8 ms·

How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing

198 points by BlackJack 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
adjkant 10y ago
Self-publishing over publishing, sure, but this is very based on the content of the book. As someone who actually interacts with College Confidential and the like, an educated book on the subject making money doesn't surprise me in the slightest, but it takes knowledge and time to write. You can't just write whatever you want - the author was lucky enough to know about a subject in a favorable market - parents and kids who are Ivy-obsessed will easily pay for a book on the subject given how many small in's and out's there are in the process. Edit Note: More info on why the market is favorable for the subject
boyter 10y ago
Its quite amazing how much money you can make with self-published books. For example I wrote a book about Decoding CAPTCHA's. I have the top ranking post on most search engines for this which is the only marketing channel. I collect about $35 a month from it without spending any additional time marketing. Not very much but such a small niche it really surprised me. Oddly enough the main reason for writing the book was to deflect all the emails I used to get about the subject. Not only did it achieve this aim it supplies beer money for me every month.
- kasey_junk 10y ago
  How long did it take to write?
  - boyter 10y ago
    The book itself took about 10 hours or so and was mostly just a collection of writings I already had and email responses.
    - no_protocol 10y ago
      I have spent more than 10 hours on a single online post multiple times.
    - wingerlang 10y ago
      I just checked it on Amazon, and there's not a whole lot of concrete information of what I will find in the book. I guess it is a niche indeed and people who are looking for it will know already. Maybe image algorithms? If you had to take a picture of the most interesting / telling page of the book (to try to sell the rest of it) which page would it be? And do you mind doing it.
      - boyter 10y ago
        I actually get almost no sales through Amazon. Most come through either Leanpub followed by Gumroad. http://www.boyter.org/decoding-captchas/ http://www.boyter.org/decoding-captchas/ That's the link that generates 99% of sales. It gives you a fair idea of what is contained. Email me via my profile if you need more information.
        wingerlang 10y ago
        That seems to be what I was asking for, thanks. Seems interesting.
- SN76477 10y ago
  I work in digital marketing. There is a whole scene of guys that do nothing but create simple digitally published ebooks. They will research the market for the niche. Research the topic in depth (something like frying chicken can be deciphered and recipe and method variations can be collected in 20 hours) Then create content on the niche and sell it. Even a $3 ebook can make several thousand dollars a year.
  - neilsharma 10y ago
    How do they get traffic to it? I'd imagine the vast majority of time is spent on marketing and not on content creation.
    - boyter 10y ago
      I just checked then. Say you write a book with the title "Cooking with Buttermilk" and built a unique book page you are likely to rank on the first page pretty easily for the search "cooking with buttermilk book". With a book you can always pull out excerpts for SEO value too. I would image if you could churn reasonable content for a low price this might be a sustainable business model, assuming you can pick the right topics.
      - GarrisonPrime 10y ago
        >buttermilk >churn I see what you did there.
      - giancarlostoro 10y ago
        I wonder how many hits HN will get because of these key words, and a few others here.
  - cryoshon 10y ago
    as always, the question is how to locate the niche...
  - mherrmann 10y ago
    A friend of mine does exactly this with self-help books (NLP, hypnosis, dating, how to quit smoking etc.). He makes in the low five figures a month with this business. He identifies niches, by now using his existing audience. For example, he once had a blog post on a subject that received surprisingly many views. So he hired a writer to write a book about it, and then marketed it through his channels. It's surprisingly lucrative.
- coldtea 10y ago
  >Its quite amazing how much money you can make with self-published books. (...) I collect about $35 a month from it In what way does the first claim follow from the example? It might be possible to make a lot of money from self-publishing books, but $35/month, whether with or without additional marketing, is hardly a proof for that. If anything, it's a proof of loss, as the book took you time to write. If you value those hours at the minimal wage rate, it would take ages to recoup those costs...
