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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

#161
post #68
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess one should split to Part I, Part II, ...

Or sell the intro for 9$ and provide a link to the tome inside the book to your own payment processor.

Or “join my list for free X” in the cheap book, a email campaign which then promotes the upsell smorgasbord.

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

#162
post #160

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.

You'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.

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

#163
post #35

> 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.

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…

I wrote some chapters for Apress/Glasshouse or whoever it was many years back. By the end of the editing process, I had a "THINK OF THE MONEY" sign taped to the top of my CRT display. And there wasn't even that much money! I grew to detest the gig by the end of it.

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

#164

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…

Which 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.

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

#165

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 thing that is often missed with opportunity cost is whether more work feasible. Most of us are salaried. Most of us have contracts/policies that say working for another company has to be approved. Even if you find another job, will they actually pay that much and will the hours be flexible enough to rival writing? It's not really lost opportunity cost if the opportunity doesn't exist.

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

#166
post #164

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…

Which 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.

Yeah, 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.

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

#167

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…

working 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.

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

#168
post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, and passive income from the stock market can't be achieved without the labor of picking the stocks...

True but this is not as much work as writing a book, moreover it could turn out as a liability if the stocks go down.

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

#169
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> labour is stuff you do,

by this measure there may be no such thing as passive income, or at least very few instances of it in this world since just about everything requires you to do something to realize a profit from it. I guess having a rich relative you never knew die and leave you everything is passive, as long as you don't have to go to the will reading or anything.

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

#170
post #136
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’m actually an author and I’m getting paid continuously for zero work now. I totally categorize my books as passive income.
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