I earned $160k in passive income from writing non-fiction books
greglim81.medium.com
greglim81.medium.com
But then I look at the article. Oh, it's over six years? Okay, $26k/yr is a lot less and all of a sudden it's a big risk to try and turn that into a real business. Wait, what's that in the screenshot? 78 books? $341 per book, per year. And my thought goes from "that sounds like a great little business!" to "fuck that" within about fifteen seconds.
And such is the lifecycle of these "how I made $n doing x" articles. Great claims that when you dig into them, the resulting wisdom is basically "do a lot of work, and have a little bit of luck. And don't forget the marketing!"
I don't mean to tear down what the author did by any stretch, it's impressive regardless of the time frame. But if you're already making $150-200k/yr from a tech job, do you really want to bust your ass for another couple grand?
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!)
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.
No, but that definitely puts you in the 1% of authors!
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 <=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.)
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.
> 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.
> However, if you hold an operating oil, gas, or mineral interest or are in business as a self-employed writer, inventor, artist, etc., report your income and expenses on Schedule C (Form 1040).
https://irs.gov/publications/p525#en_US_2021_publink10002292...
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.
Imagine you work a legit, regular job. Obviously, that's not passive income. But say you get a deal[1] that, for every year where you defer receiving the salary from the employer, you get a 10% bonus (compounded like interest).
The correct way to look at that, IMHO, would be "The original salary is working income, the additional gains from deferral are passive income."
Then apply that to the case of these writing royalties. Which part is what? Well, he worked to write the book, but received income over several later years.
So then I'd break it into:
a) "the hypothetical amount he could have sold the IP to a publisher for when he finished it", which is rightly called working income.
b) any gain above that amount that he received via the royalty deal, which would be passive income.
(This is probably 100% unrelated to how the IRS would classify it.)
[1] which, for simplicity, we'll assume is trustworthy and above-board, even though an offer like this probably wouldn't be in practice.
[2] In common parlance, I think "working income" would be called "earned income" but I don't like that phrasing and so avoid it here.
> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
That's because, although I can trace specific projects and therefore specific revenue to things I've written, I don't know what the counterfactual would have been. Would I have ended up doing another, similar, project instead? How much of a premium can I charge because of the channel through which the work came in?
I don't think anyone can answer that.
If you take this line of thought to completion then nothing is quantifiable because there's too many ways for events to have an unpredictable outcome when measured over time. For example, you could start walking outside on a windy day, wave at your neighbor without stopping, eventually reach train tracks, pause for 2 minutes to wait for the train to pass, continue walking and then get hit in the face by a $20 bill that happened to get lifted up by a wind gust. If you talked for 5 minutes with your neighbor instead of just waving you wouldn't have picked up $20 because the $20 would have blown away by the time you got there.
Since your life is a series of non-editable events there's no way to know what would have happened in both scenarios. Or to relate it back to this example, writing blog posts, books or courses. The only thing you can do is make decisions that you think will be beneficial for you based on whatever criteria you feel is important. I can say at least in my case, writing these posts and making those courses produced a beneficial outcome and tons of other folks have said similar things about writing.
One thing I've learned is you can't discount great things from happening when doing things that feel minor. It's like the butterfly effect. Someone reading 1 sentence in a blog post you wrote 2 years ago could result in you getting a personal tour from the senior astronomer at SETI's headquarters[0]. Completely unpredictable.
[0]: https://nickjanetakis.com/blog/coming-back-to-cloud-field-da...
That seems extremely low for finished, post-edit text? I would estimate one work-day per page is more likely?
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.
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).
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.
I fear we are built different.
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 different.
Even if you struggle, having a little commitment every day helps building habits and actually relieves the struggle (because a habit creates familiarity and ease).
The "we're all different" part plays a role in how long it takes to adapt and bind to this new/building habit.
> 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) that he literally had to force himself to sit in front of the keyboard for a minimum time each night and type anything, just to get the groove started.
Stephen King said a similar thing in Danse Macabre.
When it comes to software, Joel Spolsky in his JoelOnSoftware blog said the same thing - Fire and Motion is your friend (https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/).
When it comes to achieving something[1], you need to "not break the chain". You need to force yourself to start on it each day. After maybe 30m of doing it you'll get into the groove and continue with less effort for the day.
[1] The actual "Something" is not important.
Spend 30m each day practising guitar and eventually you'll be good enough to be in a band.
Mark off a time slot on your calendar every day to spend working on your side-project, and ensure that you have nothing booked after that time-slot, and eventually you'll release your product.
Force yourself to start typing into your book-in-progress for not less than[2] 30m after dinner every single day and I assure you, you will have a completed book in two years.
[2] My experience is that if I force myself to spend not less than 30m on something, by the time the 30m expires, I get into the groove and can run in that rut all day if necessary.
