Money: How I got some, how I lost some, how I missed some

This is the another part of my musing about money. The first part is Money: getting it, losing it, wasting it, wanting it

The image above is the cover page on one of my less successful books. I wrote it in 2008 at a time when a web page I owned was generating around $1,000 a month in ad revenue and giving me much, much more in business income for my Unix consulting business. It sold enough to justify my time writing it, but it certainly didn’t bring me much money or fame.

Another book I wrote with the title Linux and Unix Troubleshooting did much better and actually still brings me little dribbles of money from Amazon. I mean literally dribbles: a few dollars or so a couple of times a year. But it did over $5,000 in the first month I offered it, so it was definitely worth the time I spent putting it together.

I wrote one other book, but I can’t even remember the title. I don’t think it did well at all. Obviously the books and the web page were not paying the bills, but the consulting business definitely was. It gave me a nice living for a bit more than thirty years.

It wasn’t so hot the first few years, though. In fact, those startup years put me $100,000 in credit card debt by 1987. That was hard to dig my way out of, but I did it and a decade later we were debt free…