6 After being rejected by every publisher she went to, a penniless and broke woman named Amanda Hocking decided to publish the novels she had been writing on Kindle. Within six months, she sold 150,000 copies earning $20,000 and 1.5 million copies in 20 months earning $2.5 million.

Hocking was a group home worker in Rochester, Minnesota who wrote 17 fantasy young-adult novels during her free time for nine years, all of which were rejected by both book agents and publishers. She is also a huge Muppets fan. In April 2010, she heard of an exhibition about Jim Henson, creator of the Muppets which was going to be held in Chicago in October. She desperately wanted to go. The problem was she couldn’t even afford the $300 needed to get to Chicago, let alone stay at a hotel for the night.

So, Hocking decided to publish her books herself on Amazon hoping at least her friends and family would buy them and she could raise the $300. But by October, things were way better than her expectations as she had already made $20,000, and she went to the exhibition. In early 2011, her books sold an average of 9,000 copies per day, and by March, she sold over a million copies, something completely new among self-publishing writers. She is now a multi-millionaire and one of the top, self-published authors on Kindle. (1, 2)

7 During the time of the Great Depression, a banker convinced a small town of struggling families in Florida to buy Coca-Cola shares. The town became the single richest town per capita in the US and now has at least 67 millionaires. 

In the 20s and 30s, the agriculture-based town of Quincy was struggling to stay afloat. But Pat Munroe noticed that the townspeople were buying bottles of Coca-Cola with what was left of their money. At the time the company’s shares were quite cheap at $19 each. So, he invested in multiple shares, and being a trusted banker, many took his advice and invested too even though the market was down.

Munroe’s instincts paid off and the shares pulled the town through the worst of the Great Depression. It is also reported that the dividends helped the people during further recessions and when crops failed as well. Many of them amassed huge fortunes giving them the name “Coca-Cola millionaires” and passed their wealth down to their grandchildren. (source)

8 In 2008, a North Dakota couple of modest means lived on their ranch for seven decades before finding crude oil right beneath their land. They were skeptical at first, but the oilmen soon found a large deposit of oil making the couple millionaires within a year.

Oscar and Loreen Stohler, 83 and 83 years old respectively at the time, were living in a sod house on their cattle ranch when the oilmen came to them saying they wanted to drill there. Though Oscar doubted there would be any oil, their home is near the Bakken shale formation, a rock unit of about 200,000 square miles (520,000 square kilometers) that formed over 300 million years ago with 3.65 billion barrels of recoverable oil according to the 2008 estimates by US Geological Survey.

After the success with the first well, drilling of a second and third was started aimed in the direction of the shale formation. The Stohlers soon became millionaires and bought their first, very own, home a few miles east of Beulah. Interestingly, apart from the thousand dollar ring Oscar bought his wife and a new sprinkler Loreen bought for her flowers, they haven’t bought much else and report being quite content with how they used to live. (source)

9 After finding out how sentimental the Irish-Americans are about the dirt from their country, a businessman named Alan Jenkins began selling bags of imported dirt to them. Now he and his partner own a multi-million dollar company. 

While at a gathering in Florida of the Sons of Erin, a nonprofit promoting Irish heritage, Jenkins, an Irish immigrant in his 50s, realized that everyone there “would give their right arm for was a drop ‘of the auld sod’ to put on top of their casket.” Five years later in 2006, he met Irish-American agricultural scientist Pat Burke. Together, they managed to get permission from the US Customs Department and Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service after patenting a method to sanitize the dirt to meet standards.

Jenkins and Burke founded Auld Sod Export Company and its product Official Irish Dirt. Within a year after their first shipment reached warehouse, their website crashed 15 minutes after launching as they began receiving calls from people interested in starting franchises. They also found out that people weren’t using the dirt just for burials, but that many florists were using it for planting flowers and shamrocks.

An 87-year-old lawyer bought $100,000 worth of Irish dirt to fill his grave in America, and another man from New England bought $148,000 worth of it to spread on land over which he built his home. Interestingly, even non-Irish Chinese began ordering the soil because of its association with luck. (source)

10 A man purchased an ugly painting for its gilded frame for $4 at a flea market to find one of the 26 known copies of the United States’ Declaration of Independence made by printer John Dunlap. He later sold it for $2.42 million.

The unnamed collector bought the painting in Pennsylvania two summers before 1991. According to David N. Redden, the head of the book and manuscript department at Sotheby’s in Manhattan, upon finding the declaration, the collector decided to keep it as a curiosity as he believed it was probably printed in the early 19th century. A friend of his urged him to show it to an expert and so the collector brought it to Sotheby’s where it was examined.

The copy turned out to be one of the first printed copies by John Dunlap which are all worth a fortune. In addition to that, the collector’s copy was simply folded, was unbacked, and unframed making it one of the only seven unbacked copies. The auction for the Declaration was held on June 4, 1991, and it fetched him $2.42 million, the highest price fetched by a piece of historical Americana. It was bought by Donald J. Scheer of Atlanta, president of the fine arts investment firm Visual Equities Inc. (1, 2)