text: The man in the video says there’s a simple reason why I’m not rich. “Most people have a scarcity mindset,” he explains through a thick Australian accent, addressing the camera like a wise mentor lecturing a student. “Top-tier people—actual movers and shakers that are doing things—have an abundance mindset.” Behind him, an ancient sword hangs on the wall. For some reason, he’s in a bathrobe.
  This is Dan Pye, who’s posted nearly 500 videos on YouTube and even more on Facebook and Instagram, where he’s amassed over 15,000 combined followers. If you stumble upon one of these videos, you might mistake him for one of the countless self-appointed gurus who stalk the platforms in search of clicks, clout, and commerce. Pye certainly looks like the other hypermasculine bros on the #grindset internet—the corner of the web dedicated to hard work—with large biceps, an affinity for Punisher tank tops, and a haircut that’s somewhere between Marine and mohawk. He sounds like them, too, with praise for stoicism, relentless striving, and Elon Musk. “I’m an absolute animal,” he says in one video, staring down the viewer as if expecting a fight. “I’m a competitive beast.” But unlike the many other would-be influencers linking mindset with unbelievable wealth, Pye isn’t hawking crypto or herbal supplements. He’s not suggesting you get into drop-shipping. Instead, Dan Pye is talking about Frankenstein.
  The theory is simple. Countless classic works of literature have fallen out of copyright and into the public domain, granting normal people the right to reproduce, remix, and resell them. Pye, along with other talking heads like Julian Sage and Daniel Hall, says this offers a remarkable opportunity, one that will reward those who take advantage. After all, Moby-Dick and Treasure Island have the kind of brand recognition even the best marketing firms can’t replicate. Aspiring entrepreneurs, the logic goes, just need to act.
  To turn a profit, you just need a basic understanding of the internet: Public-domain manuscripts are available for free through Project Gutenberg, while eye-catching covers can be mocked up in minutes on Canva, a free-to-use design suite. From there, aspiring publishers bring their titles to Amazon’s print-to-order publishing service, Kindle Direct Publishing, or KDP, where users can create listings without paying a cent in overhead.
  Sage estimates that popular titles like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War could earn him over $10,000 per month. Pye claims his titles make over $100,000 every year with minimal effort, generating what he calls “truly passive income.” “Of course you can succeed with KDP,” he says in “Unlock Your Ultimate Potential.” “Of course you can succeed with anything in your life!”
  I decided to send him an email. I was tired of scarcity. I was ready for abundance.
  In my first Zoom meeting with Pye, he walked me through his origin story, one that I was already familiar with after watching dozens of his videos. He grew up in Western Sydney, in a neighborhood where violence and addiction were normalized. He’s “semi-dyslexic” and, as a result, struggled in school and dropped out before graduating. For a time, he was homeless—sometimes sleeping in cars and in the woods—and began spending his days in the local library. At first, he says, he was there because it was dry and warm. Eventually, he began exploring the stacks, developing an affection for the older books on the shelves, especially those by Dale Carnegie, Charles Dickens, and Napoleon Hill.
  Hill’s Think and Grow Rich had the biggest impact on Pye. I wasn’t familiar with the book, so the day after our conversation, I grabbed it from my local library and dug in. Despite it being published in 1937, Hill writes like influencers speak, relying on dubious data (he claims the book’s lessons were derived from 25,000 case studies), unbelievable anecdotes (he says his son was born without ears but eventually willed himself to hear), and manosphere talking points (one chapter extols the creative benefits of voluntary celibacy).
  The book’s falsehoods and unproven claims didn’t deter readers. Think and Grow Rich was a runaway success upon its release, effectively erasing Hill’s past as a two-bit con man. Americans were struggling through the Great Depression and wanted solutions, even if they sounded absurd. “Throughout his life Hill was selling the promise of blue skies for everybody, if only they’d follow his proven model of success,” Matt Novak writes in his fascinating deep dive on Hill’s life. “Proven, that is, by anyone but Napoleon Hill.”
  After discovering Hill in the library, Pye worked through several business ventures before stumbling upon KDP. He told me he spent a decade quietly raking in six figures selling public-domain books before he thought of sharing his methods with the world. His coaching began hesitantly, he said, with just a few friends—fathers like himself who needed some extra income to help cover what felt like an unending list of bills. When the pandemic struck and people began losing their jobs, he felt compelled to do more and decided to share his secrets to “generational wealth” with the larger world.
