Meson manual sales numbers and a profitability estimate

The Meson Manual has been available for purchase for about two months now. This is a sufficient amount of time to be able to estimate total sales amounts and the like. As one of the goals of the project was to see if this could be a reasonable way to compensate FOSS maintainers for their work, let's go through the numbers in detail.

Income

At the time of writing, 45 copies of the book have been sold amounting to around 1350€ of income. The first month's sales were about 700€ and the second one's about 500€. This is the common sales pattern where sales start at some level and then gradually decrease as time passes. Depending on how one calculates the drop-off, this would indicate total sales over a year of 2000-2500€.

Expenses

The ecommerce site charges ~10€ per month, which is 120€ per year. Credit card processing fees should land somewhere in the 200-300€ area depending on sales. Accounting services come to about 500€. Then there are many small things that probably sum up to 100-200€ in a year. After these immediate expenses roughly 800-1300€ remains. Unfortunately this is where things get uglier.

The book was launched in my presentation at Linux.conf Australia. Having some sort of a launch is a necessity, because just putting things on the Internet does not work. This cost about 2000€ total in travel and lodging expenses. This single expense takes out all remaining income and then some. One could have gone to a conference nearer by but as Finland is far away from everywhere, the expenses are easily 500€ even for continental Europe. This also assumes that one would have gotten a talk accepted there, which is not at all guaranteed. In fact the vast majority of Meson talks I have submitted have been rejected. Thus depending on how you look, we are now either 700€ in the red or 300-800€ in the black in the best possible case.

Writing a book takes time. A lot of time. The way I got mine was to make a deal with my employer to only work four days a week for several months. I spent that one day a week (specifically Wednesday) writing the book and working out all the requisite bureaucracy. In my day job I'm a consultant and my salary is directly determined by the number of hours billed from customers. Doing the math on this says that writing the manual cost me ~9000€ compared to just being at work.

With this the total compensation of the manual comes out to a loss between 8000€ and 9500€.

So was it worth it?

It depends? As a personal endeavor writing, publishing and selling a full book is very satisfying and rewarding (even though writing it was at times incredibly tedious). But financially? No way. The break-even point seems to be about 10× the current sales. If 100× sales were possible, it might be sufficient amount for more people to take the risk and try to make a living this way. With these sales figures it's just not worth it.

Bonus chapter: visibility and marketing

The biggest problem of any project like this is marketing: how to get your project visible. This is either extremely hard or downright impossible. As an example, let's do some Fermi estimations on reachability on Twitter. Suppose you post about your new project on Twitter, how many of your followers would then buy the product? Ten percent is probably too much, and one tenth of a percent is too small, so let's say one percent. Thus to sell 400 copies you'd need to have 40 000 direct Twitter followers. Retweets do not count as their conversion rate is even lower.

Your only real chance is to get visibility on some news media, but that is also difficult. They get inundated by people and projects that want to get their products to be seen. Thus news sites publish news almost exclusively on large established projects as they are the things that interest their readers the most. Note that this should not be seen as a slag against these sites, it's just the nature of the beast. A news site posting mostly about crowdfunding campaigns of small unknown projects would not be a very tempting site and would go out of business quickly.

Advertising might work, but the downsides include a) it costs more money and b) the target audience for a programming manual is the set of people who are the most likely to use ad blockers or otherwise ignore online ads (I have never bought anything based on an ad I have seen online).