It is based on what other programming books on Kickstarter ask for and from my past experience. Advances from traditional publishers are not that much more than $3000.
The majority of successful programming books on Kickstarter raise anywhere from a few thousand up to around $10k. The lucky few raise $20K to $100K or more.
Since I enjoy writing programming books, I don't need it to replace my income just supplement it.
When I started writing the book "Dataflow and Reactive Programming Systems" I thought I completely understood the various forms of dataflow. Yet in doing research for the book I found there are many more subtle variations than I ever knew existed.
The book went through many iterations before I felt I accurately described the similarities and differences between the many forms of dataflow. I'm happy to hear that I may have succeeded.
It may be fairly simple for you to change your design to generate a static call graph for the nodes using topographical sort. Then on each "tick" you simply execute each node, in order, from top to bottom.
I always like to use a stack to schedule execution because I can then change the algorithm that schedules them to use a very different method.
I'm the author of the book and it is true that this would be my first published book.
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.
The majority of successful programming books on Kickstarter raise anywhere from a few thousand up to around $10k. The lucky few raise $20K to $100K or more.
Since I enjoy writing programming books, I don't need it to replace my income just supplement it.