141–150 of 229 posts
Hi 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.
But yea, i hope to have other products priced more than $9.99 outside Amazon, eg gumroad
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As 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 Maintaining his books: the author doesn't communicate about that but maintenance operations on books s…
> if we define "labor" by "spent money" And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon. This is obfuscating a useful distinction - labour is stuff you do, spending money in the hope of a return is investment. It's like trying to redefine landlordism as labour because you do occasionally have to do some work. > Moreover, they can be extended by bank investments or Bitcoin investments, extending their "passive"-side…
> In the court's view, royalties are those items which constitute passive income, such as the compensation paid by a licensee to a licensor for the use of a Page 7 patented invention.
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicd89.pdf
Also, as you say, some royaltie are active incomes. But Passive royalties exist.
Do you know approximatively how much time you spend to write one of these books ?
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Its 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 Amazon doesn't allow authors to delete unpublished books, thus showing 80.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
Useful clarification! Would also be interesting to see what your sales tail is like… are some of your books still selling decently several years after publishing?
There's also Smashwords & Ingramspark as well but I won't share those for now.
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> if we define "labor" by "spent money" And if my grandmother had wheels she'd be a wagon. This is obfuscating a useful distinction - labour is stuff you do, spending money in the hope of a return is investment. It's like trying to redefine landlordism as labour because you do occasionally have to do some work. > Moreover, they can be extended by bank investments or Bitcoin investments, extending their "passive"-side…
I was writting a long answer but finally, I decided to simply quote: > In the court's view, royalties are those items which constitute passive income, such as the compensation paid by a licensee to a licensor for the use of a Page 7 patented invention. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicd89.pdf Also, as you say, some royaltie are active incomes. But Passive royalties exist.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was writting a long answer but finally, I decided to simply quote: > In the court's view, royalties are those items which constitute passive income, such as the compensation paid by a licensee to a licensor for the use of a Page 7 patented invention. https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-tege/eotopicd89.pdf Also, as you say, some royaltie are active incomes. But Passive royalties exist.
I guess writing a book is "labor" but "royalties" out of it are passive income, I guess it's a mix of both. But Royalties cannot be achieved in that case without the Labor of writing the book
I 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 fair…
Or maybe things have changed in the past few years?
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". (W…
Some 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.…
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?