Seems like a fair definition of passive income. Not sure why the commenter feels it's not.

Feels weird to call the entire profession of being an author passive income.

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?

Yes. Passive income can initially take work to build the income source. Most people consider rent to be passive income, yet people don't just magically own houses, they more often than not work to buy them.

Anyone that thinks renting houses is passive income has never done it.

Repairs, collections, advertising, evictions, etc.

...which are things you do every now and then, unlike a job, where you have to be there 5/7 days for a number of hours ?

But all of this is something you can contract out to an agency for a cut of the rent.

That cut of the rent ends up being around all of the cash flow for a newly bought property, and in many markets ends up being more than the initial cash flow. It’s a second job with irregular on-call.

Well, then you've leveraged too highly. Estate agents here take a fairly small percentage of the rent to manage all of this, so it takes a fairly small deposit before your rental income less management fees can't cover the remaining mortgage.

Property management companies in the US take somewhere in the 8-12% range. Is it dramatically lower wherever you are?

Towards the low end of that, but even at 12% it just means you can afford lower leverage.

People do magically own houses. It's called inheritance.

Do you think houses are most commonly inherited or worked for?

passive income requires ownership of some revenue producing assets, whether its land or digital content. If you just work for someone else, your trading time for money, no passive income.

I write on the side though (i have a full-time job). Just a hobby :)

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.

Passive income was never defined as "no work, receive income". It was, "work once, passive income later without extra work". As in, your full time employer will stop paying you if you stop working. Your books that you wrote some time ago will generate income in perpetuity without any extra work.

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.

Passive is the opposite of active, I get the definition. Something you're no longer really actively working on that keeps making money. I'm jealous, I'd love to have such an idea.

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.

Its mainly jsut about eight books that bring in majority of the income. Amazon doesn't allow authors to delete unpublished books, thus showing 80.

you can check out the active books here:

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=greg+lim&ref=nb_sb_noss

Useful clarification!

Would also be interesting to see what your sales tail is like… are some of your books still selling decently several years after publishing?

So far for April: From Amazon $2,064.81 From Gumroad $384.96

There's also Smashwords & Ingramspark as well but I won't share those for now.

> This is more akin to building 80 money printing machines that each print a certain amount of money.

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...

I love how negative HN is. $1k for a book and I would be over the moon

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

It sounds even stupid to write programming books for passive income. You need to regularly update them in order to be able to sell them well.

K&R has two editions. In 46 years. It’s $60 on Amazon today.

It’s an outlier, sure. But it’s proof you can write on programming topics that are very sticky.

But regularly updating them also gives you the edge over established publishers who DON'T update them.

and its not too difficult to update books, as compared to updating videos.

The author wrote many technology introduction books over a period of six years. They probably have a limited lifespan. I think the comment is somewhat fair if overly snippish - “How I earn $27k per year writing books in my spare time” would have been more informative and accurate than calling this passive income. If the author stops writing books, will they earn another 160k over the next six years?

I still think it’s a cool and fascinating article - congrats to the author on their success!

I didn't do anything this month. So far royalties > $2,000. And I am thankful for it :)

Many (Most?) ebooks on amazon require steady advertising to not drop into oblivion.

This makes it decidedly less passive.

Source: my authors group

NOT for a long time after, because you're writing about frameworks that may be out of date in 12 months!

many of my books have been there for years.