Getting into that groove is the hard part, and is probably why work productivity for most devs is about 10% less than side-project productivity - at work you are constantly yanked out of the rut.
Definitely not true.
Some people really don’t have those sorts of struggles.
It doesn’t mean that those who do need to push themselves shouldn’t write/paint/code/swim/whatever, or that the results of their effort are of any lesser quality, or that they’re not in highly esteemed company.
It just means that people have different processes and motivations and drives, and that there are many paths that lead to comparable accomplishment.
To say otherwise isn’t entirely the encouragement I think you’re trying to offer. It’s denying the reality of other people’s lived experience.
> Definitely not true.
You're saying that all the successful authors who spoke about their experience did not all express similar struggles?
You have a quote from a successful author, who said that they did not express similar struggles?
Because I am only making the claim about what successful authors said, not whether they were lying or not.
Some successful authors have shared their struggles with motivation and perseverance, and others have shared their lack of such.
For some people, writing is a refuge from the stresses of the world, for others it’s a compulsion, for others it’s a surge of inspiration that moves through them now and then, etc
This variety of process is common to all traditionally creative endeavors, and even things like athletics or coding. There’s no shortage of “successful” people sharing their experience of such.
I can’t know, but you may be blinding yourself through some kind of confirmation bias.
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.
And? I didn't claim that he claimed not to enjoy it, I claimed that he said it's a struggle to get into the groove.
There are many, many successful authors. Some of them, it just flows. One of the best selling non fiction authors in the world over the last 10 years is a friend of mine. He doesn’t describe it as a struggle.
Jerry Seinfeld, by his own admission, didn’t invent that: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1ujvrg/jerry_seinfeld...
Maybe the takeaway is that you have to trick (or lie to) your brain somehow when you want to do something bigger than you can imagine.
Maybe this is why some really nutty people have done amazing things.
Sounds almost like getting a rough requirements or ideas, then writing a more detailed specification and finally fully developed software that goes through rigorous testing and refinement.
It's quite different to how I thought most writers write. My assumption it's more straightforward with little preparation.
But many major authors produce a book every 1 to 5 to 10 years. Game of Thrones being the big example.
>I fear we are built different.
Isaac Asimov was like Greg Lim:
>[T]he only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes.
You can't get successful only doing what you love. You'll still have to do a lot of things you hate.
You can’t get successful keeping it to yourself for sure
Real-World Cryptography https://www.amazon.com/dp/1617296716/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_1P...
Write Short and Concise Books.
Instead of writing a 500-page book selling for $50 (which probably few will buy), write a 100-page book and sell it for lesser which greatly increases the number of buyers! ...It fits in Amazon’s price range of $2.99 — $9.99 (gets 70% royalties for ebooks). Anything lesser or more gets 35% royalty. This is for the ebook version. Paperbacks have a different price structure. You can price them higher with higher royalty rates.
I do understand that a shorter book might, and most likely does unless one has spent years thinking this way, take just as much or more effort than a longer book.
As @quickthrower2 mentioned, the email list. I like that, but unless I really want to follow something, I won't do email. What I am a sucker for is a cheat sheet or some infographic looking poster.
What I won't buy though are the first 3-4 chapters of the book to be met with the "insert card for more".
Perhaps this should be called "My $160k side gig as a book writer"
Infact, they're written before any income so technically you could say he did a lot of work and can sit back now. Semi-Passive maybe.
The only 'true' passive income types I can think of is just inheriting a huge amount and having it sit earning interest ?
Not for the type of books he has written. They are all technical books on specific frameworks (iOS, MongoDB, NodeJS). This reminds me of all the "Office 2001" or "Visual Basic Programming" that I saw in the "Computers" aisle the last time I went to a physical book store. Those books now are a dime a dozen.
Anyways, writing that many book is not passive at any rate.
Action over procrastination.
You never know if you gonna hit success!
Have people considered that perhaps the author enjoys the process and it's a win-win given they learn new stuff, get to teach that stuff, and make a little cash on the side too?
OP has written 78 books. That's 78 more attempts than most people and it's like the Ray Bradbury quote:
"Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row."
Given the stats on going viral, this person is well on their way to writing a book that may one day make the same money of all the others combined with a little luck.
Lady luck fortunes the one who tries at the end of the day.
It's hardly out of bounds to think the primary objective was to make money. when the headline is "How I earned $x...".
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 fairly easy to get traffic from Google if you write in depth posts around 1,500 words each.
Https://cryptologie.net
Or maybe things have changed in the past few years?
Once you get over 50k or 100k uniques per month, you can qualify for Mediavine and AdThrive respectively, and they pay more than Ezoic.
