I don't get it. A good book is an enormous amount of work.. probably several months full-time, at the very least, and a bigger risk than contracting for example. If it's about the money (which happens to be the title of the post), it doesn't look like a success to me. What am I missing?
If you are keeping a blog anyway (like the author did), then the marginal effort to edit/repackage your best work into a book is not that great.
(Another data point: I have a math blog, and did the same ebook repackaging for 12 of my favorite topics; it's an Amazon as a Kindle ebook/paperback & PDF on my site, makes low 4-figures monthly).
If you write on an evergreen topic (management philosophy, math, etc.), the effort can definitely be worth it. Of course, having an established audience helps (So start the blog today! In 12-18 months of not-too-much writing effort, the book may emerge.)
This a metric point that isn't talked about much. I would really like to see a metric for $/hr measured from the start of writing the book to book launch, or to when first sale occurred.
Like some of the other comments indicated, it will be quite low, but the payoff is in other areas such as recognition and profile elevation.
