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How is that passive?
Put in work once, get paid over a long span of time in a way that is not proportional to the effort you put in at the start. Like any other passive income.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Passive income: income not related to current/recent work. Writing is a bit like an investment. It can pay off later.
Passive 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).
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 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.)
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…
Passive income: income not related to current/recent work. Writing is a bit like an investment. It can pay off later.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
>> You aren't built different. > 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. GP probably worded it poorly; yes, we're all built different, but all the successful authors who spoke about their experience all expressed similar struggles. Terry Pratchett said once (can't be bothered to look for the exact quote) t…
For me writing is effortless and a lot of fun, and I believe that it is effortless for most writers who are far more successful than me. Stephen King could have never written so much so persistently without thoroughly enjoying it. If you don't enjoy writing and have to continually force yourself to do it, then writing might not be the right thing for you. I believe this is true for any work you do - if you have to force yourself every morning to do it, then you haven't found the right profession yet.
That being said, the examples you give sound familiar and don't contradict what I say. Especially in larger projects, there will always be a point when it becomes a chore and it's becoming very hard to finish a book. It's reasonable to assume that every author has such moments. I remember J.K. Rowling once said she had this moment with the 5th Harry Potter novel - which is very understandable, writing so many novels within the same universe is dreadful and tiring. But, again, the same is probably true of almost any other activity. There is no work without some downsides and some occasional chores. For me, it's editing and marketing, which is why my novels are poorly edited and barely marketed.
There is another thing worth mentioning: Successful creative professionals of all kind tend to over-emphasize the work aspect of their profession. They're fighting an image of being lazy against people who do not understand creative work. For example, the maximum number of hours anyone could write on a novel per day is 6, but 4 or less hours is more realistic. Some of them might even fight their own guilt for being successful, believing or knowing they could have improved their works by spending more time and being more diligent. In summary, you shouldn't take claims about "hard work" in these professions too seriously, it's mostly a defense against the many people who will be openly hostile to anyone successful due to envy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Passive 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).
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…
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
???
The word everyone is looking for in regard to royalties is not passive or active but deferred income. Writing a book is labour, regardless of word games, and it produces a capital asset - intellectual property - that you can either sell all at once or over a period of time.
> the author doesn't need to promote his books
This is rarely true of books. It sounds like he's found an under-served niche. Once upon a time you didn't have to promote apps in the app store, either.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Passive income: income not related to current/recent work. Writing is a bit like an investment. It can pay off later.
That’s not what passive income is. Passive income is earning by doing nothing, which is what happens when you write a book.
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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like a fair definition of passive income. Not sure why the commenter feels it's not.
There'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.
Author has a full time job, think of it as a hobby like a blog.
Instead of posting on HN daily , he wrote books and made $160k…that’s a full house in some parts…and that’s on top of a full time job so it’s pure savings…sans tax.
Not having a dig at you per se but the general nitpicking and negativity in some of these comments
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…
Passive income: income not related to current/recent work. Writing is a bit like an investment. It can pay off later.