17 ms·
I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
- haspok 4y agoI wonder which formats are selling better: the paperback or the Kindle versions?
- greglim81 4y agopaperback sells better
- xboxnolifes 4y ago"Passive" has truly gone down the path of "literally".
- greglim81 4y agopassive in the sense that I wrote it once, and it continues to collect royalties for a long time after, without me having to do much :)
- chrisdbanks 4y agoSeems like a fair definition of passive income. Not sure why the commenter feels it's not.
- xboxnolifes 4y agoFeels weird to call the entire profession of being an author passive income. Or put another way, If I give you two options: (1) Work 100 hours and I pay you $10,000 lump sum. (2) Work 100 hours and I pay you $100 a year (inflation adjusted) over 100 years Is one of those passive income while the other isn't?
- greglim81 4y agoI write on the side though (i have a full-time job). Just a hobby :)
- evanjonr 4y agoYes. Passive income can initially take work to build the income source. Most people consider rent to be passive income, yet people don't just magically own houses, they more often than not work to buy them.
- _tom_ 4y agoAnyone that thinks renting houses is passive income has never done it. Repairs, collections, advertising, evictions, etc.
- Shugarl 4y ago...which are things you do every now and then, unlike a job, where you have to be there 5/7 days for a number of hours ?
- vidarh 4y agoBut all of this is something you can contract out to an agency for a cut of the rent.
- sokoloff 4y agoThat cut of the rent ends up being around all of the cash flow for a newly bought property, and in many markets ends up being more than the initial cash flow. It’s a second job with irregular on-call.
- vidarh 4y agoWell, then you've leveraged too highly. Estate agents here take a fairly small percentage of the rent to manage all of this, so it takes a fairly small deposit before your rental income less management fees can't cover the remaining mortgage.
- silisili 4y agoThere's nothing passive about writing 78 books. That's what, approx 2k per book? If this were 20 years in the future since the books were written, sure. This is more just a person writing a ton of books for relatively little money. Please don't take it as any insult, I love the energy and drive. It's just not passive in any sense of the word.
- ativzzz 4y agoPassive income was never defined as "no work, receive income". It was, "work once, passive income later without extra work". As in, your full time employer will stop paying you if you stop working. Your books that you wrote some time ago will generate income in perpetuity without any extra work. You still need to put in the upfront work of creating something. It just so happens that something can generate income for a long time without much, if any, upkeep. Think of it as a machine that prints money. You still have to build the machine, but afterwards you just have to change the oil once a year.
- silisili 4y agoPassive is the opposite of active, I get the definition. Something you're no longer really actively working on that keeps making money. I'm jealous, I'd love to have such an idea. But this seems different -so far-. This is more akin to building 80 money printing machines that each print a certain amount of money. They may work forever, or die in 6 months, or not work at all. I guess my entire point is that this is a monumental amount of seemingly continuing effort. It's simply too early to call it passive IMO. However, dates are missing here. If OP wrote his last book 5 years ago and is collecting this income each year, I'll gladly eat crow.
- greglim81 4y agoIts mainly jsut about eight books that bring in majority of the income. Amazon doesn't allow authors to delete unpublished books, thus showing 80. you can check out the active books here: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=greg+lim&ref=nb_sb_noss https://www.amazon.com/s?k=greg+lim&ref=nb_sb_noss
- moconnor 4y agoThe author wrote many technology introduction books over a period of six years. They probably have a limited lifespan. I think the comment is somewhat fair if overly snippish - “How I earn $27k per year writing books in my spare time” would have been more informative and accurate than calling this passive income. If the author stops writing books, will they earn another 160k over the next six years? I still think it’s a cool and fascinating article - congrats to the author on their success!
- greglim81 4y agoI didn't do anything this month. So far royalties > $2,000. And I am thankful for it :)
- _tom_ 4y agoMany (Most?) ebooks on amazon require steady advertising to not drop into oblivion. This makes it decidedly less passive. Source: my authors group
- radicalriddler 4y agoNOT for a long time after, because you're writing about frameworks that may be out of date in 12 months!
