
How I make $400 a month in Passive Income by Self-Publishing - BlackJack
https://medium.com/@aayushu/how-i-make-400-a-month-in-passive-income-by-self-publishing-68fa948edff5
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dilemma
1\. Active, not passive: This is income made by actively promoting the book
upon its release as stated in the post.

2\. Past, not future: This is historical revenue based on active marketing. It
is unlikely that it will bring the same income in the future without
marketing.

3\. Revenue, not profit: The nice cover design is something others would need
to pay for if this is to serve as reference, but this cost isn't taken into
account.

TLDR: He isn't making $400 ($360) in passive monthly income and it is unlikely
he will in the future.

~~~
cylinder
People are constantly misusing the term "passive" when they mean "residual."

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IIAOPSW
Mark my words this won't last.

It has happened to Itunes, Play Store, Steam, New Grounds and basically every
website that let's users upload content for sale / ad money. I call it the
fundamental problem of user generated content.

At the current expected payoff, soon every schmuck will be uploading his book.
Quality won't matter. Eventually the torrent of content for consumers will be
more than consumers can hope to consume, and the expected passive income for a
given creative person will go to zero.

The thing all these sites have in common is that they promised to be a
meritocracy for creative types. You simply make your work and then reviews
come in and its judged fairly. Better content gets more money. No need to
revert to tricks like paying a PR firm to market it. The reality is that when
there is money to be made, people will rush in until there is no longer money
to be made. Our mechanisms to separate the wheat from the chaff don't scale
nearly as well as the economics of digital content distribution networks.

Don't believe me? Go to Steam Greenlight. Tell me how many games look
interesting. Tell me how many uploads are happening per day. Can you keep up
with it? Go to the app store. How much stuff is in the new section? How much
looks good.

~~~
nickjj
There's also hundreds if not thousands of blog posts on certain topics that
have dozens if not hundreds of books/video courses made for it.

People tend to buy paid learning material not only for the learning
experience, but how it's written which is very unique to the individual who is
publishing.

It doesn't matter if 5,000 other people have books on the same subject. Once I
get to know an author, if his style clicks with me then I'm going to buy his
book. If his style resonates with a lot of people he'll quickly rise to the
top for that subject.

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runj__
I was the editor and publisher of this tome of a shitpost:

[https://www.amazon.com/Hypersphere/dp/132978152X](https://www.amazon.com/Hypersphere/dp/132978152X)

[http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/pro...](http://www.lulu.com/shop/anonymous/hypersphere/paperback/product-22517627.html)

The 4chan /lit/ board wrote Hypersphere as a collaborative writing project but
someone needed to actually publish it, something I undertook as a project, I
must have spent something like 20 hours editing it (plus way more helping to
write it). It has so far sold 650 copies, most of which I sold with a profit
of less than a dollar in profit per book since it didn't feel right selling it
for a profit to the people that helped write it.

I've since bumped the price and I'm getting something like ~$2.5 a book, and
it's currently selling 5-10 copies a month. The Amazon price is far higher
than the Lulu one (which was the publishing platform of choice) since they
obviously want a cut.

The biggest pro of the project was that it helped me understand how to self-
publish: I've given my partner two physical poetry collections about her
since: something that was pretty appreciated.

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adjkant
Self-publishing over publishing, sure, but this is very based on the content
of the book. As someone who actually interacts with College Confidential and
the like, an educated book on the subject making money doesn't surprise me in
the slightest, but it takes knowledge and time to write. You can't just write
whatever you want - the author was lucky enough to know about a subject in a
favorable market - parents and kids who are Ivy-obsessed will easily pay for a
book on the subject given how many small in's and out's there are in the
process.

Edit Note: More info on why the market is favorable for the subject

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boyter
Its quite amazing how much money you can make with self-published books. For
example I wrote a book about Decoding CAPTCHA's. I have the top ranking post
on most search engines for this which is the only marketing channel.

I collect about $35 a month from it without spending any additional time
marketing. Not very much but such a small niche it really surprised me.

Oddly enough the main reason for writing the book was to deflect all the
emails I used to get about the subject. Not only did it achieve this aim it
supplies beer money for me every month.

~~~
SN76477
I work in digital marketing. There is a whole scene of guys that do nothing
but create simple digitally published ebooks. They will research the market
for the niche. Research the topic in depth (something like frying chicken can
be deciphered and recipe and method variations can be collected in 20 hours)
Then create content on the niche and sell it. Even a $3 ebook can make several
thousand dollars a year.

