1) A book is an asset, and provides long term revenue (even though it diminishes over time without some form of marketing / outreach)

2) A book establishes a customer base, and Pete can provide future offerings to this pool.

3) A book is a great way to establish credibility in a space. When someone is looking to hire a consultant to work out Rails <> Stripe, who looks more attractive: the guy who wrote the book on it, or "generic Rails developer"?

The focus is on long term asset building, not short term gain.

> 50€ per hr. is a german student designer/programmer (first uni year) price.

I've definitely doubts about that price for a german first semester student. As a student in first semester you'll be a non payed trainee in germany.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought that was stupidly high for a college student...

I now follow Pete on Twitter, know his name, and know he does Rails and can start and finish a project. Plus he wouldn't do this if he didn't like it. 3796€ for a fun side project? Yes please.

120€/hr in Germany for a 1st year uni student? I find that hard to believe..

You know that prices are (often) more a function of marketing than of competence...

Sure -- no argument there: for any population, there will exist individuals who can market themselves at extraordinary rates.

I was interpreting the post as a statement of the average market rate, which is something else entirely.

It may be "nothing" special, but ignoring the people who have taken you to task for the amount itself, consider that writing programming books often delivers the biggest value in reputation and follow-on consulting jobs etc.

A lot of technical books (for that matter: most books, regardless of subject) never generate a living wage from the book itself.

Yes. However, that $5000 was at a point where I wasn't actually actively working on the product itself. The total is nearly $9k at this point, but assuming I put in 140 hours of work that comes out to roughly the same per hour amount. Like I said above, this is definitely not a full time thing yet.

it would be much more productive to discuss the merits of the article and the author's efforts rather than trying to look smart.

Thanks for making Germans look like dicks...

IMHO you are not factoring in the value of the built email list building. This will (hopefully) allow Pete to be exponentially more successful with future books.

I'd prefer make that much writing, doing something I enjoy rather than the same salary or even more at a company being a pawn.