7 ms·
Writing (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 gi
by simonjgreen 4y ago
Writing (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.
- pjc50 4y ago> 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. No, but that definitely puts you in the 1% of authors!
- emteycz 4y agoNot me, unfortunately... And I live in a low CoL area, so my friends aren't rich either
- baby 4y agoI’m actually an author and I’m getting paid continuously for zero work now. I totally categorize my books as passive income.
- Namari 4y agoPassive income is income that can be earned automatically with minimal labor to earn or maintain. I guess you can't really call that passive if you spend time working for it. It's not like an investment that you buy once and gives your income each month. PS: Sadly writing can pay off as much as giving you nothing (money wise).
- kahon65 4y agoAs I pointed in a comment I've written, books income are actually automatically earned, since the author doesn't need to promote his books (Amazon's upvote system, e.g.). (however: it's an hypothesis for the moment because he didn't communicate about that). Labor to write his book is low labor, since he writes books <=100 pages, he enjoys that, and it is far less stressing than working for someone (employer/customer). In fact it makes him feeling happy and, perhaps, relaxed. However, the author would be welcome to clearly indicate weither or not this required labor is actually "low one" or not, because he didn't communicate about that. Maintaining his books: the author doesn't communicate about that but maintenance operations on books seem low labor too, far less than code maintenance. Those books incomes, I see them as passive(writting a book once, over a period of several months probably, then eventually getting money each month is as worth as investments, except that investments are done in few seconds with some money needed to be brought - for books written: no money is needed to be brought, but it takes months contrary to few seconds to be done). Moreover, they can be extended by bank investments or Bitcoin investments, extending their "passive"-side. > PS: Sadly writing can pay off as much as giving you nothing (money wise). Exact. But the author writes no books > 100 pages and he has even written a sentence about this. PS: if we define "labor" by "spent money", then writting and publishing a book (and ebook) is also low labor since very few $$$ are required to be bring by the author, like computer science projects. > Note that: bank investment need lots of money to be done. Writting books, no. Bank investment need a few seconds to be done. Writting books, several months. I think they are equivalent and, thus, are both ways to earn passive incomes. ("equivalence" from a money point of view and almost from a labor point of view, if we consider that bank investments's initial brought money is only due to labor, not inheritance, etc.)
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- vegai_ 4y agoIf we're trying to figure out the total benefits that come from writing a book, we probably shouldn't dismiss how much writing a book compels one to improve in various ways.
- kahon65 4y agoFrom Wikipedia: > Passive income also know as "Unearned Income" is income that can be earned automatically with minimal labor to earn or maintain. It can be a great way to help one generate extra cash flow, whether he or she is running a side hustle or just trying to get a little extra dough each month. According to the above definition, the author earns $$$ each year after he had written each book and he doesn't need to do a lot of stuff to earn or maintain (people just buy on Amazon and upvote his books, e.g.). So it is passive income. ("minimal labor to earn" =>>> the author doesn't need to create ads to promote his books etc., he just write them once... and this writting is equivalent to "low labor", see below). What you want to highlist is rather: SINCE he has worked a lot to earn $10k with 78 books (not only one book - which you wrote in your comment) written over a period of several years, THEN: is it actually worth in terms of $$$? Given the fact he probably didn't spend lots of $$$ to write and publish his books & ebooks (but he didn't give this piece of information), and given the fact that writting a book is far less stressing than working for someone (in fact, in addition to his job, it made him relaxing), I would say YES. The time he has spent on each book is controlled since in his article, he emphasizes on the fact that he writtes 100+ pages books, not more: so even considering "time is money", the time with no income required to write his books may have been refunded with the sells quite quick. *Note that: bank investment need lots of money to be done. Writting books, no. Bank investment need a few seconds to be done. Writting books, several months. I think they are equivalent and, thus, are both ways to earn passive incomes.* ("equivalence" from a money point of view and almost from a labor point of view, if we consider that bank investments's initial brought money is only due to labor, not inheritance, etc.) Moreover, since he already have a fulltime job, I bet he uses his books income to invest as banks investments or, perhaps, on Bitcoin, etc (since his fulltime job decreases the risks for him to have a big debt e.g., in the case of his eventual investments were not worth). Such investments would extend the "worthly"-side of his books activity, alongside with very controlled risks thanks to his fulltime job. PS: I think 2 or 3 points above have medium probability to be wrong, because the author didn't communicate about them, leading to some speculation/hypothesises by myself. So don't take this comment too serious. However I think it's consistent thoughts.