- greglim81 4y agomany of my books have been there for years.
- vmception 4y agoIt's just clickbait for engagement, this is the author's new job in writing the ebooks. Better title: Earned $26,000 per year writing 20,000–30,000 word books and selling them for $9.99. Subtitle: Split book into another $9.99 book if there is more to say. Here's why.
- esjeon 4y agoYeah, I don't think this is really "passive", mainly because his "works" are quite time-sensitive and short-lived... I'm not saying the OP did something wrong or bad or anything. It just looks more like he worked extra hours for extra income. I've seen some people who work >12 hours a day (main + side) and earn >$100k/year, and this case feels much more natural if I think this way.
- chrisdbanks 4y agoCongratulations. Most people get stuck at the procrastination phase you mention. Just getting a book to published is a huge achievement let alone making significant revenue from it. This is not only good advice, but also an inspiring tale.
- greglim81 4y agoThank you so much Chris!
- jamesfinlayson 4y agoAgreed - I finished a book last year and it felt like the last 10% took 75% of the time.
- vmception 4y agotl;dr Earned $26,000 per year writing 20,000–30,000 word books and selling them for $9.99. Split book into another $9.99 book if there is more to say. This is actually pretty cool, if he didn't pick the maximum largest gross dollar figure they could find. The primary takeaways are how to maximize Amazon's royalties and trend hopping. It actually does solve the problem of people publishing long-winded books in an area that has limited timespan of utility (programming, tech). Helps people get to the point of what they are looking for and be in a mindframe to take it seriously, compared to ad garbage affiliate websites and long winded youtube videos or Udemy courses.
- curtiseinsmann 4y agoAwesome, well done! Which book was the easiest to write, and why?
- greglim81 4y agoHey Curtise! The initial books were harder to write as I hadn't flexed my writing muscles yet. but as i wrote more books, and get greater technical knowledge, subsequent books got easier and easier. I would say the easiest book I got to write is my current on on Svelte (yet to be published) as i can leverage much of the content from my previous React, Angular books.
- achow 4y agoThank you for helpful tips! Solid advice: Write Short and Concise Books. Instead of writing a 500-page book selling for $50 (which probably few will buy), write a 100-page book and sell it for lesser which greatly increases the number of buyers! ...It fits in Amazon’s price range of $2.99 — $9.99 (gets 70% royalties for ebooks). Anything lesser or more gets 35% royalty. This is for the ebook version. Paperbacks have a different price structure. You can price them higher with higher royalty rates.
- greglim81 4y agoglad it helped!
- techdragon 4y agoThat explains why the entire market for depth content at a higher price has basically collapsed… what a shitty deal. Want to charge more than $10… that’s a pretty nice book you have there… shame if something happened to your royalties…”
- zerr 4y agoI guess one should split to Part I, Part II, ...
- sitkack 4y agoOr sell the intro for 9$ and provide a link to the tome inside the book to your own payment processor.
- xcambar 4y agoAnd get all your readers to shout at you for getting their readers to pay twice.
- sitkack 4y agoI can see how you might think that, but I actually really like the $9 100 page booklet and if I want to go deep, having the 250-500-∞ page book is something I would be willing to pay for in addition to the $9, maybe off a discount, but I don't think it should matter. I'd kinda like to be able to pay twice as it were and get condensed versions of books I already have. I do understand that a shorter book might, and most likely does unless one has spent years thinking this way, take just as much or more effort than a longer book. As @quickthrower2 mentioned, the email list. I like that, but unless I really want to follow something, I won't do email. What I am a sucker for is a cheat sheet or some infographic looking poster.
- itsthecourier 4y ago
- astonex 4y agoIs anyone able to suggest software for writing technical books?
- suslik 4y agoorg-mode, if you don’t mind using emacs.
- dotancohen 4y agoI recently had to print some of my notes - already in Org mode - for a meeting. After going through numerous options including reformatting in LibreOffice, pandoc, HTML, etc etc I discovered that org mode can export the documents to PDFs that look better than anything else. Unfortunately, I don't have the config options that I used any more! I changed some fonts and drastically reduced the margins. And some places in which underscores were used had to be escaped as the PDF export interpreted underscores as being subscript.
