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 Amazon doesn't allow authors to delete unpublished books, thus showing 80.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.