Year End Results of TikTok & Publishing Books

In January of 2024, my goal with TikTok was to make lots and lots of videos promoting my books. I did that for about six weeks and decided I’d rather stab myself in the eye. Around this time, I saw a video on TikTok, a young woman, mid-30s, talking about making affiliate money from videos on TikTok, which instantly piqued my curiosity because I’d done a lot of affiliate articles in the early 2000s.

She said she’d been making some outrageous amount of money, like $130,000 since August, so like over a six-month period. By this point, I’m thoroughly disgusted with trying to market my books. I’ve been doing that for several years with limited success, and I was finishing up writing the last book in the series, which I wasn’t crazy about, and I thought, why not? Let’s give it a try.

TikTok affiliate videos, that is. So the first couple of months, I actually, it was probably the first four or five months; I was really widespread in my video topics, or products, I should say. One week, I’m trying to promote wrenches, and the next week, dragon toys.

I hardly made any money with the dragon toys, but I made about $1,300 with a semi-viral video about wrenches that were for sale on the TikTok shop. I had bought a set of those wrenches earlier in the year, and I was actually very impressed with what you got for how little money that they actually cost. So making a heartfelt video saying, hey, here’s a great product, and I had 40 years’ experience in auto repair, and if it’s good enough for me, it’s probably good enough for you.

That sold a lot of wrenches. I was hooked after that. I kept seeing creators, primarily young women, who were pitching everything but the kitchen sink, and I thought, yeah, that’s what I want to do.

I wanted to have a list of topics up on my page, but you need 10,000 followers to get the different links for different topics, and I didn’t have that. But I kept pitching all these different products with minimal success, and finally, long story short, we’ve got down to cats. That’s the niche I’m doing now, and that is actually starting to pay off.

I like cat videos. Nobody really gives you much grief with them. Not like the tool videos where everybody’s an expert and can’t wait to tell you that you’re an idiot. Life’s short, and the less of that, the better.

I don’t need that kind of nonsense. Most people are happy with their cat, not so much with their tools. TikTok’s funny.

There’s a lot of affiliates on there saying, hey, I made 100 grand this month, and there’s other people on there that said, hey, I worked 100 hours and I made a dollar. Yeah, the experience is very different from one person to the next.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve put enough time into it to make it a full-time job, but honestly, I’ve probably put part-time hours into it, mostly. If you really wanted to get down to it.

Between making affiliate videos and my books, I’ve probably made about $15,000 this year. With my social security, it’s not a bad income, so I’m happy. Life is short, do what makes you happy. If you can.

I had my own business for over 20 years in Hawaii, so the last thing I want to do is actually go get an actual job. That would mean I’d have to show up somewhere, and trade hours for a paycheck. Plus, I’d have to do what they tell me, and honestly, I’d probably get fired the first week.

I’ve been on my own too long. You know, they’d tell me to do something stupid, and I’d tell them to shove it, and that’d be the end of it. So anytime I can do an online gig, and I can make some money, and I don’t have to take no crap from nobody, it’s perfect.

I’m never going to get rich, but I’m going to be thrilled that I just do what I want to do when I want to do it. There’s a lot of happiness in that. In 2025, I’m going to keep producing videos on TikTok, and I’m going to start the next book in a completely different genre under a pen name.

I’m looking forward to making cat videos, and bank in 2025.