- greglim81 4y agoJust ms word for me
- runjake 4y agoTechnical book writers seem to gravitate toward Latex or Microsoft Word.
- jamesfinlayson 4y agoI use HTML but it's not the best. Latex is probably a better option.
- jmercouris 4y agoThere's a lot of spelling errors in this article.
- greglim81 4y agoyes yes. i gave up hope on this article having submitted it months ago. just tried it again today and hack, it went up #1.
- travisgriggs 4y agoThis is one of the ironies of HN to me. It can feel like “you’re keeping up with trends” by following HN regularly. And then you experience this (either firsthand or secondhand) and realize just how completely randomly arbitrary it is if your submission floats to the “top 30” or not. Which doesn’t mean it’s not still worthwhile reading (I still follow regularly), it’s just that it’s more like a daily fortune cookie than it is any sort of “curated by popular consensus.”
- greglim81 4y agoYou are right.
- daenz 4y agoI've considered writing a book on how to grow software through different evolutions, and using different software paradigms that make sense for the different stages of growth. I don't think there's an audience for it though, or at least an audience that would respect the opinions of a non-credentialed author.
- greglim81 4y agoJust try it. Action over procrastination. You never know if you gonna hit success!
- gcheong 4y agoIt would seem the knowledge of how to grow software through different stages is most likely best gained through experience rather than credentials so I think sharing your knowledge based on your hard-won experience would be more valuable than that of someone writing from a more academic perspective.
- daenz 4y agoThanks for the encouragement!
- instagraham 4y ago> I wake up daily excited to write. When work is a dread, or when something unhappy pops up, some writing will always bring in positive energy into me. I don’t dread writing. In fact, I can’t stop myself from writing! I fear we are built different.
- xrd 4y agoI wrote a book for O'Reilly. It was grueling and I really struggled with it. The only thing that worked was following the Jerry Seinfeld "Don't break the chain" rule: promise yourself you will write every day, and mark it on your calendar each time you do, and never let there be a gap. It doesn't matter from where you start. If you do this, you'll accomplish more than you ever thought you could. You aren't built different.
- joeberon 4y agoYes they are built different: one person has no struggles writing and actively loves it, cannot stop doing it; the other finds it effortful and painful. Those two people will have vastly different experiences writing the book. The former will gain energy and feel great, the latter will feel pressured and depressed. We are not all the same, we are all built different, don’t ignore this reality
- xcambar 4y agoThat doesn't invalidate GP's comment. Even if you struggle, having a little commitment every day helps building habits and actually relieves the struggle (because a habit creates familiarity and ease). The "we're all different" part plays a role in how long it takes to adapt and bind to this new/building habit.
- joeberon 4y ago
- lelanthran 4y ago
- abdel_nasser 4y agoi am really interested in history and i have spent a lot of time looking for a good book on a certain topic or time period and sometimes not finding anything. it turns out that its really hard to find books that are completely objective, well researched and also written well. there is a scarcity of these kinds of books especially for modern history. and so the idea struck me that maybe i ought to write a short history book. but then i thought that that sounds like a pipe dream. anyway, for anyone who likes that kind of thing i would recommend the binladen book that was published recently. havent read it yet but i cant wait to. it turns out the invasion wasnt so misguided after all. https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300260632 https://yalebooks.co.uk/display.asp?K=9780300260632
- _tom_ 4y ago> completely objective. The really sad thing is that people have discovered that "completely objective" doesn't sell very well. Taking an extreme view sells much better, but provides much less useful information.
- lelanthran 4y ago> The really sad thing is that people have discovered that "completely objective" doesn't sell very well. "Discovered"? It's always been this way. Controversy sells. If it bleeds, it leads. Etc... I remember, when first doing academic publications, my supervisor told me controversy sells. It was true then, it's true now, it was probably true when newsletters were printed in cuneiform on stone tables.
- self_awareness 4y agoIs it even possible to write a completely objective book about history?
