibis de la porte de la Chapelle.

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@LudovicJean13 @hiddenliburua Oui c'est bien ce film.

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@adrienbseo Et tu ferais quoi exactement ? Affiliation ? Vente de liens? Sinon, très bonne idée. Ça m'intéresse également.

[Nicolas Cotto @ncbc75]

@hiddenliburua Je vous conseille d'ailleurs de lire le livre si ce n'est pas déjà fait. On oublie souvent que Schoendoerffer était également un grand écrivain. La plupart de ses films sont tirés de ses romans : La 317e section, le Crabe-Tambour, Là-haut...