Robert Enright: From Side Hustle to Full-Time Author

This transcript is auto-generated and lightly edited for readability, it may contain errors.

[0:00] Sammie Ellard-King: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Money Gains podcast. This is your host, Sammie Ellard-King, and today my guest is Robert Enright, who’s an independent author, and we have a really great chat about his journey, how essentially he was working full-time and was working on his side hustle in his spare time as a writer and his journey over a course of nearly a decade to get to where he wants to be. And he is now absolutely killing it with his series Sam Pope. And we really chat about all the effort that has to go in to really get a side hustle off the ground. And I think it’s a really, really good uh conversation. So if you’re listening on YouTube, please do whack that subscribe button. And if you’re listening on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, you know what to do. Leave us a review. Thanks very much, and let’s get started on the Money Gains Podcast. So Rob, welcome to the Money Gains Podcast, man. How are you doing? You well?

[1:11] Robert Enright: I’m very well, thank you. Thank you for having me. How are you? I’m good, thank you. Yeah, crazy week this week. First week self-employed and full-time on the business. So it’s been a bit bit of an eye-opener trying to get myself into a routine. How are you feeling? Yeah, good, good. It’s great because I can you know spend Wednesday afternoons creating content with you. So that’s you know, that’s the that’s the joys of it, man. It’s the dream. It is the dream, yeah. But I am really excited to chat with you today. Um, you know, your journey is slightly different to some of the guests that we’ve had on, and I really wanted to unpack it, you know, your journey of how you’ve gone full-time with your business, and then kind of understanding the nuts and bolts of what it took to make that happen. But just to give a reader um listeners, not readers, you know, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Um give the listeners a bit of context of who you are, please, mate.

[2:07] Robert Enright: Okay, so um, I’m Robert Enright, um, and I am a full-time independent author. Um, so I I basically self-publish all of my own action thriller novels. So if you want a flavour of that, think of Jack Reacher. Um, obviously wildly popular, is probably the most famous one. Um, that kind of genre. Um, I have a series, uh, the characters called Sam Pope. And yeah, I’ve I’m just in the final third of the twelfth book in the series that I’m writing at the moment. So yeah, that’s what I’ve um been doing over the past few years. Um started the journey eight years ago, over eight years ago now. Um, but I only went full time as an author uh September last year. So I’m now nine months, I’m nine months ahead of you on the uh self-employed uh front. So yeah, it’s this um so it’s a well-worn road you’re about to go down, my friend.

[3:02] Sammie Ellard-King: How are you finding it? Um I love it. It it’s it’s it’s beyond what I thought it would be. Um and all the worries I had when I started have very quickly dissipated um just through you know just how it’s going and the more stuff I put out, the you know, the easier it becomes. Um obviously this is a um financial podcast. We talk about money here, so um that side of it has been better than I thought it would be. Um but I you know without the restraints and the restrictions of a full-time job, I’ve been able to push things in the way that I want it to be. Nice. So let’s roll back the years a little bit. Obviously, before you came up with this idea, were you always a writer?

[3:50] Robert Enright: So I I think probably from a very young age, I used to do a lot of creative writing. I’ve always had a bit of a wild imagination. Um quite a violent imagination, according to my wife. She’s read one of my books, found it too violent, and then refuses to read anymore. Um however, her mother-in-law’s a big fan. Like my mother-in-law’s a big fan, so that’s uh that’s a weird one. There you go. Um but I think when I was like in my teens, I wanted to write comics because I’m a nerd, and then obviously that’s really difficult because I can’t draw. And then I started writing film screenplays because I thought I’d be a film writer. And then what I did was I think I was just struggling to find what I wanted to do. I knew writing was a passion of mine, like I would find time to sit and write. No, no one’s paying me to do it, I would just do it. I’d have an idea, I’d want to do it. Like me and friends would come up with ideas for sitcoms, and you know, we’d start for two weeks, and then people can’t be bothered to do it anymore because they don’t get success immediately or anything like that. And then what I did is I I I finished a screenplay finally. I wanted to prove to myself I could see something through to the end. Did nothing with it, but then I actually turned that into my first ever novel. So I turned a 90-page screenplay into a hundred and twenty thousand-word book, and then that was the first book I released. So it’s been it’s been a long time that I wanted to write.

