My life has been very busy up to just recently. Now that I have extra time I want to spend it productively. $3000 is the minimum I was willing to make to spend my time to create a complete book, not just a series of blog posts. In short, I'm home with the kids while my wife works.
I started "Relay" more than a year ago just as a personal project. But in talking to others about it, I found that many people have lots of questions about dataflow. At first I thought I would just create a short blog post about dataflow to attempt to answer the questions. So, I started working on it... and it kept growing... and growing.
Even topics that you are an expert in, when you look hard you can find new things to learn. I started collecting links to articles related to dataflow just for my own edification. Eventually I posted them all to a new subreddit /r/DataFlowProgramming so that everyone could benefit.
So... I had a lot of text already written, a huge collection of notes, and time on my hand and enough material for a book that I felt would answer many questions people have. I thought I would give it a shot.
Kind Regards, Matt Carkci
As you said, $3k doesn't go very far if you're thinking in terms of $/hr.
The only issue for me with backing this project is, the author does not have experience being a write/teacher. As a developer he has experience documenting the systems he creates, but I'm not sure how easily that translates to writing a book aimed at teaching a complex concept like dataflow systems.