  - boyter 10y ago
    I think you are missing my point which is that even very small niches can produce income even without marketing efforts. Small niche. Zero marketing effort. $35 seems pretty good to me for the effort spent.
- shostack 10y ago
  If you'd like to continue earning from this and SEO is your only marketing, I would kindly suggest you diversify. That is having all your eggs in one basket that you have very little direct control over.
  - boyter 10y ago
    It's not really anything I'm worried about. Its not really worth putting any effort into as the whole thing is just set and forget. I would also imagine it would be very hard to topple the see value of the page that's driving sales, which for the amount of money we are talking about isn't worth it.
- chimprich 10y ago
  > CAPTCHA's You don't need the apostrophe to indicate a plural, even with acronyms (or backronyms). "CAPTCHAs" is fine. I wouldn't normally comment but it is the title of your book.
  - boyter 10y ago
    Being your own editor is hard. Cheers. I'll push an update with corrections.
matt4077 10y ago
I couldn't find any numbers, but I get the distinct impression that so far, the authors job at google probably pays better than the book. Sure, most of the work is done now and if continues for another two years or so things change. But it's hard to predict how non-fiction books age.
- chii 10y ago
  It doesn't matter how much a book ages, as long as it was written in the off time (I.e., evenings or weekends). The sales made from that book is a net productivity gain.
  - bloopalert 10y ago
    You could freelance $400 in a few hours at most. Probably less. You have to consider opportunity cost, for which books are poor.
    - Rumudiez 10y ago
      You also have to consider personal cost. Do you enjoy writing, and do you have a strong interest in a field worth writing about? Then great, this could be a productive use of time for you both personally and financially. There's nothing wrong with doing things that make your life worth living.
  - greglindahl 10y ago
    This post is about "passive income". If a book ages into $0 sales after 3 months, that's not passive income.
  - coldtea 10y ago
    Opportunity cost doesn't stop working on evenings or weekends.
mojoe 10y ago
I always enjoy seeing stuff like this. While it may not make a ton of economic sense for a guy working at Google, I'm happy to see people fill niche knowledge spaces because they can. It's interesting that the paperback copies sold the best -- I would guess it's because these books are given as gifts (and bought by parents). If anyone has data on this behavior for fiction I'd be interested to hear it (I publish an online science fiction magazine, compellingsciencefiction.com).
nameisu 10y ago
your adjusted rating on amazon is 4.5. It is still very good. http://reviewmeta.com/amazon/1517293146?utm_source=extension&utm_content=firefox_v2.2 http://reviewmeta.com/amazon/1517293146?utm_source=extension...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
patrickyeon 10y ago
A little off-topic, but I found this interesting: > "Specifically, a lot of the traditional guys price e-books at $20–30, often times more than the paperback/hardcover, which is so stupid." It catches my eye when people get stuck on an e-book version costing more than a hard copy. It's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant delivery, easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience) to somebody, but still seem like it should cost less. Personally, I'll gladly pay an extra dollar to get an e-book version for anything I'm only expecting to read once or twice.
- umurkontaci 10y ago
  Sure, it's about supply and demand, but the cost of distributing and ebook compared to a hard copy is close to zero. Plenty of products are artificially priced, but when this is very obvious, it feels like a rip-off.
  - agumonkey 10y ago
    Anything digital artefact seems to cost less because a electronic copy seems almost free (in time, space and energy).
  - rayalez 10y ago
    Things cost as much as people are willing to pay for them. If I'm willimg to pay $5/$20/$50 for an ebook, it should be irrelevant how much it costs to distribute it. It has information in it and if I want this information I will give author the money. He may have determined his price by considering the distribution costs, or how much he wants to make per hour, or based on how much he thinks people will buy it for, or he may have simply pulled it out of his butt. If I'm handing him $50, and am not disappointed after reading the book, it is not a rip-off.