[5:16] Sammie Ellard-King: And you were doing this all while working full-time. Yeah, so I I went into full-time employment straight out of college. Um I wasn’t the most academic person. I love to learn, but I’m not an academic person. Um, I was a horrible student. I feel bad now, like for the teachers, because I was that student that was like, I don’t want to learn this, I’d rather learn double that. Um, but I went straight into full-time work from the age of like 17, 18. So um, and obviously, as I progressed, I got into like systems and data and analytics and something that keep my mind occupied while I focused on what my passion was, and that was always it. It was always like, Oh, I do this, but I want to be a writer. Um, just the better you get it, the more you progressed up and up and up. So the more I kind of got into writing books, the busier my work life became because I was like progressing up in the business.

[6:12] Sammie Ellard-King: You get you get you go up that mountain and you’re like, and then suddenly you go, Um, I wasn’t sure I actually wanted to do this, but here I am, a manager of a team. It’s like, oh my god, now I’ve actually got real life responsibilities, and I have to write reports for bosses, etc. Like, I’ve been there, man. It’s uh it’s one of those things you but you know they turn around and say, Yeah, but there’s ten grand extra a year, and you go, Well, yeah, I could maybe I can do it. You know, it’s like to do more work. Yeah, yeah, you know, you you’re sort of thinking, oh, I could probably do less, but uh it doesn’t work out that way, does it? No, never. So during this time, um, what were you like with money?

[6:58] Robert Enright: So I I was rubbish with money until I met my wife. So I um I’ve been with Soph for nine years this year. Uh been married for four. Um so before then, so I 36 hours. Yeah, you were there, yeah. We should probably let people know we we you our our partners went to I think to uni together or they lived together in their early 20s. So um um but yeah, it was a it was a wonderful wedding. Um but before that, before I met Soph, I wasn’t good with money. I was a proper paycheck to paycheck person. I I didn’t have any savings, I didn’t, you know, I I was at one point I was living in my best friend’s family home because it was cheaper for me to live there because I was yeah, I just didn’t do much. And I had a I had a PC that my brother donated to me that was like eight years old at the time, because I was just I didn’t I didn’t prioritize you know the sensible thing. I was I was the the textbook 20 young 20 in their young 20s just spending money going out four or five times a week and stuff, and then um you know it took it took a sensible woman to straighten me out.

[8:16] Sammie Ellard-King: I uh I can relate. Really can man. I was exactly the same as you, you know, like early 20s, just spunking money up the wall. But unfortunately, I also got um got hooked on credit as well, so I had quite a deep amount of credit cards and and personal loans and uh worked myself into a right hole. And it’s easily done, man, because we’re we’re let loose as this young 20-year-olds, like we’re extremely social, we want to go out, we want to meet people, and we’re kind of suddenly like, oh yeah, like we don’t actually have any money to chauffeur or anything, you know. We we have no savings, and and suddenly we’re we’re forced to admit that to ourselves. And sometimes it can take a good woman to do that for us.

[9:03] Robert Enright: Absolutely. I mean it it’s the I think the most terrifying thing I’ve had with money. Um, like I said, I’ve been good with money now for like nearly a decade, like sensible with it. But I think the most terrifying thing um I had in my 20s was that the credit card became part of my monthly like reliance. Like I would use I would I would never get out of it, I’d always be dipping into my credit card. So I was always stacking up more on the credit card because I’d always need to subsidize myself because I just wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing, and that’s a really when you get when you get confronted with that, that you’re you’re actually living outside of your means because you’re having to add more debt every month, when you finally realise that it’s quite a daunting thing.