~~~
mherrmann
A friend of mine does exactly this with self-help books (NLP, hypnosis,
dating, how to quit smoking etc.). He makes in the low five figures a month
with this business. He identifies niches, by now using his existing audience.
For example, he once had a blog post on a subject that received surprisingly
many views. So he hired a writer to write a book about it, and then marketed
it through his channels. It's surprisingly lucrative.

~~~
marklgr
As someone who actually likes books, this makes me sad. Leanpub and Gumrroad
are already full of quite mediocre content, to the point that I avoid them
altogether--which is a shame, since there are some serious self-published
authors that would benefit from a good platform. These cheap ebooks
(e-brochures?) also made their way into Amazon, which really annoys me.

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patrickyeon
A little off-topic, but I found this interesting:

> "Specifically, a lot of the traditional guys price e-books at $20–30, often
> times more than the paperback/hardcover, which is so stupid."

It catches my eye when people get stuck on an e-book version costing more than
a hard copy. It's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant
delivery, easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience) to
somebody, but still seem like it should cost less. Personally, I'll gladly pay
an extra dollar to get an e-book version for anything I'm only expecting to
read once or twice.

~~~
coldtea
> _It 's funny that a Kindle version can be more valuable (instant delivery,
> easier to carry around, and a more enjoyable reading experience) to
> somebody, but still seem like it should cost less._

That's a bizarro reasoning.

Obviously it's not about the value added because of extra functionality, it's
about the new technology having lower marginal costs (and all that
functionality comes basically for free), and publishers still charging as if
they still incur the full physical production and distribution costs.

When commercial music records first came out in the late 19th century, they
cost quite a lot -- but that was justifiable because it was a new technology,
with big costs to manufacture, carry, etc.

Would you justify paying the same amount for an mp3 today, just because it's
more convenient and it sounds way better than those disks?

~~~
jjnoakes
> Obviously it's not about the value added because of extra functionality,
> it's about the new technology having lower marginal costs

Is that really how supply and demand works though? If people are willing to
pay more for the extra functionality, why would you not sell it at that higher
price?

~~~
chrisabrams
Most people aren't paying for the extra functionality of ebooks though. Most
people are still buying physical books:
[http://authorearnings.com/report/print-vs-digital-
report/](http://authorearnings.com/report/print-vs-digital-report/)