    - dceddia 10y ago
      To expand on this: if the book can provide value above and beyond its selling price, it is a worthwhile purchase. Your examples of "how to price" are all focused on what the author wants (or what he can get away with). The way to justify a higher price is to focus on what the READER wants, and the value they will get out of the book. An ebook about learning React, for instance, might be worth $39 because it will save the reader HOURS of reading through random blog posts. How much is their time worth? (source: I wrote and sell an ebook about this. People actually buy it :)
IIAOPSW 10y ago
Mark my words this won't last. It has happened to Itunes, Play Store, Steam, New Grounds and basically every website that let's users upload content for sale / ad money. I call it the fundamental problem of user generated content. At the current expected payoff, soon every schmuck will be uploading his book. Quality won't matter. Eventually the torrent of content for consumers will be more than consumers can hope to consume, and the expected passive income for a given creative person will go to zero. The thing all these sites have in common is that they promised to be a meritocracy for creative types. You simply make your work and then reviews come in and its judged fairly. Better content gets more money. No need to revert to tricks like paying a PR firm to market it. The reality is that when there is money to be made, people will rush in until there is no longer money to be made. Our mechanisms to separate the wheat from the chaff don't scale nearly as well as the economics of digital content distribution networks. Don't believe me? Go to Steam Greenlight. Tell me how many games look interesting. Tell me how many uploads are happening per day. Can you keep up with it? Go to the app store. How much stuff is in the new section? How much looks good.
- dawei 10y ago
  Totally agree. It's perfect competition (or something close to it). When you have low barriers to entry for relatively similar goods, enough sellers will enter into the marketplace that you won't be able to profit enough that it'll be worth your time. You'll still probably be able to make some money, but not enough to merit continued publishing.
- amelius 10y ago
  I think it is a real shame that this effect hasn't been quantified and documented yet. Apple, Google, Steam and other platform owners have all the numbers, but they strategically keep their mouths shut. In fact they do the opposite by pretending there is good money to be made. In my opinion it is very close to fraud. And look how many people are victimized by it... Time for the government to step in to demand transparency.
- ObeyTheGuts 10y ago
  you make absolute no sense??? do you want everyone make money from books? it is obviously impossible... but these sites bring entry level to lowest in history, which makes competition higher and thus product becomes better. i cant see what is your alternative? make writing a book almost impossible so only chosen people can do it?????
runj__ 10y ago
I was the editor and publisher of this tome of a shitpost: https://www.amazon.com/Hypersphere/dp/132978152X https://www.amazon.com/Hypersphere/dp/132978152X http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/product-22517627.html http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/pro... The 4chan /lit/ board wrote Hypersphere as a collaborative writing project but someone needed to actually publish it, something I undertook as a project, I must have spent something like 20 hours editing it (plus way more helping to write it). It has so far sold 650 copies, most of which I sold with a profit of less than a dollar in profit per book since it didn't feel right selling it for a profit to the people that helped write it. I've since bumped the price and I'm getting something like ~$2.5 a book, and it's currently selling 5-10 copies a month. The Amazon price is far higher than the Lulu one (which was the publishing platform of choice) since they obviously want a cut. The biggest pro of the project was that it helped me understand how to self-publish: I've given my partner two physical poetry collections about her since: something that was pretty appreciated.
djaychela 10y ago