[9:54] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s a weird moment. You have this like aha moment in your head, and it’s a kind of self-reflection in a in a way, and you you see a side of yourself that you had kind of been very much putting the mental blockers on for such a long time, and it can be quite uh depressing as well, and it you know, it can cause you a bit of anxiety. Some people really don’t like addressing that about themselves, and but if you do have that moment, and when it does come, because it will come eventually for some people, hopefully, um, you know, it take it, take it by the horns, take that moment by the horns, and it’s how you react in that moment that will define the rest of your financial success. I really do believe that. And when was that moment? Was it meeting sof or was it did you have it slightly before? Were you already thinking about it?

[10:43] Robert Enright: I think it was it was again, it’s it’s it’s in the back of your head, isn’t it? You know it’s not a good idea to spend another hundred pounds on a credit card, but you do it because everyone’s going out. And I I I also had like my best friends, I have like a close group of like six, six guys that we’ve all grown up together, and a lot of them went into quite high-paid jobs quite young, like they’re all in banking and coding and all that stuff. So they were living uh, yeah, and I I I didn’t have the means that they did, but I’d still attend the things that they attended, and so I think you you start understanding the more you see that um overdraft, every time you’re using your overdraft and then you’re seeing your credit card creep up, you you can feel it nagging at the back of your head. But you’re just like you’re saying you’re not you’re not confronting it, and then it was with Soph that I think I had probably about four thousand pounds on a credit card that I was never gonna pay off. And I was living in a house share in my like late mid to late 20s, and obviously she’s like, Well, what are we gonna do? Like, if you know, if we’re gonna make a go of this eventually at some point, like we’re gonna have to move out and get a place, and then we did eventually move in together, and that was when it was like, right, I really need to um sort this out, we need to start saving because actually nothing good is gonna happen if I don’t like reverse this trend. It was quite a sobering moment, but it was a bit a very important one.

[12:58] Sammie Ellard-King: Oh mate, I can I completely see this. There’s a lot of parallels to how it happened with me, and it’s just like it’s uh suddenly you’re like, okay, cool. What is the next step? I you know, if there’s a future for me, then I can can’t continue down this road. I’ve had my fun, I won’t regret what I did because it taught me a lot, it put me in the position I am today. And so, yes, all right, you know, it was a crap, you know, 18 months getting rid of sort of 20 grand plus worth of debt, but it it it needed to be done, and it was always gonna have to happen at some point, and it just so happened that I I managed to to think about it in my you know mid to late 20s rather than you know 30s and 40s, which thankfully happened. So, yeah. So I just wanted to so we’re just gonna talk a little bit about this moment then for you, because you you become the writer. Uh, did you start the first Sam Pope book during the time you were with Sophie, or is it before that? How was that transition from the first book into the into this series?

[14:07] Robert Enright: So so the first book is just like a standalone book based on a movie idea. It was again it was like an action you know, revenge film. And then I actually got a publishing deal um for a different series, like a more of like a Men in Black type series. And I met with a publisher who you know told me all the things I wanted to hear, wrote the book, they published it, they it didn’t sell anything, they kind of offered me no hope on anything. So I actually took my rights back from them, and then I got approached by another publisher who I went with, and again, the same thing, they just didn’t really have a plan. They were just it’s one of those things where they just hide they get as many authors on their roster as possible, hoping that one of them would do well, and the others don’t worry about it, and it’s absolutely devastating. And I still keep in contact with other authors who are on the books of these publishers. Um, you know, some of them aren’t even writing anymore, some of them are just you know dabbling. But I got told by one of my publishers, I still got the email somewhere, and it’s good to keep this type of stuff as an impression. Someone just said, Um, sorry, but your books just aren’t sellable.

