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...
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.