I have written and self-published a couple of books [1] - one which is effectively a practical textbook for the course I teach (A level music technology in the UK, for 16-18 year olds), and one which sprung out of a course I taught locally for a number of schools, using Sibelius 7, where the user interface changed in a similar way to the change to Word 2007's "ribbon" interface. The A-level textbook took me about a year of all my spare time to get it together. It's the best part of 500 pages long, and covers practical and music theory elements to a level that will allow anyone to be competent enough to complete the coursework to a good standard, and more importantly to give them a good, broad grounding in the subject. It was my passion for the year it took to create it, and I learned loads (including how to use Indesign, which I bought to allow me to do a good job on the layout of the book). But the biggest thing I learned was that writing the book wasn't the most important thing, it was getting it in front of the right people. I hadn't even thought about this until I completed the book, and then found that to get it to the right people it would cost me far more than I'd reasonably expect to earn from what is a fairly niche publication (I was quoted £2000 to mail-shot all the heads of music at schools that teach music technology). I have updated the book twice (to version 7 and 8 of the software), each taking the equivalent of over a week of full time work to update screenshots, workflow and procedures, plus add in new information as appropriate. It was only the chance connection with the education department of the software house who makes the main software I used in the book (Cubase) that led to any significant increase in the number of sales, but it's still nowhere near what the author of this article is making; I have had one really good month in September (start of the year, and it was promoted in a newsletter), which has outdone the figure above, but usually I'll sell maybe 1 or 2 books. This is all done via Lulu, with printed versions of the book, and I've elected not to do it as an e-book as I feel the cat will be out of the bag and it'd be torrented everywhere (particularly as I set the price at £24.95, feeling that it was worth an hour's private tuition cost for such a large amount of info). While it's nice to have a small income from this each month, it's certainly not something that works out well at an hourly rate - it would have to sell in the high hundreds to achieve this. By contrast, the book on Sibelius has sold much better as I've sold it via Amazon as well as via Lulu. The reasoning for this was simple, really - I did it as a test to see how different sales would be via Amazon, and they've been much larger (about 7:1). But this is countered by the payments; I actually put the price of the book up before selling it because otherwise I would have seen almost nothing from an Amazon sale. At the moment the book is £7.95, and I see just over £1. For the other book, if I sold it via Amazon, I would see £3 from the £24.95 sale price (compared with about £12 via a Lulu sale). I'm not sure if I would get 4x as many sales from the Cubase book if sold via Amazon (particuarly as I think most of the sales are driven via recommendation rather than browsing), but as I said before, this is not an area I even gave a moment's thought to until I completed the book. [1] - http://musictechtuition.com/books/ http://musictechtuition.com/books/
dilemma 10y ago
1. Active, not passive: This is income made by actively promoting the book upon its release as stated in the post. 2. Past, not future: This is historical revenue based on active marketing. It is unlikely that it will bring the same income in the future without marketing. 3. Revenue, not profit: The nice cover design is something others would need to pay for if this is to serve as reference, but this cost isn't taken into account. TLDR: He isn't making $400 ($360) in passive monthly income and it is unlikely he will in the future.
- galfarragem 10y ago
  Passive income is just an alias for a delayed active income with uncertain ROI.
- cylinder 10y ago
  People are constantly misusing the term "passive" when they mean "residual."
ddoran 10y ago
>But 1-on-1 advising doesn’t scale. In the right market, it doesn't have to scale. I know some wealthy people (in NYC) who have dropped a lot of money to get their kids into Ivy League schools. It is a must for those people and I've seen them drop high dollar for application advice and prep. With any kind of success, the same people get referred over and over again in the same circles. As an aside, I loosely know someone who went to prison for a white collar crime. He too hired a high dollar consultant (former prison officer, IIRC) to advise him on how to prepare for, adjust to and survive in prison. Of course consulting to wealthy people isn't passive, but the return on effort is hard to beat, once you're in the right referral circle.
patsplat 10y ago
Disappointed the link is not satire. $400/month is less than unemployment
patsplat 10y ago
Disappointed the link is not satire. $400/month is less than unemployment