[15:21] Sammie Ellard-King: Wow. So I was like, okay, cool. Well, thank you very much. Like, let’s go our separate ways. I do have this other um idea, and I pitched the Sam Pope series to a very big publisher um who said, Yeah, it sounds interesting. Why don’t you write it and then we can have a chat? So I was like, okay, I’ll go away and I’ll write it. And then halfway through writing it, I was just like, Why am I waiting for someone else to give a damn about my book when no one’s gonna care about it more than me? So then so then that’s when I started writing. So I started writing the Sam Pope series, it’ll be five years this year that the first book came out. So I was already three years into my author journey. I’d been self-published and published over those three years, and in that three-year period I’d made less than £400 in total across those years, and yeah, that is enough to knock your confidence or or put you off. But that was the moment I decided not, I’d either take this seriously and give it a go. Similar to like you with um going full-time with your uh with with other gains and and and your self-employed business, is either give this my all or I stop trying to do it. And then that’s when I started like really investing not just the money but like the time into it. And then yeah, it’s been Sam Pope’s been a success to the point that the publisher has reached out to me saying, Oh, would you like to publish through us? And I get to say, No, I’m fine because I’m selling enough as it is, which is quite nice.

[16:58] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s a good it’s a good position to be in, position of power, man, for sure. Go out and prove yourself. It’s kind of like uh you see these days as well a lot of the musicians doing similar things, you know. They’ve yeah, they’re like, No, I’m not gonna take the label deal, I’m gonna do it myself. Why? Because you’ve got uh Spotify and iTunes and TikTok, and that’s all you need. And you can blow up and you can sell out your own tours and you can do your own thing. So it’s a it’s a really similar way of thinking about it. So talk to us about this 400 quid because this moment’s quite pivotal for a lot of people. A lot of people would have put the pen down. Uh, you know, if you think about the amount of time you invested into that in writing those books, you know, your your hour, your hourly rate or your hour rate of pay must have been pittance, right? So, like how Yeah, man, like you know, if that. And so how do you like how do you get yourself through that? What was the mental kind of chat that you had to have your yourself at that point? Because as you know, as you say, it could have gone one or two ways.

[17:58] Robert Enright: I think I’m quite lucky in that my business, which it is, I am a business owner, um, I actually own a publishing house, I just publish myself now. But it is I’m lucky that it was all it’s my passion, it’s what I actually like doing for fun, and very few people get to do that for a living, what they really, really enjoy doing. Um, so there was always that element of it that just because someone told me, or just because someone says, Oh, I can’t sell this book, to me doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea, it just means that they’re incapable of selling it. That’s how I saw it. Um But I do have this sort of ingrained thing in my head that well, if I don’t do it, if I give it a go, it might happen. If I don’t give it a go, it will never happen. So I was always just sort of umming and Ring that I would get picked up by a publisher. That’s why I carried on doing it for those few years. And then it wasn’t until I had those bad experiences with publishers that that was the moment for me. Because you have to understand now that I do it myself, I can write a book and I can have it out on the electronic and paperback shelves within a month because I’m in control of everything. Publishers be like, Oh, yeah, write this book, and then in nine months’ time we’re gonna release it because they’ve got other books, they’ve got other books, other priorities. So for I’d say half of that three years, I was just sitting around waiting for them to publish my books. Obviously, while starting to write the next one and coming up with other ideas, but obviously I had a full-time job, and you know, if someone’s saying, Yeah, it’s gonna be six months till your book comes out, it’s like okay, well, I may as well focus on the other book. So luckily I didn’t have like an instant, you know, soul-crushing disappointment of oh yeah, this book doesn’t sell, it kind of filtered in over the years. Um then I think you were already working on the next one. I was, and then I also started to, and this is for me is a really important thing, is I started following people who were doing what I wanted to do, and then I was seeing what they were achieving, and then I started looking at how they were achieving it, as opposed to just sort of going, Well, I’ve put my book out there, why is no one reading it? I was looking at what they were doing, and then that’s where my mindset started shifting to I should do this myself.