- baggy_trough 4y agoNo, but one can try to avoid overt irritating biases.
- 4y ago
- robinsonrc 4y agoHow are you publishing and printing these?
- greglim81 4y agoits in the article :)
- robinsonrc 4y agoThanks - I realised I was scanning for a specific section on this without spotting that the whole thing was done entirely through Amazon
- lifeisstillgood 4y agoSo, does this work outside of tech? Would a bus driver or a accountant be able to enjoy similar success?
- greglim81 4y agoyou never know. just try. :)
- lifeisstillgood 4y agofairy nuff:-)
- gcheong 4y agoI liked how the author gave an example of how they learned enough of a topic to write a beginner’s book on it. I’ve heard before that you don’t necessarily need to be an expert in something to write about it but it’s always better to understand the details.
- dmitriid 4y agoThis sounds like one of those "earn thousands selling custom t-shirts" tutorials: - the market is over saturated - you have to work continuously to output something - you are very lucky if you have a breakthrough
- greglim81 4y agoI did put in work. I am lucky.
- durpkingOP 4y agoI wish people wrote less
- yitchelle 4y agoWhy? It seems writing this is the only which complex thoughts can be formulated and be passed down through the generations.
- duckmysick 4y agoMaybe the OP meant something else, but for me writing less is about getting rid of the fluff in non-fiction books. It feels like large portions of those are marketing materials for themselves, telling me how great this book is going to be. Is buyer's remorse this strong that the authors need to alleviate it? Getting Things Done is the most notorious example from my recent reading list. I noticed other readers also dislike different anecdotes talking about the same idea. I see how repetition is helpful in learning, so it doesn't bother me as much. But I guess you could trim some fat here too.
- teddyh 4y ago“[…] of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh. ” — Ecclesiastes 12:12
- greglim81 4y ago"The end of the matter; all has been heard. Fear God and keep his commandments, for this is the whole duty of man. For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil." Eccl 12:13-14
- dotancohen 4y agoI wish people wished less.
- jbverschoor 4y agoHow is that passive?
- hambes 4y agoPut in work once, get paid over a long span of time in a way that is not proportional to the effort you put in at the start. Like any other passive income.
- ChrisRR 4y agoExcept he's working every day over 6 years. That doesn't sound very passive
- Shugarl 4y agoFor _multiple_ books. A book he wrote 6 years ago can still earn him some money, without him touching it.
- jbverschoor 4y agoThe books are about (versioned) technology. They have a lifespan. It's not like books which which are here to stay for decades
- bspear 4y agoLess impressive because this was done over 6 years...
- Copenjin 4y agoHi Greg, did you ever consider selling longer books with a higher price outside of Amazon? Maybe using the 9.99 ones to drive traffic to your pricier book/s.
- greglim81 4y agoHello, I believe in writing short books and spending no more than 3 months on a book. In case the book is a failure, I cut my losses. But yea, i hope to have other products priced more than $9.99 outside Amazon, eg gumroad
- stevage 4y agoThis doesn't sound like passive income as I understand the term. Writing a book is a ton of hard work, compared to, say, buying and renting out a house.
- charles_f 4y agoIt is though cause once it is published you get the income passively. However the topics of these books are perishable, so, have a end date
- xxs 4y agoHe has written 78 books - some of them make little to no money... or have stopped already. That's a lot of continuous work. The books are about current technologies that are bound to change, if the books are not updated/edited/etc. they are bound to stop making money as well. Anyways, writing that many book is not passive at any rate.
- charles_f 4y agoThat's fair, it actually sounds more like a cookie shop where you need to keep baking the cookies for them to sell, even though these cookies can be sold multiple times you still need to keep baking some fresh ones.
- godfreyantonell 4y agoI'm pulling a late-nighter decommissioning stuff and I stumble across your post. Thank you for the inspiration I needed for a new income stream! Please inbox me I believe we have a few commonalities. Or don't I won't be offended. I needed a little kick in the zen.
- canttestthis 4y agoNot OP but you don't have contact info in your profile
- godfreyantonell 4y agoThanks! I just put my email there. I'm new at this.
