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!)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.