passive in the sense that I wrote it once, and it continues to collect royalties for a long time after, without me having to do much :)
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