198 points by BlackJack 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Self-publishing over publishing, sure, but this is very based on the content of the book. As someone who actually interacts with College Confidential and the like, an educated book on the subject making money doesn't surprise me in the slightest, but it takes knowledge and time to write. You can't just write whatever you want - the author was lucky enough to know about a subject in a favorable market - parents and kids who are Ivy-obsessed will easily pay for a book on the subject given how many small in's and out's there are in the process. Edit Note: More info on why the market is favorable for the subject

boyter 10y ago

Its quite amazing how much money you can make with self-published books. For example I wrote a book about Decoding CAPTCHA's. I have the top ranking post on most search engines for this which is the only marketing channel. I collect about $35 a month from it without spending any additional time marketing. Not very much but such a small niche it really surprised me. Oddly enough the main reason for writing the book was to deflect all the emails I used to get about the subject. Not only did it achieve this aim it supplies beer money for me every month.

kasey_junk 10y ago
How long did it take to write?
- boyter 10y ago
  The book itself took about 10 hours or so and was mostly just a collection of writings I already had and email responses.
  - no_protocol 10y ago
    I have spent more than 10 hours on a single online post multiple times.
  - wingerlang 10y ago
    I just checked it on Amazon, and there's not a whole lot of concrete information of what I will find in the book. I guess it is a niche indeed and people who are looking for it will know already. Maybe image algorithms? If you had to take a picture of the most interesting / telling page of the book (to try to sell the rest of it) which page would it be? And do you mind doing it.
    - boyter 10y ago
      I actually get almost no sales through Amazon. Most come through either Leanpub followed by Gumroad. http://www.boyter.org/decoding-captchas/ http://www.boyter.org/decoding-captchas/ That's the link that generates 99% of sales. It gives you a fair idea of what is contained. Email me via my profile if you need more information.
      - wingerlang 10y ago
        That seems to be what I was asking for, thanks. Seems interesting.
SN76477 10y ago
I work in digital marketing. There is a whole scene of guys that do nothing but create simple digitally published ebooks. They will research the market for the niche. Research the topic in depth (something like frying chicken can be deciphered and recipe and method variations can be collected in 20 hours) Then create content on the niche and sell it. Even a $3 ebook can make several thousand dollars a year.
- neilsharma 10y ago
  How do they get traffic to it? I'd imagine the vast majority of time is spent on marketing and not on content creation.
  - boyter 10y ago
    I just checked then. Say you write a book with the title "Cooking with Buttermilk" and built a unique book page you are likely to rank on the first page pretty easily for the search "cooking with buttermilk book". With a book you can always pull out excerpts for SEO value too. I would image if you could churn reasonable content for a low price this might be a sustainable business model, assuming you can pick the right topics.
    - GarrisonPrime 10y ago
      >buttermilk >churn I see what you did there.
    - giancarlostoro 10y ago
      I wonder how many hits HN will get because of these key words, and a few others here.
- cryoshon 10y ago
  as always, the question is how to locate the niche...
- mherrmann 10y ago
  A friend of mine does exactly this with self-help books (NLP, hypnosis, dating, how to quit smoking etc.). He makes in the low five figures a month with this business. He identifies niches, by now using his existing audience. For example, he once had a blog post on a subject that received surprisingly many views. So he hired a writer to write a book about it, and then marketed it through his channels. It's surprisingly lucrative.
coldtea 10y ago
>Its quite amazing how much money you can make with self-published books. (...) I collect about $35 a month from it In what way does the first claim follow from the example? It might be possible to make a lot of money from self-publishing books, but $35/month, whether with or without additional marketing, is hardly a proof for that. If anything, it's a proof of loss, as the book took you time to write. If you value those hours at the minimal wage rate, it would take ages to recoup those costs...
- boyter 10y ago
  I think you are missing my point which is that even very small niches can produce income even without marketing efforts. Small niche. Zero marketing effort. $35 seems pretty good to me for the effort spent.
shostack 10y ago
If you'd like to continue earning from this and SEO is your only marketing, I would kindly suggest you diversify. That is having all your eggs in one basket that you have very little direct control over.
- boyter 10y ago
  It's not really anything I'm worried about. Its not really worth putting any effort into as the whole thing is just set and forget. I would also imagine it would be very hard to topple the see value of the page that's driving sales, which for the amount of money we are talking about isn't worth it.
chimprich 10y ago
> CAPTCHA's You don't need the apostrophe to indicate a plural, even with acronyms (or backronyms). "CAPTCHAs" is fine. I wouldn't normally comment but it is the title of your book.
- boyter 10y ago
  Being your own editor is hard. Cheers. I'll push an update with corrections.

matt4077 10y ago

I couldn't find any numbers, but I get the distinct impression that so far, the authors job at google probably pays better than the book. Sure, most of the work is done now and if continues for another two years or so things change. But it's hard to predict how non-fiction books age.

chii 10y ago
It doesn't matter how much a book ages, as long as it was written in the off time (I.e., evenings or weekends). The sales made from that book is a net productivity gain.
- bloopalert 10y ago
  You could freelance $400 in a few hours at most. Probably less. You have to consider opportunity cost, for which books are poor.
  - Rumudiez 10y ago
    You also have to consider personal cost. Do you enjoy writing, and do you have a strong interest in a field worth writing about? Then great, this could be a productive use of time for you both personally and financially. There's nothing wrong with doing things that make your life worth living.
- greglindahl 10y ago
  This post is about "passive income". If a book ages into $0 sales after 3 months, that's not passive income.
- coldtea 10y ago
  Opportunity cost doesn't stop working on evenings or weekends.

mojoe 10y ago

I always enjoy seeing stuff like this. While it may not make a ton of economic sense for a guy working at Google, I'm happy to see people fill niche knowledge spaces because they can. It's interesting that the paperback copies sold the best -- I would guess it's because these books are given as gifts (and bought by parents). If anyone has data on this behavior for fiction I'd be interested to hear it (I publish an online science fiction magazine, compellingsciencefiction.com).

