Building a second income stream by writing a book | Hacker News Reader

Building a second income stream by writing a book

fatsoftwareengineer.substack.com

119 pointsfat-se-uk122 comments

This is a funny post in the context of the overall substack. Basically all of his money has been generated by his FAANG job:

"It’s been nearly 3 years since [I joined FAANG] and I have managed to increase my salary to £150k and have had another stock refresh. I joined at a pretty good time and generally the stock is a lot higher than it was at the point of issue. Due to this, my total compensation for 2021 was around £350k. 2022 and 2023 are going to be less but still in a similar ball park"

https://fatsoftwareengineer.substack.com/p/fire-fat-fire-and...

£6k from a book is a rounding error. It's play. In practical terms it's completed divorced from FIRE, let alone FatFIRE. Secondary income streams, investment strategies, budgets, etc. It's all play and infotainment when you have already have a high income.

The whole "here's my FIRE journey where 95% of my money comes from my FAANG job" is a tired trope.

6k is what the book brought in but the author has only been paid 1.5k. And given that the author paid his friends to review it, this project seems like it's pretty close to netting zero.

But you gotta start small. The hope is that one could continue to do this side hustle, until such times as this hustle gets enough income to allow one to comfortably quit the FAANG job without worry.

Of course, not many succeed in this endeavour - it has to be the case, otherwise, nobody would be working at FAANGs today! However, it's not worthless to try.

>But you gotta start small.

You could say that of any number of side hustles that are <1% likely to approach $350K/year. Write a book or don't write a book. I've done a few and it's been a good, if not especially directly profitable, experience (at least in retrospect).

I can make more money in sometimes ghostwriting content marketing content (~$1K/day). As with many things, you basically need to know people to get that sort of work--though that's often true of going through a publisher as well.

How do you find gigs in which you're paid 1k per day to ghostwrite marketing content? I've worked in this space and that seems unusually high. Honestly curious.

> And given that the author paid his friends to review it

Didn't read the article but these don't sound like friends.

I should clarify that the author said he had technical people he knew review it during the production phase. He was not talking about paying money to get positive reviews on the Amazon or that sort of thing.

I disagree a little. While publishing a book is almost never a good financial decision unto itself, it can be a good way to “diversify“ by adding to your professional reputation if you lose your FAANG job. Should OP get laid off and is later being evaluated with roughly similar rivals in the job market, having the book authorship as a tiebreaker is probably a good thing.

Ditto for speaking at conferences, contributing to open source, etc. However the author is talking about building additional income streams, not firming up the foundation for a single primary one.

Put another way, building a "brand" is often a good investment (and can be interesting) as a way to build on an existing income stream but it doesn't easily/reliably translate into a lucrative career as an independent consultant.

You forget that this is £6k for the first 90 days. Let's be conservative and you can get 7k/year out of this book (author says it's more or less evergreen). Comparing it to an investment that gives a 7% return, that means it's comparable to about 100k invested.

What? That estimate is the opposite of conservative, it's outrageously optimistic. In all likelihood, £6k is >50% of lifetime earnings.

Just check out Daniel Vassallo, who has a large audience and also wrote an "evergreen" book on AWS. His book made $80k in its first 90 days out of a total $140k earnings.

https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1563280049373331456

Selling an info product is also not at all like an investment. It's not even recurring revenue. Consistent product sales tend to rely on a lot of factors including continuous spend on marketing/ads.

If you offered me the revenue from this book or £100k, I'm taking £100k every time.

> it's comparable to about 100k invested

When investing you typically can retrieve your original investment at any time.

> £6k for the first 90 days > Let's be conservative and you can get 7k/year out of this book

Keep in mind the author doesn't make that money, but rather, is paid a royalty. The author said they've earned more like $1100, and they expect around 1-2k a year, not 7k: "I am hopeful that in a couple of months this might lead to a passive income of $100-$200 per month for a while."

> author says it's more or less evergreen

No, they acknowledge the book likely has a shelf life: "...with all things in the tech world I imagine someone will write a newer book on the same topic in the not so distant future or perhaps some of the technologies mentioned will update substantially and my book will no longer be up to date"

You forget that the £6k is total sales, he's made about 1/6 of that. I think 7k/year is extraordinarily optimistic based on the sales he's seen so far

> £6k from a book is a rounding error. It's play.

Or it's the beginning.

Yes, to potentially 2k a year in passive income: "I am hopeful that in a couple of months this might lead to a passive income of $100-$200 per month for a while."

