The second biggest driver was a link in Ruby Weekly. [..] Not to mention, the amount of money I would get from direct sales is vastly more than I would get from the same number of sales if I were getting royalties.
I'm always happy to link to good stuff, but I must admit, if I'm not making any money out of it, I never push anything particularly hard.
This makes me wonder if I partnered with or acted as a publisher to indie writers like this, I could quite easily offer a 50-75% "royalty" yet push it more frequently and heavily to my audience and everyone wins. Indeed, I believe this is what Pragmatic Bookshelf does when it takes on previously written indie books(?)