While I can agree that koby is being pretty unrealistic and is perhaps wasting his time here with his mentalities, hoping that he fails… a bit too hyped about his mental state you might be.
In terms of EA, there are more than a few reasons why, from a monetary standpoint, he would not produce books anymore. For one, he stated quite clearly that the production costs of those books was pretty steep. He fashioned them with a whole lot of stuff that cost a decent deal of money, and given his other avenues, it doesn’t make sense to pour a lot of money into producing physical books.
He’s since then placed his Complete Works for purchase digitally, or at least the last I heard of it. The production cost of digital releases is far lower than physical copy, perhaps only the amount of paying for a hosting site and, possibly, an online merchant account. Also, people cannot resell their digital copies to others without some sort of reprimand, as selling such could be done over and over again by the seller. So if people want his digital books, they come to him, and not someone who has the capability to resell their own shit.
Finally, EA’s 3 “Mastery” courses for astral travel, evocation, and divination, are always available for purchase in a digital format. Again, having this format keeps production costs far lower than creating continuous DVDs for them. He also has magick-for-hire services he is offering, so by no means does the limitation of physical copy books limit his income. I could bet that he makes far more money from the digital media he sells, but I couldn’t say for sure.
At any rate, I believe I was asked why I stopped doing what I did, and in answering I will also answer an inquiry I received from koby. What I did was primarily online work that involved going through a few loopholes in order to make what I was doing work. My mentor on this program first got me involved in a standard chain-letter type deal, which in most normal circumstances is illegal. The reason why is that those things are somewhat pyramid-like, and pyramids are illegal because, at a certain point, the pyramid theoretically outlasts the population of people on Earth.
I’m not sure I have to explain this, but let’s just say you have a pyramid that is supposed to be 10 levels deep. If I am on level one, I have a task of recruiting, let’s say, 10 people. They all pay their way into the pyramid, and they would be considered level 2. Those people who are recruited are instructed to get 10 people each, and the people the recruit would be 100. The idea is that the pyramid is set up so that in each level, the person higher up is getting paid from each level of the pyramid. The problem is that by the time you reach the 10th level, the population of the pyramid is, theoretically, over 10 billion people.
Many chain letters solved the pyramid problem by creating a system of cycling out people so that the system is only 6 levels. I’m sure some of you may have gotten emails in the past like this:
“This is a letter seen on “insert media avenue” that can make you 40K or more easily! Just $6 to start.”
Then you get instructions to send $1 to 6 names on a particular list, in this case it was paypal e-mails. So you get a list like this:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
What you did was that, as someone who entered this letter, you would send $1 to each person on the list. What you did once this was completed was that you inserted your name in the number 1 spot, and threw out the name in the #6 spot. So, your new list looks like this:
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
You then would advertise this list on several free venues such as craigslist (which doesn’t allow for that anymore), various yahoo and google groups, or, my personal favorite: web advertising safelists. You advertised this as much as you could, and after that, you simply waited until people did the same thing with that list.
The whole idea was that you name would get cycled farther and farther down the list, and as you cycled farther down, you cycled, the rate of people who sent you money grew exponentially. So, in level 2, 100 people got it. Level 3, 1000. Level 4, 10000. Level 5. 100000. Level 6, 100000.
This system, however, was also considered illegal after some time because there was exchange of item. Some lists tried to rationalize this as “paying your way onto the list,” but that also did not fly. So my mentor have created a list in which he the instructions called for each member to have “something” they sold to the person buying into the list. This something could be anything, including a file text file that said, “Congratulations, you are swell!” As long as it was a consistent item, you could have this list while satisfying all the legal ramifications.
I honestly did not think it would work, and yet it wound up working pretty damn well. By the end of 3 months, I had close to 80K just from advertising this list, which I used a multicolored vesica pisces to sell on the list. However, where my money came in was that the people who paid me were now a list of people 80K deep that I advertised other things to. My thing was advertising online network marketing products. When it comes to online money avenues, the real money is in recurring income. So I advertised affiliate products that taught online entrepreneurial things at a monthly charge. I got a percentage, and I could count on about 100 per media blurb to bite on the product.
As for why I stopped… well for starters, paypal started becoming really anal about people who made a lot of money in a short time on the site. They would withhold funds, bring up some new restriction… a whole lotta bullshit. So it would sometimes take weeks before I could see money I made, and that was a real bother.
However, my main reason for stopping was, initially, stupidity. Within 6 months, I had racked in about 200K from just that one list; I didn’t even do the list again but it net me $200K from just advertising products to that initial 80K people. Feeling that there was no way I could spend that much money, I started living WILD!
I threw several, no-charge parties at apartments around champaign campus, some of which cost over $10K. Those parties were good for $50K+, and I didn’t even keep record of the expenses so it could’ve been $70K (did I mention I was 19 and paying 21-year-olds, at my own suggestion, to purchase the liquor… which I also paid for). I helped “finance” several of my friend’s weed operations, despite the fact that they were NOT grossing profit for themselves or me, and we actually ended up smoking more than 50% of what was probably easily 20lbs (again, being really conservative, because I don’t want to admit, or perhaps I can’t imagine that I may have spent over $100K on weed in less than a year) of weed over a 10-month time period between a band of about 7 people with a cadre of different hoes coming through from time-to-time. On top of that, I was living in an apartment with $3000 monthly rent, which I also paid for solo despite being with roommates. I would like to say that I was being manipulated, but I came up with the idea to pay for rent despite my friends having their own jobs and despite them setting aside rent money. I just added that to the weed pool… yea now that I think about it, I easily spent over $100K on weed.
I completely underestimated how quickly the recurring incomes would dry up, and within a year and a half, my bank account was at a staggering $2500 with no new income coming through. I went back to work, but by that time paypal had becomes extremely difficult to deal with. Moreover, I had a place that was still due rent (I moved to a place that was by myself with $2000 rent… still pretty damn expensive) and a pretty profuse weed habit. I never considered myself addicted to weed, but it’s not easy to downgrade a weed habit that was as profuse as mine was.
At that time, I was also experiencing a spiritual awakening of sorts. I had seen how irresponsible I was, and that my motives for money were completely out-of-line. I thought myself pretty educated and even spiritually knowledgeable, and yet I spent nearly none of my money advancing my spiritual endeavors, which was MY KEY MOTIVATION in the first place. And considering that I managed to make close to half-a-mill overall, only to spend it so recklessly and frivolously… I wasn’t mad at all at myself. I was actually pretty clear-headed, including through my impending eviction and loss of electricity and gas (luckily it was warm that year, and I ran out of these utilities during the late spring and early summer). I just knew I needed to clear my head up quite a bit, especially since my family also managed to spend about $30K of it without making significant improvements to their lives either.
So that’s the whole story of my ascension and fall since it was asked about. I’m also sure that some of these things would not work now because of marketing saturation; craigslist is not as open as it used to be. And I’m not sure what the regulations are in regards to lists like these anymore, so who knows what’s up with that.