[20:21] Sammie Ellard-King: It’s a it’s a mad thing. It’s it I I really like hats off to you, man, because you know, sticking that out, you know, I it’s lonely, right? As well, you’re writing books, that that journey is is lonely. So to keep yourself going and to you know be the success that you are today, like I you know, hats off to you. So talk to us about this moment then. So that when the first book started to do some numbers, you got into this, okay. So if we took it of the context of like any side hustle, it’s starting to work, things are starting to happen. Talk to us about that journey that you went on, essentially, from I’m starting to make a bit of money out of this, but you carried on working for a few years, and then when did you get to that moment? And and what was the kind of key point there?

[21:12] Robert Enright: So there were two paths I could have trod when I started to sell books. One was hey, I’ve got extra money this month, and I’ve seen some author I yeah, I mean I’m quite active in the independent author community, and um like I have a I have a podcast about being an indie author with with a friend of mine. So I I I I watch a lot, and there are people who go, Hey, I made like 80 quid this month, that’ll pay for my coffees this month, but my mentality’s always been different. That’s like, well, that’s 80 pounds you could probably spend on advertising. So what I did is I went away and I did a lot of I turned to safe and I said I’m going to invest in online courses to learn how to do certain aspects that I don’t know how to do. I’ve never done mailing lists, I’ve never done Facebook advertising, I’ve never built a website. I’m gonna sit down, I’m gonna just spend all my evenings doing that, and I’ll pay for courses if I have to. And she was fully on board with it. Um, because you know, it could be worse. I could be out at the pub three nights a week, or I could just be sat in my office, you know, trying to build something following a passion. Um, but what happened was I I put loads of stuff in place. Like, like I said, I looked at what other authors were doing, I looked at what people who were doing well in the industry I wanted to do, what were they doing, and what was driving that success and everything. So I signed up to their mailing list so I could see what they were sending out to people. Um I was scanning their websites, I was everything I could. Do just to absorb it, and then if I needed to go and do something similar, I’d figure out how to do it. So then when I launched Sam Pope, the first book, um, The Night Shift, I made in the first month of it over 500 pounds, which you know it’s it’s it’s a nice amount of money, but it’s more than I’d made in the however many years previous. And that was like a watershed moment for me because it was okay, cool, I’ve got an extra 500 pounds a month, or I don’t have an extra 500 pounds a month, but I’ve now got a 500 pound marketing budget, and that was the mentality I had the entire way through that any money that comes in from the books, apart from the odd I’ll pay for dinner with with the booking, I had a separate bank account straight away for it to keep the money separate. It was everything that came into that bank account was off limits for the personal life. So the more I started investing in ads, and I’ve spent thousands of pounds, tens of thousands of pounds on Facebook ads that didn’t work. I’ve since spent tens of thousands of pounds on ads that have worked because I had to figure find out like that money wasn’t wasted because that money showed me how to get it right, but just month on month, say if I made £500, and then the next month I made £600, as long as I was tracking upwards, I was just making sure I was putting enough back in to keep growing it incrementally. Because I had a full-time job at this time. So if and I bought our first house, we’ve since had a kid. There’s always been things to be careful of. I create content, and this is like a content generation, the Netflix generation, isn’t it? People just want stuff immediately and they want more and more. Because I had to keep writing more and more books because it’s easier to sell someone now on a 12-book series of an author you don’t know than a one book from an author you don’t know. So that was what my focus was was keep pumping the money back in that I’m making whilst growing the catalogue. Because the more people I’m sending to it while the catalogue’s growing, the more people are just gonna get stuck in and stuck in, and that’s exactly what’s happened. I think it was like I had like a the plan was to go full-time as an author when I was 35, and I managed to hit that just by like five.

