Is it worth becoming an author?

It was worth it for me. I had accumulated a lifetime of software development knowledge, much of it in the C++ programming language. It seemed sad to allow this painfully collected knowledge just to poof into oblivion when I retired. Then, toward the end of my career, I got into an argument at work over the value of optimizing software. I realized that I’d had this argument several times before, and I had a strong opinion about it. In preparing to refute this latest disagreement, I realized I had enough knowledge to write a good technical book. In my whole life, I never imagined I would write a book, but all of a sudden I had to write this book. It was called Optimized C++. In spite of my inexperience as an author, and in spite of some painfully embarrassing errors in the book, it seems to have been reasonably popular, which means that since its publication in 2015, I’ve made about $21k in royalties. This is less than minimum wage for the effort to write it, but it was still worthwhile in terms of preserving my knowledge and helping out other developers.