And the author acknowledges it may come to an end: "...perhaps some of the technologies mentioned will update substantially and my book will no longer be up to date"

Also the author doesn't see the money, but only their royalty (after the initial advance is covered, which it hasn't yet)

For some people, yes. Daniel Vassallo and Gergely Orosz are two people who I respect that started with a similar thing and have now turned writing/products into their full time job.

However, it feels like OP is just visiting. A lot of talk about "I could do this next" and a focus on FatFIRE. Daniel and Gergely just went all in and created a lot of high quality content.

real estate isn't too different though.

one property can be yielding $3k/mo, which isn't a lot, until you have ten of them...

same deal. if OP churns out ten books, and they all cash-flow similarly, that's £60k/mo!

THAT is what FATfire means.

(in OPs case, since their take rate is 15% or so, this will be £9k/mo, which isn't FAT, but it's still a lot of money to make while reading Hacker News!)

You're probably talking quite a few years of on-the-side work to churn out ten books. And, depending upon the type of book, they may only have a shelf-life of 2-3 years.

Also, they're talking about taking home maybe $100-$200/month (which has been about my experience for a tech-related book). $1K/month, to say nothing of $6K/month, to say nothing of this holding up over a period of years, would be very good for a technical book.

I do ~$15k/m in royalties from 3 nonfiction titles[1] which mostly sell via word of mouth (as opposed to hands-on marketing and/or author platform stuff). So it's definitely possible, if you approach it properly.

It's true, as another commenter mentioned, that the expected result of most nonfiction is zero. But in my opinion, that's largely because most nonfiction today is built like software in built like software in the 90s, without proper user-facing iteration and refinement. I wrote a whole thing about it[2].

Books created as a cynical cash-grab are already negative value in terms of time investment and opportunity cost. I think they're only worth getting into if you care enough about it (either the end result or the activity) to do it regardless of the money. And then, only once that's true, perhaps start looking for ways to optimize it as a process and product.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B00J77JH5G/allbooks [2] https://helpthisbook.com/robfitz/useful/

I haven't read any of your books, but looking at the "allbooks" link on Amazon, I find it funny that the English title is "The Mom Test" and is has the same title in other languages, "El Mom Test", "Der Mom Test", "Le Mom Test" and so on, while the Swedish title seems to be "How To Talk To Customers To Find Out If Your Business Idea Is True, When Everyone Is Lying To You?". Maybe Swedish people like their titles more explicit?

Congratulations on your success! I actually own one of your books and recommend it regularly

In the current climate with large language models, I predict that the expected payoff for writing a book will plummet sharply toward $0, due to the sheer saturation.

Not all books, of course - but the ones that are geared toward passive income. Imagine some guy with a small bot-farm that manages to generate thousands of different "authors", and generate similar books for each and every one of those - then spam the living sh!t out of marketplaces. And then tens of thousands of other people do the same, because they follow the same tutorial.

Before you know it, there are millions and millions of different books on the same topic, all somewhat unique - in the sense that they've been generated by a LLM, and not copy/pasted like in the good ol' days.

It's going to be fun.

> Before you know it, there are millions and millions of different books on the same topic, all somewhat unique - in the sense that they've been generated by a LLM, and not copy/pasted like in the good ol' days.

At this point everyone will just need their own LLM to digest all the crap and help the user sort though it.

Now I'm imagining a world full of LLMs, everyone uses an LLM, attention spans are reduced even further, LLMs give instant answers, social media algorithms become even more effective. And yet, LLMs get things wrong in this new world, LLMs produce content other LLMs consume and mistakes spread. Someone discovers the LLMs are wrong, they try to spread the word, but people are skeptical and believe their LLMs instead, and attention spans are too short to have a real dialog about the matter. Falsehoods propagate. -- Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.

> Sounds like a Black Mirror episode.

Sounds like "Fall, or Dodge in Hell" by Neal Stephenson.

Also the Reticulum in Anathem, although that was caused deliberately by spam filter vendors to create a need for their spam filter wares.

To me this brings back the need for publishers as content curators. If, as you say, the act of writing itself loses inherent value, or at least the inherent filter of effort, then people will stop reading... Unless someone can guarantee actual effort went into the book.

The thing is, folks were already churning out junk for Amazon and getting robo reviews. Some made/make a lot of money doing this.

AI just makes the task of curation all the more important.

Traditional publishing, due to the AI crapflood, is going to become even more inaccessible and exclusionary than it already is. You thought querying was the worst nightmare it could be before November 30, 2022? You sweet summer child.

I don’t think anyone has a good sense of how this problem will be solved. It’s possible that commercial writing is done. True literary work will still have a chance if it spreads by word of mouth but I don’t know how society will pay for it.

