pometablava said:
Would there be a sizeable market for a missile book in this price class?
Probably in the Cold War years but not for today.
Nevertheless I'd be interested on a 500 pages missile book.
The problem is that in order to be viable, such a book would have to attract sales numbered in four figures, as the following will illustrate:
As the opening line of many a joke goes, there were these four guys who walked into a pub. But in this case the pub in question was the Eagle in Cambridge, and the date was during the last Xmas and New Year holiday season.
Let’s call them the Writer, the Journalist, the Industry Man, and the Academic.
As the afternoon wore on and the beer slipped down, all agreed that there was a need for what they started to call ‘The Big Missile Book’ – all the world’s missiles from the earliest times to the present day, including all the cancelled programmes that had seen metal being cut, and a selection of some of the more important cancelled ones that had not even progressed that far.
Starting from scratch, how long would such a book take to compile?
Industry Man said that his company had looked at compiling such a book for its own internal use, but covering only the missiles currently in service or under development. Having estimated that the job would take 10 man-years of work, they had shelved the concept.
The others pointed out that if freed from company overheads, the job could certainly be done in much less time - two or three man-years would probably be sufficient These timescales might be halved if the book contained only missiles currently in service or under development. This would make the job a more practical proposition.
Next they tried to predict the market for such a book. The Writer and the Academic were the only ones with relevant experience and they predicted that missile companies might account for 100 copies, ministries of defence for a further 100, and military colleges another 100. Even if every one of these sales was matched by two from the enthusiast market, the total sales would still be less than 1,000 copies.
And if the book was successful, at what point would ‘person or persons unknown’ stuff a copy into a scanner and post a pirated PDF version on-line, bringing sales to a near-halt? (One of the Writer’s books had suffered this fate, so a publisher is unlikely to commission a badly-needed revised and updated edition.)
Sadly, the group concluded that the likely income from ‘The Big Missile Book’ was unlikely to pay for a man-year of full-time work.
Perhaps the job could become a ‘labour of love’ – a retirement project for one of the group, it was suggested. Instead of long hours of post-retirement relaxation, the ‘chosen victim’ might be persuaded to churn out up to five missile descriptions per day, five days a week for a year or two until the job was done. But as the old limerick says, “No-one came to give his name”.
I hope the idea will stay alive. Perhaps several of the group could be persuaded to team (once their respective retirements arrive) to pool their efforts and get started on the job. But it would be a long-term project with a limited financial return, so I would not blame anyone who opted out in order to cultivate his roses, improve his golf, or tackle some well-paying consultancy jobs.