Just an alternative - if you can find a profitable niche, you can have the book ghostwritten. A non-fiction book of around 30k words (~110 - 180 pages, depending on trim size) can be produced for $1000 (or less, if you can find a diamond in the rough on upwork). The cover can run anywhere from $100 - $800 depending on the quality you want.
So, from $1000 - $2000 you can basically have a book written for you. Choose a pen name and sell it on Amazon.
To me, this is truly inspiring and I certainly need to get back into my writing habbit!
This is actually pretty cool, if he didn't pick the maximum largest gross dollar figure they could find.
The primary takeaways are how to maximize Amazon's royalties and trend hopping. It actually does solve the problem of people publishing long-winded books in an area that has limited timespan of utility (programming, tech).
Helps people get to the point of what they are looking for and be in a mindframe to take it seriously, compared to ad garbage affiliate websites and long winded youtube videos or Udemy courses.
But yea, i hope to have other products priced more than $9.99 outside Amazon, eg gumroad
just tried it again today and hack, it went up #1.
And then you experience this (either firsthand or secondhand) and realize just how completely randomly arbitrary it is if your submission floats to the “top 30” or not.
Which doesn’t mean it’s not still worthwhile reading (I still follow regularly), it’s just that it’s more like a daily fortune cookie than it is any sort of “curated by popular consensus.”
The really sad thing is that people have discovered that "completely objective" doesn't sell very well.
Taking an extreme view sells much better, but provides much less useful information.
"Discovered"? It's always been this way. Controversy sells. If it bleeds, it leads. Etc...
I remember, when first doing academic publications, my supervisor told me controversy sells. It was true then, it's true now, it was probably true when newsletters were printed in cuneiform on stone tables.
No, not necessarily. From the events you go to the chains of events, the clusters, the trends, the teachings etc.
Similarly to experimental science, where you go from the protocols ("this happened there then") to the "laws".
The role of «decisions and bias» could be limited, with some similar quantitative, and maybe collaborative (aggregation of multi-agent contribution) approach that ranked the outputs through a computed importance.
But also note what the goals can be: a "computed" summary vs clever, intelligent, wise insights. Note that some texts are built so as to include both: a flow of core analysis with quality commentaries as asides.
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 also assuming that people make $1000 a day doing "simple" programming. 99% of developers do NOT work for VC funded companies or FAANGs.
B. Books about those framework are short-lived ones, given trends and versions are changing rapidly.
C. Not everyone are working for a vc funded or FAANGs, but one with such capabilities can definitely work for such.
So, neither of those.
Unfortunately, I don't have the config options that I used any more! I changed some fonts and drastically reduced the margins. And some places in which underscores were used had to be escaped as the PDF export interpreted underscores as being subscript.
- the market is over saturated
- you have to work continuously to output something
- you are very lucky if you have a breakthrough
I am lucky.
Or put another way, If I give you two options:
(1) Work 100 hours and I pay you $10,000 lump sum.
(2) Work 100 hours and I pay you $100 a year (inflation adjusted) over 100 years
Is one of those passive income while the other isn't?
Repairs, collections, advertising, evictions, etc.
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.
You still need to put in the upfront work of creating something. It just so happens that something can generate income for a long time without much, if any, upkeep. Think of it as a machine that prints money. You still have to build the machine, but afterwards you just have to change the oil once a year.
But this seems different -so far-. This is more akin to building 80 money printing machines that each print a certain amount of money. They may work forever, or die in 6 months, or not work at all.
I guess my entire point is that this is a monumental amount of seemingly continuing effort. It's simply too early to call it passive IMO.
However, dates are missing here. If OP wrote his last book 5 years ago and is collecting this income each year, I'll gladly eat crow.
you can check out the active books here:
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.
We should cut out the middle man -- and the middle step -- and just print money. We can start 100 digital currency initiatives and play the lottery, one of them is bound to take off...
It’s an outlier, sure. But it’s proof you can write on programming topics that are very sticky.
and its not too difficult to update books, as compared to updating videos.
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
I still think it’s a cool and fascinating article - congrats to the author on their success!
This makes it decidedly less passive.
Source: my authors group
Better title: Earned $26,000 per year writing 20,000–30,000 word books and selling them for $9.99.
Subtitle: Split book into another $9.99 book if there is more to say. Here's why.
The initial books were harder to write as I hadn't flexed my writing muscles yet. but as i wrote more books, and get greater technical knowledge, subsequent books got easier and easier.
I would say the easiest book I got to write is my current on on Svelte (yet to be published) as i can leverage much of the content from my previous React, Angular books.
Getting Things Done is the most notorious example from my recent reading list.
I noticed other readers also dislike different anecdotes talking about the same idea. I see how repetition is helpful in learning, so it doesn't bother me as much. But I guess you could trim some fat here too.
— Ecclesiastes 12:12
Eccl 12:13-14