One of the great things about publishing a book is the wonderful sense of closure it give you. You work really hard writing, editing, and formatting, then you release your baby out into the wild. And then...well, and then that's it. You're finished, except for maybe talking up your book to your friends and family, or publicizing it on your various social networks.
But here's the really great thing about publishing a book: In today's world, once your book is in Amazon's Kindle Store and Barnes&Noble's NookBook Store and all the other eBook stores, you don't really have to do anything else.
Think about that for a minute.
Each day you get up, go to work, and earn your pay. However, if you stop getting up and going to work, then the money stops coming in. This is active income. You have to keep working to make active income money. If you stop, then the money stops too.
Publishing a book is different. Once you've published your book, you've created a source of passive income. This is income you'll receive whether you work another day in your life or not. How cool is that? By publishing a book, you've created an income stream that's independent of anything else you do in your life. And if you can somehow get your passive income to surpass your cost of living, then you can give up your active income completely. Even if you can't achieve that, you can still earn some nice pocket change. I love this idea. I may only be earning a few dollars extra per month from my published book, but it's still free money.
Now if I can just publish another 1,935 books, I should be able to earn enough passive income to quit my job!
