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.
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.
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 $9k at this point, but assuming I put in 140 hours of work that comes out to roughly the same per hour amount. Like I said above, this is definitely not a full time thing yet.
IMHO you are not factoring in the value of the built email list building. This will (hopefully) allow Pete to be exponentially more successful with future books.
2 weeks => 8 work hrs. per day. 5000$:80hrs. = 62,50$
1 $ = 0,7592$ = 47,4479€ = 47,45€ ---------------- total: 3796€ in two weeks.
50€ per hr. is a german student designer/programmer (first uni year) price. nothing special. the most work for 70-120,00€ p. hour.