Trad pub isn’t likely to save us. There will be more profit in gaming these new capabilities than in trying to protect elitist literary sorts, most of whom don’t make any money.

My not wholly pessimistic (I guess) take is that the market both for books and content more generally is already so flooded with crap that LLMs may not make things much worse. There's at least an argument that publishers remain relevant as a brand and if you need to have lunch with the right person in NY or London to cut through the noise? <shrug> (And, admittedly saying this as someone who wrapped a book outline in London with an acquisitions editor.)

Yeah, I think most literary authors in North America string together teaching gigs along with grants and fellowships.

I'm more interested to see what happens to authors like James Patterson, who doesn't even write his books, but instead gives an initial idea to another writer and then acts more as an especially opinionated editor and taskmaster (and, eventually, a famous brand). Maybe that sort of author will thrive?

> True literary work will still have a chance if it spreads by word of mouth but I don’t know how society will pay for it.

I don't understand, this seems like a leap in logic I am not following. Assuming a good book is identified by it's target audience why wouldn't people pay money for the book?

We need to solve online reviews. How can we make them credible? This alone could fix so many problems.

My impression is that this has already been the case for many years, only presumably being mostly done my humans!

Already Amazon is being bombarded with book submissions

I sell programming ebooks on regular expressions, CLI one-liners like grep/sed/awk, Vim, etc.

My fear has been that AI tools will replace the need for such books. Didn't think of the angle that books themselves will be automatically generated.

I've been seeing lower sales past few months, but not sure if it is just normal downturn or AI related, etc.

I would think google already replaced the need for such books. You think people would be better at asking "AI" than asking google?

One difference is that you get solutions without having to dig through the search results. And you can iterate while retaining current context.

I would expect books to be pretty safe. I can see people paying a premium for no ai books and stores declaring as much.

I have written ten books, two trad published, the rest self published. Books sales are minimal usually 2,000 lifetime. My income was primarily speaking fees at industry events (cybersecurity). Having a book to sign is always great to get more speaking gigs. All of that evaporated on March 11, 2020. But I am still going to write books, because I enjoy writing books.

For tech books, the benefit is mostly to be (excessively) seen as an "authority" on a topic. At least that's how it's been for me. Oh. He wrote that book on X. still do them but don't do the 250+ page books required by publishers.

It's 3 years (and two days) since. Have none of the speaking gigs come back?

I'd expect that given the state of the economy (with companies looking to shore up their finances and expecting a recession), the budget for conferences, paid for by businesses (whether attending, or sponsoring), are going to be drying up. Unfortunately, i think these conferences are the ones that bring in paid speakers.

The small, indie conferences would generally ask for volunteer speakers (at least, for small indie conferences that i have watched before), and so those could continue but not if the tickets are expensive, and also wouldn't bring in much revenue for the speakers generally. They are a labour of passion.

Good for you! Nice work getting paid speaking engagements in the past and I hope they pick up again for you. Seems conferences are starting up in person again this year.

With the headline and first paragraph sounding like a pitch, I was relieved to see them be honest about what they learned.

Writing a book can be satisfying, it can play a role in establishing a brand or profiting from one, it can be an addiction, and it can be the start of an earnest business writing many, but getting one book out the door rarely pays much of anything compared to the work involved.

Thanks! Do you have a suggestion for a better title given the content?

It’s a fine title. It’s descriptive and honest. It doesn’t read as click bait/scam.

Click bait would be, “Passive income guaranteed in publishing,” which would make a (false) promise you did not.

A very popular publisher of tech books contacted me to work on a book about a DB. At the time I was working as a freelance writer for that DB company.

They offered me less than half a month's pay in advance. Then they told me if I wanted more money I could try to convince the DB company to sponsor the book...

I mean of course a book about some tech product is good for the company selling the product. But the publisher basically wanted to get a writer for peanuts then get most of the profits from the book.

While writing a book is not particularly profitable, the author could probably earn more by self-publishing rather than working with a publisher, since the author has done most of the marketing anyway.

I think you are likely correct on this but I do think having deadlines helped me make sure I actually finished. If I was to write another I would self publish.

A good way to have deadlines is to presell the book, and promise these deadlines to people who paid. Example: buy now for 50% of the final price, two chapters already ready, and I promise one new chapter every two weeks.

I use this strategy, and I’m always amazed that people trust me enough to deliver as promised :)

Given the amount of high profile kickstarter failures (or delays), i'm surprised that people would continue to do pre-orders and such! I guess if the cost is small, it won't be a loss for the backer even if it was delayed.

I not only self publish but I print and warehouse my latest book and only sell it from my website. Still can't sell more than 2,000, but I cover my costs.