- 35mm 4y agoI know a lot of people on HN are not a fan of monetising with ads. That said, an alternative to writing a whole book before seeing if people will pay, is to write a blog. You’ll get validation in smaller chunks and can iterate. Currently the display ads on my blog pay between $15 - $30 per thousand visitors, and many blogs earn a lot more than that. If you’re writing a non fiction book in a technical niche, it’s fairly easy to get traffic from Google if you write in depth posts around 1,500 words each.
- baby 4y agoI’ve been blogging since 2013, have had a lot of traffic on my blog, yet would make almost no money from ads if I had some (I know from having successfully and not monetized many websites) Https://cryptologie.net
- bemmu 4y agoWhat topic has a CPM this high? I never saw anything like this when I played around with AdSense on some small websites I had in the past. Or maybe things have changed in the past few years?
- 35mm 4y agoThis in the home improvements space. I’m also using Ezoic which in my experience and from what I’ve heard from others pays a lot better than Adsense. Once you get over 50k or 100k uniques per month, you can qualify for Mediavine and AdThrive respectively, and they pay more than Ezoic.
- simonjgreen 4y agoWriting (from a quick skim check) at least 16 books over a period of 6 years, and earning money from that, is not exactly what I'd call "passive income". And given the topics are mostly (all?) about niches in current technologies they also won't continue to deliver passively forever. A more appropriate title and angle might be "How I've earned $10k/book and manage to keep writing more while maintaining a day job". (Which is in itself impressive!)
- n4r9 4y agoThe image near the top of the post suggests that he's written 78 books!
- tgv 4y agoPassive income: income not related to current/recent work. Writing is a bit like an investment. It can pay off later.
- baby 4y agoThat’s not what passive income is. Passive income is earning by doing nothing, which is what happens when you write a book.
- pjc50 4y agoI can hear my author friends gathering to beat you to death with hardbacks at the suggestion that writing a book is "doing nothing".
- emteycz 4y agoI can hear my author friends gathering to beat you with hardbacks at the suggestion they're wage-slaving, too! More seriously, I agree it's hard to write a book - but I don't think you can claim it's just like normal job when you wrote it in 3 months and it keeps earning you money for years and it's more than a full-time job would earn you.
- madsbuch 4y agoThis is a good reminder that book writing should not be for the income it generates, but for the joy of writing! To me, this is truly inspiring and I certainly need to get back into my writing habbit!
- greglim81 4y agoExactly! THanks!
- sakaroz 4y agoDo you know approximatively how much time you spend to write one of these books ?
- greglim81 4y agoabout 2 months writing on the side for each book.
- kahon65 4y agoIncluding the research and reading steps necesary to collect the data to aggregate in your books you write? You say you have read the 3 top books and several tech blogs <--- what are they? What main sources did you read to collect the data? Maybe you won't answer since all your business is based on that, finally :-).
- progx 4y agoI earned "passive money" too, only thing i have to do is work.
- lmt55 4y agoNo offense to the author, but I hope that I don't accidentally buy a book written by him or someone like him, when looking for a decent book on a topic I want to learn about.
- sakopov 4y agoThis is a heck of a lot of hard work. I wouldn't dare to call this passive by any means. You're going to spend just as much time updating content when technologies become obsolete or outdated as you did writing original material. This is hard hard work that's paid off. Major props to the OP, but there is nothing passive here.
- kolla 4y agoTIL: No author has a salary it's just "passive income"...
- tzury 4y agoWhat am I missing? 78 books totaling $160k makes it ~ $2K per book. If it takes 2 days to write a book, this is not passive income rather belated income.. If it takes more (and it should if you want the books to bring value), then simple programming is more profitable.
- Cthulhu_ 4y agoYou're missing that it's recurring income over time, done on top of a day job. If the author was a developer, they would probably be making MORE money from being a prolific book author. You're also assuming that people make $1000 a day doing "simple" programming. 99% of developers do NOT work for VC funded companies or FAANGs.