nameisu 10y ago

your adjusted rating on amazon is 4.5. It is still very good. http://reviewmeta.com/amazon/1517293146?utm_source=extension&utm_content=firefox_v2.2 http://reviewmeta.com/amazon/1517293146?utm_source=extension...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

patrickyeon 10y ago

A little off-topic, but I found this interesting: > "Specifically, a lot of the traditional guys price e-books at $20–30, often times more than the paperback/hardcover, which is so stupid." It catches my eye when people get stuck on an e-book version costing more than a hard copy. It's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant delivery, easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience) to somebody, but still seem like it should cost less. Personally, I'll gladly pay an extra dollar to get an e-book version for anything I'm only expecting to read once or twice.

umurkontaci 10y ago
Sure, it's about supply and demand, but the cost of distributing and ebook compared to a hard copy is close to zero. Plenty of products are artificially priced, but when this is very obvious, it feels like a rip-off.
- agumonkey 10y ago
  Anything digital artefact seems to cost less because a electronic copy seems almost free (in time, space and energy).
- rayalez 10y ago
  Things cost as much as people are willing to pay for them. If I'm willimg to pay $5/$20/$50 for an ebook, it should be irrelevant how much it costs to distribute it. It has information in it and if I want this information I will give author the money. He may have determined his price by considering the distribution costs, or how much he wants to make per hour, or based on how much he thinks people will buy it for, or he may have simply pulled it out of his butt. If I'm handing him $50, and am not disappointed after reading the book, it is not a rip-off.
  - dceddia 10y ago
    To expand on this: if the book can provide value above and beyond its selling price, it is a worthwhile purchase. Your examples of "how to price" are all focused on what the author wants (or what he can get away with). The way to justify a higher price is to focus on what the READER wants, and the value they will get out of the book. An ebook about learning React, for instance, might be worth $39 because it will save the reader HOURS of reading through random blog posts. How much is their time worth? (source: I wrote and sell an ebook about this. People actually buy it :)

IIAOPSW 10y ago

Mark my words this won't last. It has happened to Itunes, Play Store, Steam, New Grounds and basically every website that let's users upload content for sale / ad money. I call it the fundamental problem of user generated content. At the current expected payoff, soon every schmuck will be uploading his book. Quality won't matter. Eventually the torrent of content for consumers will be more than consumers can hope to consume, and the expected passive income for a given creative person will go to zero. The thing all these sites have in common is that they promised to be a meritocracy for creative types. You simply make your work and then reviews come in and its judged fairly. Better content gets more money. No need to revert to tricks like paying a PR firm to market it. The reality is that when there is money to be made, people will rush in until there is no longer money to be made. Our mechanisms to separate the wheat from the chaff don't scale nearly as well as the economics of digital content distribution networks. Don't believe me? Go to Steam Greenlight. Tell me how many games look interesting. Tell me how many uploads are happening per day. Can you keep up with it? Go to the app store. How much stuff is in the new section? How much looks good.

dawei 10y ago
Totally agree. It's perfect competition (or something close to it). When you have low barriers to entry for relatively similar goods, enough sellers will enter into the marketplace that you won't be able to profit enough that it'll be worth your time. You'll still probably be able to make some money, but not enough to merit continued publishing.
amelius 10y ago
I think it is a real shame that this effect hasn't been quantified and documented yet. Apple, Google, Steam and other platform owners have all the numbers, but they strategically keep their mouths shut. In fact they do the opposite by pretending there is good money to be made. In my opinion it is very close to fraud. And look how many people are victimized by it... Time for the government to step in to demand transparency.
ObeyTheGuts 10y ago
you make absolute no sense??? do you want everyone make money from books? it is obviously impossible... but these sites bring entry level to lowest in history, which makes competition higher and thus product becomes better. i cant see what is your alternative? make writing a book almost impossible so only chosen people can do it?????

runj__ 10y ago

I was the editor and publisher of this tome of a shitpost: https://www.amazon.com/Hypersphere/dp/132978152X https://www.amazon.com/Hypersphere/dp/132978152X http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/product-22517627.html http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/pro... The 4chan /lit/ board wrote Hypersphere as a collaborative writing project but someone needed to actually publish it, something I undertook as a project, I must have spent something like 20 hours editing it (plus way more helping to write it). It has so far sold 650 copies, most of which I sold with a profit of less than a dollar in profit per book since it didn't feel right selling it for a profit to the people that helped write it. I've since bumped the price and I'm getting something like ~$2.5 a book, and it's currently selling 5-10 copies a month. The Amazon price is far higher than the Lulu one (which was the publishing platform of choice) since they obviously want a cut. The biggest pro of the project was that it helped me understand how to self-publish: I've given my partner two physical poetry collections about her since: something that was pretty appreciated.