  Pye believes his work is more than just a way to “quite literally retire,” though. The product, after all, is literature. It may seem like mindless work, but it’s an effort that prolongs the lifespan of great art. “Every student I teach learns more about the world that was and the world that is,” he wrote in an email celebrating a new partnership, “while simultaneously freeing themselves and consequently their families from a potential life of tax-paying nothingness.”
  I enrolled in Period Time Publishing’s Public Domain Publishing Academe, Dan’s crash course on all things public domain. I love literature, after all. And, fine, I’ll admit it: I thought freeing my family from a life of tax-paying nothingness sounded nice, too. For $45, I scored a month of access to the Academe’s Discord server, where I was one of over 100 students working to build my own publishing empire. Pye’s lessons—screen recordings walking us through the ins and outs of Amazon’s system—were arranged in modules, allowing us to move at our own pace. There was plenty of mindset talk, including how to set expectations with a “net-worth mindset,” but there were a lot of practical considerations, too, like how to establish an LLC, reformat text files from Project Gutenberg, and find relevant metadata to rank in Amazon’s search results. In a lesson on book design, I watched as Pye mocked up a jacket for Frankenstein, placing a full-bleed picture of a hooded man pointing a double-barreled shotgun in the center of the frame. “That cover looks absolutely stellar,” he said.
  In the training, Pye says that “making an extra $5,000 a month is actually realistic, and it’s actually common.” (Later he would tell me that the video with that claim was several years old, estimating that the number these days is between $2,000 and $3,000.) His promotional materials flash screenshots of earnings reports to corroborate these figures, though they’re redacted beyond recognition, leaving extraordinarily high numbers above ascending bar graphs. When I asked him about one title that he said earned $27,000 per month, he explained he couldn’t share any identifying information. “I would love to, man, but I don’t want to jeopardize that particular title,” he explained. “That’s what happens in this industry. It gets cutthroat.”
  I assumed Pye was exaggerating, that—like his hero Hill—he was bluffing on the front end to yield success on the back end. It’s a criticism he’s heard before, but Pye says his teachings objectively work. If students don’t experience the same level of success, it’s due to their own errors. “Your unique decoding of the information causes abnormalities in your output,” Pye explains in one lesson, “meaning even if you feel that you are following the exact steps outlined in this training, you really are not.”
  This was about what I’d expected when I first saw Pye’s videos on YouTube, but something funny happened when I began interviewing other students in the course. Tiffany Miller, who’s in her late 30s and previously worked as a bartender in northern New Jersey, said she made about $2,000 every month after working at publishing for two years. She was so amazed by her success that she’d convinced her 13-year-old daughter to open an account. Dan Baker, who’s 50 and works full-time as a forklift operator outside of Sydney, has only made about $2,000 total after two years of work, but he told me he didn’t plan on stopping any time soon. He knew it was only a matter of time until his luck changed. “It’s like a lottery ticket,” he explained.
  Like me, Miller and Baker found Pye online. They’d watched all the same videos I had and had firsthand experiences suggesting Pye’s estimates were overblown, but both were still upbeat. There was money coming in. Neither considered themselves readers, though they’d still managed to find some success as publishers of classic literature.
  I knew literature—I had multiple degrees in it, and had spent a decade teaching many of the titles that my fellow Academe students were only just discovering. That must give me an advantage, I thought. That must put me in a position where I could start making as much as Miller or Baker, if not more. Pye’s method wouldn’t allow me to retire early, I knew, but maybe I could cover groceries. Maybe I could chip away at my absurdly high rent.
  I didn’t say this out loud, because I knew it’d sound naive, maybe even pathetic. But I was confident that I could make it work, despite the red flags. I was a skeptical person; I saw through things. That was one of the skills they taught us in all those literature classes.
  I asked Pye to send me his latest book, hoping I could learn something from studying a well-honed example. He replied with the forthcoming title from his new Archived Press imprint, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. The cover features a period-specific drawing framed by orange and black borders, a nearly identical recreation of the iconic Penguin Classics design. Inside were chapter summaries, a commentary on the text’s themes, and a biography of Dickens. All of the book’s scholarly materials, Pye told me, were generated by A.I. and then lightly edited by him. “I don’t spend a lot of time reading a book or getting the vibe for it, especially with A.I. today,” he said. “I’ll just ask it to give me a four-sentence summary of what this book’s about. You know? Because I’ve got to get this book published and move on to the next one.”
