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Not sure I follow your argument here. The thing about selling an ebook is that it's all passive income from here on out. Assuming he set everything up correctl

Not sure I follow your argument here. The thing about selling an ebook is that it's all passive income from here on out. Assuming he set everything up correctly, which it appears he has, the author has to do almost nothing to propagate the sales of his book. Sure, he could put in an hour or two a week for advertising, emailing, etc, but that's negligible. The ball is already rolling, so there's nothing stopping him from collecting money week after week while he works a real job, writes another ebook, or runs a startup.

deleted 16y ago
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mattmanser 16y ago
Look at the sales spike, there's no way that's a sustainable income. 80% of the sales was from one 24 hour period where he gets only 30% of those sales. From scanning the article he didn't really say how long it took to write. There's 32 founders on the 'founders' page, sounds like he put well over 3 or 4 hours per founder. Quite a lot of transcribing and interviewing by the look of it so I'd guess at least a month. Kudos for him for making a couple of weeks salary in a week, but put it into that context. He still only made $3,000 in a week after already putting the unknown time into the book. Ignore the $10k claim, $7k effectively went on advertising (appsumo). imho, the real winners in the story were appsumo.
- jmtame 16y ago
  I'll need to adjust this. We talked about it again and Noah insisted on paying me more. My cut will be $3 per copy on that $7 sale (42% gross) before PayPal fees (I am not sure what that will net to). Effectively, my cut will be closer to $3k or $4k, rather than the current $2k. I'll update the article when i can with the most accurate information.
biot 16y ago
I look at it like buying a hybrid vehicle. I haven't checked lately, but when they first came out the hybrid model of a particular vehicle was often $10K more than the non-hybrid model. So there's a $10K opportunity cost in order to realize passive gas savings from then on. However, even the way gas prices are now you'd have to own the vehicle for 10 years just to recover your $10K investment. On top of that, in 10 years time you could have turned that $10K investment into $20K if you were able to average about 7% interest. Writing a book full-time seems to follow the same pattern. I'm not seeing how the investment ever pays itself off. Now, if he wrote the book by spending a few hours on evenings and weekends where his time was otherwise worth nothing then any money made is all profit. In that case the passive income, even if it's only a few hundred here and there, is all good.
- petercooper 16y ago
  On top of that, in 10 years time you could have turned that $10K investment into $20K if you were able to average about 7% interest. Could ;-) What "safeish" third party investment vehicle would average a yield of 7% per year after taxes over 10 years? (Putting aside the bubbly stock market of the 90s and the property market of the 00s.) Writing a book full-time seems to follow the same pattern. I'm not seeing how the investment ever pays itself off. In many cases, the exposure and experience pay their own dividends. More practically, though, it's not always possible or desirable for us to work every hour we can grab, so "cramming in a book" that we want to write on the side can get more out of our time that we might not otherwise profit from.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

mattmanser 16y ago

Look at the sales spike, there's no way that's a sustainable income. 80% of the sales was from one 24 hour period where he gets only 30% of those sales. From scanning the article he didn't really say how long it took to write. There's 32 founders on the 'founders' page, sounds like he put well over 3 or 4 hours per founder. Quite a lot of transcribing and interviewing by the look of it so I'd guess at least a month. Kudos for him for making a couple of weeks salary in a week, but put it into that context. He still only made $3,000 in a week after already putting the unknown time into the book. Ignore the $10k claim, $7k effectively went on advertising (appsumo). imho, the real winners in the story were appsumo.

jmtame 16y ago
I'll need to adjust this. We talked about it again and Noah insisted on paying me more. My cut will be $3 per copy on that $7 sale (42% gross) before PayPal fees (I am not sure what that will net to). Effectively, my cut will be closer to $3k or $4k, rather than the current $2k. I'll update the article when i can with the most accurate information.

biot 16y ago

I look at it like buying a hybrid vehicle. I haven't checked lately, but when they first came out the hybrid model of a particular vehicle was often $10K more than the non-hybrid model. So there's a $10K opportunity cost in order to realize passive gas savings from then on. However, even the way gas prices are now you'd have to own the vehicle for 10 years just to recover your $10K investment. On top of that, in 10 years time you could have turned that $10K investment into $20K if you were able to average about 7% interest. Writing a book full-time seems to follow the same pattern. I'm not seeing how the investment ever pays itself off. Now, if he wrote the book by spending a few hours on evenings and weekends where his time was otherwise worth nothing then any money made is all profit. In that case the passive income, even if it's only a few hundred here and there, is all good.

petercooper 16y ago
On top of that, in 10 years time you could have turned that $10K investment into $20K if you were able to average about 7% interest. Could ;-) What "safeish" third party investment vehicle would average a yield of 7% per year after taxes over 10 years? (Putting aside the bubbly stock market of the 90s and the property market of the 00s.) Writing a book full-time seems to follow the same pattern. I'm not seeing how the investment ever pays itself off. In many cases, the exposure and experience pay their own dividends. More practically, though, it's not always possible or desirable for us to work every hour we can grab, so "cramming in a book" that we want to write on the side can get more out of our time that we might not otherwise profit from.