[25:26] Sammie Ellard-King: That’s wicked, man. So how so to take us through some of the numbers of the books today, like what’s uh what’s the how’s the Sam Pope series going? I’ve seen some of the Amazon review numbers and they’re wild, so yeah, it’d be great to hear. It’s exploded over the last year a bit more. That’s because I’ve up I’ve upped my spend and I’ve upped my obviously my creation um creative output because I’ve been now doing it full time for nine months. So whereas I used to be able to maybe do two books a year, I can now do I’ve done three books and I’m working on a fourth since I went full-time. And people be like, Oh, you can’t write a book that quickly, isn’t it? I can when it’s my job, and I have eight hours a day to dedicate to it. Um but yeah, those reviews, I think I’ve got about nearly 3,300 on the first book. That was at under a thousand a year ago, so it’s definitely rather dumb. But um I think in the last year, I mean I overall I’ve sold over a hundred and fifty thousand books now. Um since I’ve um launched Sam Pope. Um, and that includes there’s a an Amazon scheme called Kindle Unlimited, which is essentially their Netflix, which is where you pay a monthly subscription and you can download any books that are in the program, and then authors get paid per page read. It’s like a 0.003p per page read. But I get millions of page reads. I think last year I had like 15 million page reads, which equates to like 60,000 books or something. Um, and then the more books are going out, the the more it’s just growing and growing. So yeah, I think at the moment, this calendar year, I’m probably somewhere in the vicinity of like 40 to 50,000 books done already.

[28:35] Sammie Ellard-King: Wow, that’s amazing. And kind of what’s your like average profit margin per book at the moment? So the first book is the biggest seller because that’s the first in the series, and I put that at a reduced price because it makes sense. Bring people in, it only costs you £1.99. So I get a 70% royalty, so I get about £1.26 from the first book, but all the other books are £3.99, so I get like £2.70 per per sale. So if I go back, like last month was my best ever month, which is great. Every month, since I’ve been full-time, every month’s been better than the month before, which is what you want, right? Um yeah, and then I like launch books, and then when you get a launch when you launch a new book, we call it a pay rise because my monthly income goes up because I’ve got another book for people to read. Um but I think last month, if I include audio books in it as well, I probably made in and around £14,000 to £15,000, and I spent probably about six, six and a half thousand. So it’s about eight and nine program profit, which is amazing.

[29:53] Sammie Ellard-King: And then I’m just thinking of like what you you know that that’s ha you know, probably a lot more than your day top, right? At the end of it. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s mad. Like this calendar year so far, I’ve made more than my annual salary. And that’s like within nine months of leaving it, because I’ve been able to focus on it. Um but then you know I cover all the other costs, it’s not just pure profit. I could I don’t just cover the costs of marketing, I cover the costs of having an accountant, having a website, having a mailing list, all these things, like they all they all get paid by the money that it generates. Yeah, exactly. And people turn around and they say, Hey, I’ve got a hundred and fifty grand business. I’m like, Yeah, but you don’t. You have a 65 grand business because all your costs are you’re not including those when you say that. You know, you see all those Twitter bios and it’s like, yeah, I made seven figures last year, man. It’s like, oh right, cool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, you made about 100 grand, mate. Come on, let’s be honest. Like Matt, you were pumping back into ads. Um, but mate, that’s mental. So, like this journey for you is this is what I really it’s what I really wanted to get you on because I wanted to show people that these things don’t happen overnight. No matter how hard you try, your first book might not be a hit, your first side hustle might not be a hit, your first business might not be a hit. But if you have the determination and grit and you believe in yourself and you follow your passion and you follow your gut, the journey will happen for you, whether that’s in one year or ten years, it really doesn’t matter. It’s about the journey that you go on, and it’s about sticking to your guns. And that’s why I really like I love I love this story. I think it’s wicked, man. So so hats off to you. So last month is your most profitable month. What’s the what’s the goal now? Like you’ve got a few more left in the series. What’s next for you?