I think I made significantly more working with pragmatic bookshelf than I would have self publishing. That may be particular to pragmatic though, as they have a fairly loyal reader base.

Interesting! I wonder how big their read base is. Other commenters mentioned sales numbers around 2000, you must have made a far larger sale to compensate for the lower loyalty.

Rightly or wrongly, I find there's still a certain aura to going with an established publisher where it's justified or not. I've done both.

There is some evidence that posting at certain times can help you grab that virility factor

...Or have virality as Plan A and grabbing your virility could be Plan B.

There's women and children here, sirs.

i used to work for one of the uk's larger training companies (the instruction set) and we were approached by Addison-Wesley UK to turn one of our c++ courses into a book. i had written about half of the course, so i said sure - how hard can it be?

the answer was: very hard.

when you are presenting a training course, you can do a lot with personality, hand-waving and stuff you had just read about the previous day. this does not work for a book. i found even transposing the course to book chapters really hard, and i eventually said "no can do".

i did do some tech review stuff for them afterwards, and got a couple of hardbound volumes of knuth as payment.

bottom line - writing a book is hard!

I did this with my first book. Have written about 7 since. My book on XGBoost is coming out this week.

Writing a book is a marathon. Anyone who tells you different is lying.

How hard can it be to turn a book into a course instead? I guess it's also hard because courses and books are consumed by different audiences.

actually, our original windows programming in c course translated petsold's book into a course and all the punters hated it! i don't think it is a good book anyway, and i eventually got funding to completely re-write it, to good effect.

I recently (within the last few weeks) self-published a book, and this article has been a fantastic read. My book focuses on a particular hobby in a particular niche (urban gardening) and I was so happy to see a few sales tick through on Amazon from random internet strangers.

As some other posters have said, LLMs may make the writing space interesting in the near future, but for now I'm happy to say I put something cool out there into the world that might help some people, and I combined two hobbies I care deeply about: gardening and writing.

To all the fellow writers out there, keep at it! To fat-se-uk, congrats on the book, and great post!!

Writing a book is great if you want to enhance your professional reputation which can translate into making more salary.

In fact, your best option is probably to give the book away for free.

> Writing a book is great if you want to...

Yes, except for the little detail that you actually have to write a book. Even for those with the talents & skills to do that, it is anything but quick and easy.

Can I interest you in some ChatGPT?

Some people I follow on Twitter have used this model really successfully. I think now I have a bigger following it could work for me too

It's like today the way to make money in the music business is to give away the CDs, build a following, and then sell concert tickets.

I have written a technical book with a publisher in the past. It was a nice experience, but same as the author in this (great) post, I don’t think I would do it again. It is very time consuming, and IMO not worth the time spent.

But I admire people who dedicate so much time writing high-quality books. On my side, I chose to invest more in writing short books, practical and solving one problem at a time. Yes it isn’t as high-quality, but I’m convinced there space for all kinds of books :)

I went through a traditional publisher for one book and it was the right call for a variety of reasons but I wouldn't do it again. The big thing is that I just have no interest in doing another 250+ page book.

I've self-published another shorter book and have a still shorter one coming out. But, if I'm not going to make appreciable income and reputational effects aren't really important to me at this point, I might as well do things on my own terms.

Thanks for calling my post great, it means a lot :)

You’re welcome! I really enjoyed reading it and could relate to your experience :)

I'm surprised by the combination of "Writing a book + public speaking opportunities + (apparently public) twitter account" with not wanting to dox yourself in the blog post.

Do you have two+ very different online personas? I can't imagine you doing public speaking without your book readers/twitter followers knowing exactly who you are. And if they know, then why keep your blog covert?

I'm really curious about what content you post publicly vs anonymously.

The anonymity allows me to be open and transparent about finances that I wouldn’t be able to if I identified myself. On my other accounts I mainly just post programming related stuff, nothing special.

You can be transparent about your numbers from linking to your Amazon ranking. Pretty easy to reverse engineer sales numbers from that.

This is the dream of every educated person.. there was a time when every educated person wrote a book.. today there is a surplus of educated people... And not too many read books anymore

When I see "passive income from books" I'm thinking: https://youtu.be/biYciU1uiUw

Wow this video is such a trip! It's the pre-gpt version of the low quality book scam.

I'm guessing this "well known technical book publisher" is Packt?

Based on the description, yes, my experience with Packt was the same. As the author you are mostly on your own and the pages per chapter during the outline phase caught me completely by surprise. (I am certain I did not stick to my estimates, but the book had to be exactly 54 pages with some extra pages for TOC, blanks, preface, ads for similar titles.) It was an experience that was worth it for the first time around but not something I'd do again - at least probably not a technical book.

