Demystifying Open Source Licensing

I've been away from here, but I'm trying to make progress in the book. I took about 10 days off because I was working on another book (very simple and short) to raise some fundings to a hospital, and I actually did raise some money (not much, but still...).

Anyway, I am writing every day, and I try to write at least 300 words per day. Some weeks ago I was trying to write 500 words per day, but I'm not able to make this rate regularly because I also have to do much of research. So although 500 words are not much, when writing about a difficult topic, it can easily take 2 hours or so.

Nevertheless, I'm happy with the progress, and today I crossed the 10k words mark. It is a huge thing for me, because I was expecting to have at least 20k words in this book. This (more or less) mean that I'm half baked.

Since my last update, I did not have any other sale. I understood that sales only happens if you keeping marketing the project. Organic traffic might only exist for those that have already a good number of clients, so sales happen due to world of mouth, which is not my case (yet?).

Anyway, I also skipped the book for some days. I've been working on another book. In this other book, the intention was to make it available in very few days (less than a week). I made it, and today I had 6 sales (so far). However, 100% of the sales will go to a hospital in my University.

When I released this book for pre-orders in the beginning of this week I had in mind that 10 would be a good number to match in the first week.

To make that really happen, I offered a 50% off discount. Interesting to see that only 3 of the buyers used this discount code. This might suggest that the priced offered for pre-sales is somehow adequate.

I became tires of keeping posting and reposting news on several different websites, so I'll concentrate on Twitter and here to posts my progress.

Two more sales today. One from a friend, and other one organic. It's nice to see that some people are already finding the book. But this is still a problem. Today I only had 60 visits or so on the book website. I have to think about how to increase it.

One problem that I'm having is that it's taking a ridiculous amount of time to make everything up-to-date.

For any news I intent to share, I:

1. write a blog post on my website
2. copy this blog post to medium and share there as well
3. share the medium blog post on twitter, hackernews, reddit, here, etc
4. write the book
5. at the end of the day sum up the contributions here.

I may need a way to automatize things

I'm pretty happy that I was able to receive five pre-orders in the first day. This suggests that the topic is not only interesting to me.

I have 73 visits and five sales in the gumroad website.

Gumroad has a sales' dashboard, and I could see that 100% of the pre-orders were made by Brazilians.

I have to think about approaches to internationalize this book....

Ow! I just can't believe. My first pre-order was already made, like 5 minutes after I shared on social media. It means a lot to me!

Fair note: a friend of mine bought the book. I didn't say anything to him, but it's good to see some value.

Let's see how it keeps going through the day.

Today I announced that the book is available for pre-orders on social medias. The pre-order costs $10, but I gave a 50% off for the first 10. I really hope that at least 10 people would pre-order this book. Let's see how it goes.

In case anyone out there wants to pre-order: https://gumroad.com/l/demystifying-oss-licensing

After thinking for a while, I though that "in a nutshell" does not convey much information. Indeed, it suggests that the book might summarize something, but does not go beyond this.

"demystifying" instead already suggests that there is a problem (in our case developers don't fully understand OSS licensing) and also suggests that we are aimed to mitigate this problem. Which is clearly the goal of the paper.