Also, your reasoning for selling a book at a higher price is not correlated to
supply vs. demand. What you are talking about is a pricing strategy. There is
a near unlimited supply of an ebook, so it's not supply vs. demand, it's a
pricing strategy that's setting the price. A pricing strategy could also be
used to sell the ebook at a cost below production costs to drive sales. Again,
the ebook supply remains constant.

~~~
jjnoakes
> Most people aren't paying for the extra functionality of ebooks though. Most
> people are still buying physical books

That's not what I'm talking about though. I'm talking about this: if you set
the price of ebooks at some small margin above the price to produce plus the
price to license the content, you sell at price $X. If you set the price where
people are willing to buy it due to increased convenience for them, you sell
at price $Y. If $Y > $X, why not sell at $Y?

Of course, this isn't a direct relationship, since different people have
different $Y prices, but there's a price curve there, and one ought to sell
their ebooks on the curve to maximize the (number of sales) * $Y.

> Also, your reasoning for selling a book at a higher price is not correlated
> to supply vs. demand.

Maybe supply vs demand was the wrong choice of words, but that shouldn't
detract from the point.

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ddoran
>But 1-on-1 advising doesn’t scale.

In the right market, it doesn't have to scale. I know some wealthy people (in
NYC) who have dropped a lot of money to get their kids into Ivy League
schools. It is a must for those people and I've seen them drop high dollar for
application advice and prep. With any kind of success, the same people get
referred over and over again in the same circles.

As an aside, I loosely know someone who went to prison for a white collar
crime. He too hired a high dollar consultant (former prison officer, IIRC) to
advise him on how to prepare for, adjust to and survive in prison.

Of course consulting to wealthy people isn't passive, but the return on effort
is hard to beat, once you're in the right referral circle.

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mojoe
I always enjoy seeing stuff like this. While it may not make a ton of economic
sense for a guy working at Google, I'm happy to see people fill niche
knowledge spaces because they can.

It's interesting that the paperback copies sold the best -- I would guess it's
because these books are given as gifts (and bought by parents). If anyone has
data on this behavior for fiction I'd be interested to hear it (I publish an
online science fiction magazine, compellingsciencefiction.com).

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nameisu
your adjusted rating on amazon is 4.5. It is still very good.
[http://reviewmeta.com/amazon/1517293146?utm_source=extension...](http://reviewmeta.com/amazon/1517293146?utm_source=extension&utm_content=firefox_v2.2)

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djaychela
I have written and self-published a couple of books [1] - one which is
effectively a practical textbook for the course I teach (A level music
technology in the UK, for 16-18 year olds), and one which sprung out of a
course I taught locally for a number of schools, using Sibelius 7, where the
user interface changed in a similar way to the change to Word 2007's "ribbon"
interface.

The A-level textbook took me about a year of all my spare time to get it
together. It's the best part of 500 pages long, and covers practical and music
theory elements to a level that will allow anyone to be competent enough to
complete the coursework to a good standard, and more importantly to give them
a good, broad grounding in the subject. It was my passion for the year it took
to create it, and I learned loads (including how to use Indesign, which I
bought to allow me to do a good job on the layout of the book). But the
biggest thing I learned was that writing the book wasn't the most important
thing, it was getting it in front of the right people. I hadn't even thought
about this until I completed the book, and then found that to get it to the
right people it would cost me far more than I'd reasonably expect to earn from
what is a fairly niche publication (I was quoted £2000 to mail-shot all the
heads of music at schools that teach music technology).

I have updated the book twice (to version 7 and 8 of the software), each
taking the equivalent of over a week of full time work to update screenshots,
workflow and procedures, plus add in new information as appropriate.

It was only the chance connection with the education department of the
software house who makes the main software I used in the book (Cubase) that
led to any significant increase in the number of sales, but it's still nowhere
near what the author of this article is making; I have had one really good
month in September (start of the year, and it was promoted in a newsletter),
which has outdone the figure above, but usually I'll sell maybe 1 or 2 books.
This is all done via Lulu, with printed versions of the book, and I've elected
not to do it as an e-book as I feel the cat will be out of the bag and it'd be
torrented everywhere (particularly as I set the price at £24.95, feeling that
it was worth an hour's private tuition cost for such a large amount of info).

While it's nice to have a small income from this each month, it's certainly
not something that works out well at an hourly rate - it would have to sell in
the high hundreds to achieve this.

By contrast, the book on Sibelius has sold much better as I've sold it via
Amazon as well as via Lulu. The reasoning for this was simple, really - I did
it as a test to see how different sales would be via Amazon, and they've been
much larger (about 7:1). But this is countered by the payments; I actually put
the price of the book up before selling it because otherwise I would have seen
almost nothing from an Amazon sale. At the moment the book is £7.95, and I see
just over £1. For the other book, if I sold it via Amazon, I would see £3 from
the £24.95 sale price (compared with about £12 via a Lulu sale). I'm not sure
if I would get 4x as many sales from the Cubase book if sold via Amazon
(particuarly as I think most of the sales are driven via recommendation rather
than browsing), but as I said before, this is not an area I even gave a
moment's thought to until I completed the book.

[1] - [http://musictechtuition.com/books/](http://musictechtuition.com/books/)

~~~
anentropic
It makes sense that you sell more through Lulu: I'd never heard of Lulu until
I read this self-publishing thread here on HN

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patsplat
Disappointed the link is not satire. $400/month is less than unemployment

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matt4077
I couldn't find any numbers, but I get the distinct impression that so far,
the authors job at google probably pays better than the book. Sure, most of
the work is done now and if continues for another two years or so things
change. But it's hard to predict how non-fiction books age.

~~~
chii
It doesn't matter how much a book ages, as long as it was written in the off
time (I.e., evenings or weekends). The sales made from that book is a net
productivity gain.

~~~
bloopalert
You could freelance $400 in a few hours at most. Probably less. You have to
consider opportunity cost, for which books are poor.

~~~
Rumudiez
You also have to consider personal cost. Do you enjoy writing, and do you have
a strong interest in a field worth writing about? Then great, this could be a
productive use of time for you both personally and financially. There's
nothing wrong with doing things that make your life worth living.