  I had assumed as much: The additions to Great Expectations are mostly meaningless blocks of text, with broad generalizations scraped from places like Wikipedia and SparkNotes. “Dickens’s nuanced characters and intricate plotting create a narrative that oscillates between hope and despair, weaving a complex web of human emotions that resonate deeply,” one sentence reads. The book’s copyright page says the book was “Printed or published to the highest ethical standard.”
  Classic texts often include supplementary materials—forewords from contemporary writers, scholarly research from leading academics, glossaries for archaic language, among other additions—to help modern readers better appreciate what can be challenging reads. David Trotter, a professor at the University of Cambridge and the author of the introduction to the actual Penguin Classics edition of Great Expectations, told me that summarizing a classic work misses the point. Although scholarship is often maligned as overly clinical, he saw it as an opportunity for interpersonal communication. “I wanted to give the reader coming to the novel for the first time some idea of what it’s like to have already established a sort of intimacy with it, because that’s what reading is for,” he told me. “I’m not sure that the A.I. we currently have is built for that sort of intimacy!”
  A number of people in the Academe use A.I. in the same way as Pye, believing that these materials, which Amazon calls “differentiation,” will help their books compete with editions from the Penguins and Nortons of the world. It’s unclear whether Amazon rewards these students’ A.I.-based pseudo-scholarship, but it’s clear that it doesn’t discourage it. KDP’s Terms of Service do not prohibit the use of A.I., though they do ask users to state whether A.I. was fully or partially responsible for their content. What they do with that information is unclear. One self-publishing influencer told me that he believed Amazon was using all of the data to build its own A.I. When I called KDP looking for an answer, I was sent to Customer Service. “If it makes Amazon go better, then it’s OK,” a representative told me.
  Publishing at the rate Pye recommends (three titles per day, the maximum amount KDP allows) requires students to process their titles without any consideration for their contents, leading to a marketplace filled with literature stripped of its context and mined for its keywords. This, of course, is not that different from the rest of the internet, where search engine optimization and algorithmic gaming have created a seemingly endless trough of low-quality slop. But something about this felt different. Pye’s methods were entirely legal, but I was worried about the books’ long-tail impact. I imagined them in classrooms, in some young readers’ hands. I saw them reinforcing the terrible habits of online discourse, where vague language and unattributed generalities have become the norm. Thinking about all of this offended some long-dormant romanticism in me regarding literature and its humanity. Books, I remembered, were about people. They couldn’t be understood by machines.
  Amanda Makula, an associate professor and digital initiatives librarian at the University of San Diego, told me that low-quality public-domain publishing was nothing new, but that Amazon’s reach and A.I.’s abilities had indeed made for a unique situation. “Without regulation or oversight, it’s up to consumers, to readers, to distinguish between the many versions of, say, Frankenstein that pop up on an Amazon search,” she said. “Then it’s up to us to decide what its value is, and if and how we want to use it.”
  I returned to the Penguin edition of Great Expectations and found a sentence I’d underlined a few nights earlier. “If you can’t get to be oncommon through going straight, you’ll never get to do it through going crooked,” Joe tells Pip. I had my answer. My rent would stay absurdly high.
  In our final interview, I told Pye I wouldn’t be starting my own public-domain publishing house. Pye said he understood, but I got the impression he thought I’d misread the coursework. “It’s not a side hustle,” he said. “It can truly provide you freedom if you’ve got the gumption to take it for what it is and go out there and get it.”
  I knew I was operating with a scarcity mindset. I knew I was setting myself up for a potential lifetime of tax-paying nothingness. I shrugged. Pye claims entrepreneurs need to prioritize their business above everything else; life as a pleb at least gave me time to read.
  In all honesty, though, I remain open-minded. A few days before I signed out of the Discord, Pye plugged the Period Time Publishing Affiliate Program, allowing students to earn commission on every new recruit. It’s truly passive income, without the need to publish a single book. If you’re interested, let me know. I’ll be happy to send you my referral code.