[31:54] Robert Enright: So so the next goal is I’ve been quite strategic um over this time. So I’ve plotted out the reason I can write books so quickly is I’ve had the each one plotted out for a while. Um, so I know when I’m moving on, okay, I know this is the next story, and then I link them back and I do a lot of back and forth. What I’ve started to do over the last five or six books is I’ve started introducing characters that I know people like that are now going to sort of get spin-off series. So there was like um so Sam Pope’s obviously action hero vigilante guy. In I think book eight, there was an undercover cop that was really fun to write and he was really popular, and I wrote him that way with the complete purpose of he’s gonna get a spin-off series as a detective, so I can then start writing a series more like the TV show Luther, that type of thing. So it’s a bit of a change of pace for me creatively, um, which is good for me because I like writing, but also instead of launching a book cold and trying to find an audience, I’ve already got a loyal audience of readers who are excited that that book is coming. So when I drop it, yeah, I know I know it’s gonna sell, but then because it’s gonna sell to my current readers, people who like that genre of book who maybe don’t know about the Sam Pope series will be drawn to it because it’s gonna do relatively well, and then um I’ve got a third spin-off series. So over the next two to three years, the plan is to kind of have three ongoing series um sort of interconnected, um, and just keep, you know. Ultimately, I’m a content creator, and it makes sense the more content I have, the the more success I’m gonna have. Um, so that’s really could you see this being TV? I’ve had someone who’s worked in the TV industry um write some screenplays for it and they said they’re gonna take it to people, but again, I I’m not focused on that. Um if it happened, it’d be very good. I do have some fun with um my followers on Facebook, on my official Facebook thing, where I I um put up like a casting call sheet of famous actors who have told me that yeah, and and then I let them vote on who they think it would be. So I’ve actually almost got like a dream cast of all the characters in the series. Obviously, a bit fine, it’s just for the engagement.

[34:34] Sammie Ellard-King: But um Yeah, for sure. Yeah, but no, maybe you see a TV or a film series. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t hold my breath. I’m not even sort of like invited to proper book events because I’m not a published author, because publishers don’t like people like me because I can prove that you can do it without them. So we’ll see, but that’s the plan. The plan is just to keep growing it, see how far I can get. It’s very much um similar to me when you say that, because it’s like financial advisors and accountants they hate me because I’m like a self-taught money guy that came in with a bit of personality and they’re like, uh, yeah, who’s this dude? Like, I don’t get invited to any of the of the uh the financial events yet. Uh so it’s quite funny.

[35:22] Robert Enright: Wait, until it becomes undeniable, that’s that’s the the big issue that a lot of people don’t get over. And it isn’t just in the books. So you’re you faced it in um the financial world, I’ve faced it in the publishing world. Um you’ve spoken about musicians. Based on what we’re able to do for ourselves nowadays, the technology that’s out there, the resources that are out there for free online, on YouTube, you can find a video for anything. Um gatekeeping is starting to crumble a little bit. People who are in positions of power who would say, This is a book that will sell, or this is the person, these are the only people you should listen to for financial advice. Those people are becoming not extinct irrelevant. But obviously, it’s their job, their business, to protect. So what they’ll do is they’ll try and almost put their foot on the head of anyone who’s disrupting it. But and a lot of people will go, well, I can’t do that because you know this is the way you do it. Well, just make a different way of doing it. That’s what you’re doing. You’re now building a career out of giving financial advice. And financial advice people don’t like it, but tough.

