After seven years of chasing side hustles, I’ve tried pretty much everything. Affiliate sites that took months to rank. Dropshipping stores that ate into weekends and customer service sanity. A YouTube channel that demanded constant content just to stay relevant. Each one taught me something, but none of them ever gave me what I was really after… money that comes in while I’m asleep, while I’m at my kid’s game, while I’m doing literally anything else.

That’s the dream, right? True passive income. Not “passive” in the influencer sense where you’re still grinding 40 hours a week behind the scenes. Actually passive. Something you build once and it keeps working for you.

That’s what pulled me toward ebooks.

I’d seen people talking about Kindle Direct Publishing for a while and honestly brushed it off. It felt too simple, almost suspicious. But the more I looked into it, the more it clicked… you create a book, you upload it, Amazon does the selling. No inventory, no shipping, no customer emails at 11pm. The asset just sits there and either earns or it doesn’t.

So on December 14th, 2025, I jumped in. No course, no mentor, no real clue what I was doing. Just a willingness to move fast and figure it out as I went; which, after seven years of side hustles, is honestly the only way I know how to operate.

I decided on eBook Writer AI from numerous friends and publishers input as my base AI platform to help kickstart my business, purchased the unlimited tier to be able to create as many books as I could.

In that first month, working across just 14 days, I uploaded 30 books. Amazon KDP currently caps you at 10 publications per week, so I worked hard to hit that ceiling as consistently as I could. Was everything perfect? Absolutely not. I was a complete newbie making newbie mistakes in real time. Absolutely YES!

And at the end of it all, I had earned $7.83.

I know what you’re thinking. Seven dollars. Eighty-three cents. That’s not exactly a life-changing number. But here’s why it mattered to me, that $7.83 came in from books I had already finished. I wasn’t trading hours for it anymore. The work was done, and the machine was running. After years of side hustles that demanded constant attention, that tiny number felt like proof of concept.

This series will follow this story of how I build it, what I learn, and exactly what I’d do differently if I were starting from scratch today.