djaychela 10y ago

I have written and self-published a couple of books [1] - one which is effectively a practical textbook for the course I teach (A level music technology in the UK, for 16-18 year olds), and one which sprung out of a course I taught locally for a number of schools, using Sibelius 7, where the user interface changed in a similar way to the change to Word 2007's "ribbon" interface. The A-level textbook took me about a year of all my spare time to get it together. It's the best part of 500 pages long, and covers practical and music theory elements to a level that will allow anyone to be competent enough to complete the coursework to a good standard, and more importantly to give them a good, broad grounding in the subject. It was my passion for the year it took to create it, and I learned loads (including how to use Indesign, which I bought to allow me to do a good job on the layout of the book). But the biggest thing I learned was that writing the book wasn't the most important thing, it was getting it in front of the right people. I hadn't even thought about this until I completed the book, and then found that to get it to the right people it would cost me far more than I'd reasonably expect to earn from what is a fairly niche publication (I was quoted £2000 to mail-shot all the heads of music at schools that teach music technology). I have updated the book twice (to version 7 and 8 of the software), each taking the equivalent of over a week of full time work to update screenshots, workflow and procedures, plus add in new information as appropriate. It was only the chance connection with the education department of the software house who makes the main software I used in the book (Cubase) that led to any significant increase in the number of sales, but it's still nowhere near what the author of this article is making; I have had one really good month in September (start of the year, and it was promoted in a newsletter), which has outdone the figure above, but usually I'll sell maybe 1 or 2 books. This is all done via Lulu, with printed versions of the book, and I've elected not to do it as an e-book as I feel the cat will be out of the bag and it'd be torrented everywhere (particularly as I set the price at £24.95, feeling that it was worth an hour's private tuition cost for such a large amount of info). While it's nice to have a small income from this each month, it's certainly not something that works out well at an hourly rate - it would have to sell in the high hundreds to achieve this. By contrast, the book on Sibelius has sold much better as I've sold it via Amazon as well as via Lulu. The reasoning for this was simple, really - I did it as a test to see how different sales would be via Amazon, and they've been much larger (about 7:1). But this is countered by the payments; I actually put the price of the book up before selling it because otherwise I would have seen almost nothing from an Amazon sale. At the moment the book is £7.95, and I see just over £1. For the other book, if I sold it via Amazon, I would see £3 from the £24.95 sale price (compared with about £12 via a Lulu sale). I'm not sure if I would get 4x as many sales from the Cubase book if sold via Amazon (particuarly as I think most of the sales are driven via recommendation rather than browsing), but as I said before, this is not an area I even gave a moment's thought to until I completed the book. [1] - http://musictechtuition.com/books/ http://musictechtuition.com/books/

dilemma 10y ago

1. Active, not passive: This is income made by actively promoting the book upon its release as stated in the post. 2. Past, not future: This is historical revenue based on active marketing. It is unlikely that it will bring the same income in the future without marketing. 3. Revenue, not profit: The nice cover design is something others would need to pay for if this is to serve as reference, but this cost isn't taken into account. TLDR: He isn't making $400 ($360) in passive monthly income and it is unlikely he will in the future.

galfarragem 10y ago
Passive income is just an alias for a delayed active income with uncertain ROI.
cylinder 10y ago
People are constantly misusing the term "passive" when they mean "residual."

ddoran 10y ago

>But 1-on-1 advising doesn’t scale. In the right market, it doesn't have to scale. I know some wealthy people (in NYC) who have dropped a lot of money to get their kids into Ivy League schools. It is a must for those people and I've seen them drop high dollar for application advice and prep. With any kind of success, the same people get referred over and over again in the same circles. As an aside, I loosely know someone who went to prison for a white collar crime. He too hired a high dollar consultant (former prison officer, IIRC) to advise him on how to prepare for, adjust to and survive in prison. Of course consulting to wealthy people isn't passive, but the return on effort is hard to beat, once you're in the right referral circle.

patsplat 10y ago

Disappointed the link is not satire. $400/month is less than unemployment

patsplat 10y ago

Disappointed the link is not satire. $400/month is less than unemployment