- TrackerFF 4y agoSome quick napkin-math I found 17 books where he was author and co-author, all books sum up to 2924 pages. I'm sure some of these books have lots of overlap - for example, I found three books which included "React hooks" in them, so I'd assume that he copy/pasted some pages. But for simplicity and worst-case scenario, let's assume 2924 unique pages, and subtract say, 200 blank pages and similar, so 2724 unique pages. $160k / 2724 pages = $58.73 in revenue pr. page. Let's further assume that he spent one hour on each page. Over six years, that's 454 hours / year spent in writing books. If we further assume that he wrote those during weekdays (260 / year), that comes to roughly 1h 45m a day writing. And then you have to ask yourself - how much do you value your spare time? How much would it cost to hire you, in your free time, for almost two hours? If we assume that you make $50 / hr. at your work, and work 8 hours a day, 260 days a year, that comes to $104k/year - which seems like a normal salary for IT professionals in the western world, at least if you have the knowledge enough to punch out xx books on various topics. Let's use that as the opportunity cost for this calculation - i.e, had the average IT guy chosen to rather work than write a book, at $50/hr, the opportunity cost would have come to 2724 hours (because 1 hr/page) * $50 = $136200. These are the gross figures, we haven't even touched on things like taxes, third-party costs, and what not. And all the above assumptions could be wildly inaccurate - for all we know, the author could burn through these books in just weeks, being a very productive writer. Or it could have taken more time. So I wouldn't call it "passive income" at all. The author clearly spent substantial amounts of time to write these books, and other parts of business. But one could argue that future earnings will be more or less passive, and those are the fruits of his labor. EDIT: And as other have mentioned, while published books can earn you income "indefinitely", most books still have a finite product lifetime. At some point the sales will taper off, and become more or less negligible. But if you enjoy writing, enjoy the idea of helping people, and then a lot of the above kind of becomes irrelevant. For some people, this kind of work is infinitely more rewarding than "regular" work, and the payoff is more than just monetary ROI.
- ricardobeat 4y agoThat’s 136k over six years though, so ~22k/year in “time”, returning ~27k/year in profit. And for this kind of content one hour per page is certainly overestimating. The trick is that you cannot simply decide to work an extra hour and a half everyday at your day job to get the extra income. Plus who wants to work 10 hour days for years on end?
- notum 4y agoWhich is what explains this poor attempt at advertising. The post and this thread are more about showcasing his books, less so about income. Passive or otherwise.
- giantg2 4y agoYeah, I was expecting some mention of the editing and publishing process but didn't see them. The article doesn't have much useful information in it in my opinion. The whole thing is sort of like "look at all the money I made writing books; you can too by doing xyz", when in reality most self-published books make next to nothing. And to be honest, that making money and out of touch with reality kind of pisses me off.
- Hnrobert42 4y agoInteresting. I didn’t look up his books or even think about that. I did however start to think about a book I could write. Maybe this was an advertisement, but that’s certainly not all it was.
- greglim81 4y agoglad it inspired u to write your book!
- mnky9800n 4y agoworking in church ministry i wonder how much time the OP actually commits to work. My guess is they think they works 40 hours a week but actually doesn't.
- greglim81 4y agoi make sure not to take a lot of time to write a book. I don't write everyday. Perhaps just 3-4 days in a week? And at most 45 min per day. whenever i am busy with church, family, i will put writing down. Won't ever compromise them. And, its just a hobby i enjoy doing.
- ahonhn 4y agoAh - your day job isn't tech. Was wondering how you could get permission and time to do it. Every tech job I've had here in SG expected full ownership of any and all IP created whilst an employee, no moonlighting, and always ended up consuming every waking second of my time anyway making the whole point moot. Good on you for making it all balance and not only feeding your family but spending time with them too (which is bloody hard here).
- greglim81 4y agohello fellow sg! yea, if my day job was tech (it was previously), i would be so sick of it and wouldn't touch it when I got home. But now, i don't touch it in my day job and it suddenly becomes a pleasure to tinker with.