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I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books

greglim81.medium.com

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Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books

#151

Post by nickjj »

TrackerFF wrote: post #137
simonjgreen wrote: post #115

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.…

> $160k / 2724 pages = $58.73 in revenue pr. page.

It likely ends up being a lot higher revenue depending on the author's life style.

Books and courses potentially have a lot of "back-end" value from opportunities that come up through folks finding you through your book / course.

Here's a couple of excerpts from writing blog posts and making a few video courses over the last 5-6 years:

Wrote a blog post about Flask that took me 3 hours to write but it resulted in 40 hours of contract work from someone finding me through that post. You could say the post directly made $0, but indirectly made a lot more than $0. Stuff like this might happen 8 months after you write the post.

In another case, I made a course about Flask and someone reached me out to me for contract work which resulted in a multi-year long gig which then turned into a full time position and along the way met some great people.

I've flown across the US a few times for tech events (all expenses paid) because of a blog post and got to experience things I wouldn't have gotten to experience on my own.

There's dozens of other events and contract gigs over the years that happened from writing blog posts and video courses. They all resulted in either indirect monetary gains or fun life experiences. A lot of the posts resulted in nothing too but that's ok. To me writing is the reward, everything else is secondary.

Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books

#154

Post by kahon65 »

Namari wrote: post #146
kahon65 wrote: post #142

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

Same for bank investments, except for inheritance (but someone had to work).

Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books

#155

Post by TrackerFF »

ricardobeat wrote: post #150
TrackerFF wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

That’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?

Of course, there must be some assumption that you either have the ability to do extra work that generates income at work (could very well be the case for consultants), or you can do contract / consulting work yourself.

Writing a book falls into the category of being your own boss/business - but there are also uncertainties.

The author mentioned that he spent around two months on producing a book, and seeing that he's authored 17 books - that comes out to 34 months over 6 year. But I can't find any information on how much time is being spent during those two months. My estimates were almost two hours / pages or writing a day, and with average of 170 pages a book, that came to 80-90 days of writing, or almost 3 months. So it seems I overestimated.

Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books

#156

Post by emteycz »

pjc50 wrote: post #136
baby wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s not what passive income is. Passive income is earning by doing nothing, which is what happens when you write a book.

I can hear my author friends gathering to beat you to death with hardbacks at the suggestion that writing a book is "doing nothing".

I 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.

Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books

#157

Post by kahon65 »

greglim81 wrote: post #144
sakaroz wrote: post #127

Do you know approximatively how much time you spend to write one of these books ?

about 2 months writing on the side for each book.

Including 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 :-).

Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books

#158

Post by yellow_mixer »

TrackerFF wrote: post #137
simonjgreen wrote: post #115

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.…

One issue I see with your example. You say “had the IT guy chosen to work”. This statement assumes OP can just pickup more hours easily. That is not the reality. If it’s a salary based position, OP can’t put in more hours just to earn additional income. If it’s a hourly job, OP all can’t put in more hours. Usually anything outside 40 hours is considered overtime and would need to budgeted and approved by the employer. OP could use his IT skills to find more work at that rate for a different company, but now we are back to the passive income example. TLDR. The math makes sense, but the example falls flat in reality.

Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books

#159

Post by quickthrower2 »

joeberon wrote: post #48
xrd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 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 diff…

Yes 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

Then better to find the thing that energizes you. For me it is getting to know a good framework like NextJS and working on small solo projects. For me it is not writing books … I find it fairly tedious. Nor is it the typical day job of old complicated codebased and small incremental improvements on big established software products.

Re: I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books

#160

Post by tzury »

What 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.

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