5 ms·
"Passive" has truly gone down the path of "literally".
by xboxnolifes 5y ago
"Passive" has truly gone down the path of "literally".
- greglim81 5y 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 5y agoSeems like a fair definition of passive income. Not sure why the commenter feels it's not.
- xboxnolifes 5y 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 5y agoI write on the side though (i have a full-time job). Just a hobby :)
- evanjonr 5y 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_ 5y agoAnyone that thinks renting houses is passive income has never done it. Repairs, collections, advertising, evictions, etc.
- Shugarl 5y 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 5y agoBut all of this is something you can contract out to an agency for a cut of the rent.
- sokoloff 5y 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 5y 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.
- skywal_l 5y agoPeople do magically own houses. It's called inheritance.
- sokoloff 5y agoDo you think houses are most commonly inherited or worked for?
- fukpaywalls2 5y agopassive income requires ownership of some revenue producing assets, whether its land or digital content. If you just work for someone else, your trading time for money, no passive income.
- silisili 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y 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 5y agoI didn't do anything this month. So far royalties > $2,000. And I am thankful for it :)
- _tom_ 5y agoMany (Most?) ebooks on amazon require steady advertising to not drop into oblivion. This makes it decidedly less passive. Source: my authors group
- radicalriddler 5y agoNOT for a long time after, because you're writing about frameworks that may be out of date in 12 months!
- greglim81 5y agomany of my books have been there for years.
- vmception 5y 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 5y 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.