[36:42] Sammie Ellard-King: No, technically not allowed to say financial advice, financial education. Financial education, I get a big slap on that one if I but yeah, no, it’s a weird line. You you can’t cross it for some reason, but uh uh anyway. Um what if you if you were to give advice to someone, perhaps there’s someone out there really interested in writing, whether that be for a book, screenplays, or theatre, what’s your advice to you know young writers out there aspiring to get into the game? So I’m not gonna do the cliche one of believe in yourself, um, because I think you should just have that anyway. Um I think getting over yourself is um a good one to do. Um the amount of times I speak to authors who are like, Yeah, you know, I just you know I just don’t find I don’t feel motivated to write at the moment. It’s like, well, tough. Like tough, you don’t need to be motivated to do something. If you want to do it, you should be doing it when you’re not motivated, because then that shows how dedicated you are. It’s the same with like fitness or anything. You you do it on the days you don’t want to do it, and that’s how you know you’re you you need to be consistent. So there’s that. Um a really good one is something you alluded to, which was the overnight success. You know, it’s taken me eight years of quite a lot of hard work. You know, I’d written over a million words before I was even in the conversation of could I do this for a living? So, you know, overnight success, um it’s a saying, isn’t it? It’s overnight success takes five years or or you know, eight in my case. But you know, people don’t see the stuff you do that you don’t share with them, they just see that oh he’s a f he’s an author. You don’t know about all the hours I spent sat in a room writing writing a book. Um so you know it’s a long haul. You you might be the one in one million who writes a book and it sells a million books straight off the bat, it’s unlikely. But it’s the same with any business, isn’t it? It’s it’s you just it’s gonna take a long time to build up customers, build up your your quality, your content, whatever it is you’re doing. Yeah, the trust. But you know, if you’re selling, say you start up a t-shirt shop on Shopify, you know, that’s always an advert I see. But if you do that, you’re not gonna sell a million t-shirts straight out the bat. And I think a lot of people will do it for two weeks, maybe lose a bit of money and go, no, it isn’t for me. So I’d say, you know, go in for the long game. And probably the best bit of advice I’ve ever had comes from my wife, my my very sensible sage wife. Um she said to me, So when I was, I’d say a couple of years away from going full-time, I would always be looking at how I can make more money online. Yeah, I’m good now, I’m I’m good with marketing now, I’m good with websites, I learn all this stuff. How can I how can I use those skills to make some more income and then I can do this full time? And I was just I was chasing my tail on so many different things that she just sat me down and she was like, you know, what’s gonna get you there quicker? Trying to figure out another business or writing another book. And I was like, okay, well, writing another book. She was like, okay, then do that. And then the way she put it, and this is the most profound thing she’s ever said, was you can put your mind to anything, but you can’t put your mind to everything. And that was just like blow my mind. I mean, do you know what I mean? Out of nowhere, my wife comes out with this like like nugget of wisdom, but it was true, and so from that moment I just sort of drew a line under, you know, I could maybe come back to look at this, this was a good idea, but I’m not gonna do it now. And since then, I just focused squarely on the books, put what the end goal was completely in the centre of my mind, and that was it. So, anyway, if it’s a writer or an entrepreneur or business owner who’s starting out, remember that focus is on just that business and don’t try and you know spin a million plates when you really only need to spin one very, very well.

[41:03] Sammie Ellard-King: Great advice, great advice, and what a quote, I love it. That’s gonna stick with me that one. I need to I need to I need to I need to have that chat with myself, so yeah. Thanks, Sophie. That’s that’s work, don’t try that. It’s so easy done, man. We all get shiny object object syndrome, we see like, especially when you’re trying to make money online, it’s like, oh right, cool, you know, this new technique to get people to click these links, let’s try it. And actually, if you’d have just carried on writing blog content or books or putting out those social media posts that are doing so well instead of chasing this, that in the end, you’ll have more value and more time in this in this arena than you ever will over here. And you know, it’s just you’re just it’s that oh, I could make 50 quid doing that. If the one person clicks that and signs up, it’s it’s a different game. So yeah, great advice. I love it. So, Rob, it’s been an absolute pleasure, man. Thank you so much for coming on. Um, thank you. Where can people find you? Find the books?

[42:03] Robert Enright: Uh so all of my books are on Amazon. Um, so you can find them on there, it’s where most people go. If not, you can go to my website, uh www.robertenright.co.uk, um, where you can get the links on there. You can also get signed copies on there. You know, people fancy a more personal treat. Um, but I’m on um Facebook. Facebook’s probably where I majorly interact with people, which again is just Robert Enright. You’ll find the Facebook page on there and Instagram. But I I stay away from Twitter. Um, it’s just that’s a horrible place. So it’s not good for the mental health. Fair play. All right, man. Well, thank you so much. And uh yeah, I really encourage people to go and and read the books because uh the if you just have to look at the Amazon reviews and what people say about them, man. So um yeah, well done and and incredible journey so far. So thanks for coming on. Cheers.