- tzury 4y agoA. Very low income comparing to 100s of hours invested per book. B. Books about those framework are short-lived ones, given trends and versions are changing rapidly. C. Not everyone are working for a vc funded or FAANGs, but one with such capabilities can definitely work for such.
- lotu 4y agoI seriously thought this was satire, but nope totally real.
- rexreed 4y agoI think the word "passive" doesn't mean what he/we think it means. I had thought it meant the opposite of active, where active is an adjective that implies "action", which means actively doing something. Writing dozens of books over many years for about $10k/book sounds like a long, hard, very active slog. Not at all what I would consider passive income. Perhaps this should be called "My $160k side gig as a book writer"
- bilekas 4y agoI kind of agree, but at the same time, they only need to be written once and then he can 'sit back'. Infact, they're written before any income so technically you could say he did a lot of work and can sit back now. Semi-Passive maybe. The only 'true' passive income types I can think of is just inheriting a huge amount and having it sit earning interest ?
- rexreed 4y agoTo me that sounds like doing all the work upfront for a later, undetermined, and potentially negative return on time. That's opposed to doing the work and realizing the benefit more contemporaneously with that work. Regardless, it's still active work with the return shifted in time. Sounds riskier to me to put all the work upfront without any guarantee of return, especially if that works is particularly intense and active.
- xtracto 4y ago> I kind of agree, but at the same time, they only need to be written once and then he can 'sit back'. Not for the type of books he has written. They are all technical books on specific frameworks (iOS, MongoDB, NodeJS). This reminds me of all the "Office 2001" or "Visual Basic Programming" that I saw in the "Computers" aisle the last time I went to a physical book store. Those books now are a dime a dozen.
- impostervt 4y agoSeems like some in the comments are having a hard time calling the author's income "passive". Just an alternative - if you can find a profitable niche, you can have the book ghostwritten. A non-fiction book of around 30k words (~110 - 180 pages, depending on trim size) can be produced for $1000 (or less, if you can find a diamond in the rough on upwork). The cover can run anywhere from $100 - $800 depending on the quality you want. So, from $1000 - $2000 you can basically have a book written for you. Choose a pen name and sell it on Amazon.
- pc86 4y agoThe thing that always bothers me about these articles, and I completely accept it may just me reading into it what I want to see, is I immediately assume the dollar figure is annual. $160k/yr sounds like great passive income. You could certainly stop working a 9-5 and build out a really great lifestyle business. But then I look at the article. Oh, it's over six years? Okay, $26k/yr is a lot less and all of a sudden it's a big risk to try and turn that into a real business. Wait, what's that in the screenshot? 78 books? $341 per book, per year. And my thought goes from "that sounds like a great little business!" to "fuck that" within about fifteen seconds. And such is the lifecycle of these "how I made $n doing x" articles. Great claims that when you dig into them, the resulting wisdom is basically "do a lot of work, and have a little bit of luck. And don't forget the marketing!" I don't mean to tear down what the author did by any stretch, it's impressive regardless of the time frame. But if you're already making $150-200k/yr from a tech job, do you really want to bust your ass for another couple grand?
- lostmsu 4y agoTo summarize a bit further, the income is not passive at all.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thenerdhead 4y agoLots of negative comments here about not making much money for the effort that goes in. Have people considered that perhaps the author enjoys the process and it's a win-win given they learn new stuff, get to teach that stuff, and make a little cash on the side too? OP has written 78 books. That's 78 more attempts than most people and it's like the Ray Bradbury quote: "Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row." Given the stats on going viral, this person is well on their way to writing a book that may one day make the same money of all the others combined with a little luck. Lady luck fortunes the one who tries at the end of the day.
- rmah 4y agoHave people considered that perhaps the author enjoys the process and it's a win-win given they learn new stuff, get to teach that stuff, and make a little cash on the side too? It's hardly out of bounds to think the primary objective was to make money. when the headline is "How I earned $x...".
- ska 4y agoIt seems “passive income” now is being used to mean anything I don’t get a W2 (or country equivalent) for.
- D13Fd 4y agoThis is not passive income. This is being an author.