Sometimes they are gems, others yeah...

Royalty number seems too high... Pragmatic has high royalties (higher than listed in this post).

probably. they approach everyone. but if you're (really) good, you could also have o'reilly asking for you.

"Building a second income stream by writing a book"

Aka buy a lottery ticket that's not called a lottery ticket.

Writing a book was a ton of fun. It's challenging but really makes you dig deeper into something you're already an expert in. Really accelerated my own learning while creating a product that shares my experience with the world.

Publishers are not all made the same. Pragmatic Bookshelf was great to work with and I'm thinking their estimate of 25k per book (to the author) is probably a good goal. Mine cleared that and then cleared my sales numbers goals as well.

You simply can't get that type of revenue unless you're at 50% royalty rate. Self publish is 100% of course, but pragmatic relationship definitely gave me a better product and marketing.

Pragmatic has high royalties. Folks who do well (trad or self pubbed) either get lucky with the topic or do the heavy lift of marketing themselves.

I created a technical book authoring course [0] a bit back and interviewed over a dozen technical authors. Those who made the most were self pubbed. Though there is a huge draw to get a book with an animal on the cover...

0- https://store.metasnake.com/effective-authoring

I believe that self pub can make the most, but I'd be hard pressed to recommend it for a first book.

Maybe survivorship bias in the results? I know plenty of self pub authors that never cleared $1000 of sales. But then you have people that hit it big. Those people always seem to have a large existing audience, though.

For a niche book, self publishing and distributing it yourself seems to yield the better return. Combined with a higher price point, you can "earn back" any money you invested much faster.

- I have sold about 50 books at a $100 price point. - My cost to drop-ship print and ship, transacation fees, sales tax, etc. cost about $25 - This leaves $75 gross profit / book, or a 75% gross margin - Gross profit over 1.5 years has been about $3750 - I have spent about $2000 for someone to help with generating the PDF, Shopify Fees, ConvertKit e-mail sub-scription, etc. - This leaves me about $1750 so far in profit.

The amount is trivial, but here are the other potential benefits, both from a monetary and non-monetary perspective

- It was a lot of fun to write the book. Writing a daily newsletter for marketing purposes is also fun - There is still a decent amount of financial potential. I can see a path to selling 10 books a month in the near future, and maybe 50 books a month in the medium term. A few thousand per month in side income would be cool! - It's fun talking to readers - I could see this turning the book into an online course or something - I'm learning some new skills (next task is to tinker with LinkedIn advertising) - Very rewarding to get positive feedback

Overall selling a book online feels much more rewarding than billing another hour to my clients, even though I'd have to sell like 2 books an hour to match the money.

But, I'd also caution I probably wouldn't have written the book if I didn't get a sense that I could make a significant amount of money. Writing into the void is the most frustrating thing for a writer. So I also mitigated the risk by writing a guest post on a few relevant websites and asked people to e-mail me if they were interested in an "upcoming book" on the topic. I got about 20 or so e-mails before I decided to write it. Small number, but enough to make the time investment.

In case you're interested, book link below:

https://1099fedhub.com/

Going 1099: How to become a solo federal sub-contractor and gain control of your working life, earn more money, and unlock more free time

i agree with OP. if you get approached to write a book or (better) make a video course, absolutely do it.

making the content is a slog, but collecting those royalties is nice.

i have four courses on linkedin learning on docker, kubernetes, and devops. they are on track to give me $4k/month in royalties. my day job definitely makes more...but that's rent with money to spare! (I know that this party will end eventually but I'm enjoying it while I can!)

just don't forget to claim them in your taxes (in the US)!

personally i wouldn't write a book unless it was super short. it's a lot of work (a lot more than creating videos, most of which, in my case, are me futzing around in a terminal) and you are competing against a ton of stuff.

my gut theory is that more people learn via youtube or learning platforms these days than books, and employers don't hold publishing books to the same esteem that they used to.

I have so many questions. I enjoy teaching and would love to capitalize from it without the scam courses.

sure. email me at dev at carlosnunez dot me; happy to give you more info.

Odd post admitting that the publisher does little to market the book and then not mentioning it either...

Would mean giving away my identity

This person worked mornings, evenings, and weekends for a year for (optimistically) a $2400 USD annual raise and calls it passive income.

I think Substack is better for passive income. Subscriptions are recurring, but books are one-time purchases. The math favors Substack for this reason. Also, less work involved. No cover, no promotion, less editing. Technical books are so much work for relatively little money-.

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