

What I learned from screwing up my first ebook launch - ahoyhere
http://www.slash7.com/articles/2009/5/29/10-things-i-ve-learned-from-my-first-ebook-launch

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vaksel
Isn't the price a little high? You are a first time author, and its not even
printed, wouldn't it have made more sense to start the first book at something
cheap like $9.99? What made you pick your price point?

~~~
ahoyhere
Well, I'm not really a first-time author. I have 450 pages of a JavaScript
book I wrote for O'Reilly, just sitting on my hard drive. But (long story
short) they are blowhards so I canceled on them.

Furthermore, I'm pretty famous for my teaching skillz. My blog has 7000
readers. My Scriptaculous cheat sheet, for example, has been downloaded about
500k times.

I can't tell you how many big important people in the Rails community have
come up to me and told me that they have my ActiveRecord cheat sheet hanging
in their cube. (Or did.)

I gave a 3-hour tutorial at OSCON on JavaScript and I've given normal-length
talks on Prototype there as well.

And my coauthor, my husband, wrote the Script.aculo.us framework and is one of
the top 10 people in the world for this very topic.

Why would I charge $10 for a 150 page book? :)

Plus the DOM Monster tool, which will save our customers hours of work.

Many geeks undercharge because they don't know what creates value. I do know
what creates value, and I do it - I write so anyone can understand, I make
people laugh, I format the book in a beautiful and screen-friendly way, I make
excellent diagrams, and I am incredibly picky about quality.

All those things, and the content is in-depth and detailed to a degree you
cannot find anywhere else.

I don't undercharge. :) I could have easily charged more.

And what I'm really interested in, a few steps down the line, is teaching
others to do this. I think that the stranglehold book publishers have is an
illusory one. I think that there are tons of people right here on HN who could
make good money _and_ help people, rather than dreaming of writing a paper
book where they get 10% of the discounted price at Amazon.

~~~
bprater
It's safe to ignore anyone complaining on the topic of price. Those of us that
spend thousands of dollars every year to keep our education up for our section
of the technical playground aren't going to hesitate at paying $30 for good
information. I'm confident you've put at least $30 of value into every book,
if not thousands more.

My first ebook on software design sold for $97 starting in 2001 and that's
when nobody had even heard of ebooks. I made six-figures several times over
with the product.

Amy, I would suggest spending more time on the sales page. I don't think it's
driving home just how valuable the book can be. Put yourself in my shoes as a
developer and hear all the silly questions I'm asking about the book and the
problems I'm having with my code in which your book will help out.

For sure, you shouldn't have your bios hanging out on the side of the page.
Drop them in the middle and really allow yourselves to shine.

I'm not even sure if the best angle to spin the guide is as a "is your app
slow?" type of book. Some of us want to produce high-quality code and want to
see useful techniques for improvements across the board. "Supercharge your
Javascript" resonates more strongly with me than "Do you fall asleep waiting
while your apps are running?"

Feel free to ping me if you'd like some additional advice. For sure, add a box
to the webpage for folks to sign up for updates. Get a cheap account at
aweber.com. Regularly mail updates out about the guide. Often, it takes 7-10
impressions of a product to make the sale. And once you have thousands of
folks on your list, selling the second guide you write will be much easier!

~~~
ahoyhere
Hiya, bprater.

Thanks for... actually, anything I try here sounds silly - support, sharing,
etc., etc. But, in any case, thanks.

Re: the sales page, you're right. This is the beta sales page. When I ship the
final version (next weekish), the sales page will change. I didn't think it
made sense to work on the sales page again before the book was done. :)

I'm always looking for more advice so I will definitely ping you.

Nice to see another geek doing this stuff, not just sleazy "I make
$102,221.392 repeating on Google Adsense every picosecond!" people. :)

------
vaksel
You should also offer a printed version for those people who want a hardbound
copy.

Something like: <http://www.cafepress.com/cp/info/sell/books.aspx>

So if you end up with 150 pages in the book, it'll just be something like 11
bucks extra. And most people prefer to have technical manuals in paper format.
+ You can charge a little bit more for the printed version, to make the ebook
that much more appealing

~~~
ahoyhere
Well, let's see...

Only one person has asked for it.

The actual price for printing the beta was $24. (I told him to go ahead and
get his own printed copy.)

That would double the sales paths I have to worry about, collect email
addresses from, etc.

It's really a non-starter to me. I have made the ebook screen-friendly and
it's got a great interactive Table of Contents.

I don't think there's a reason to sell a printed copy when you could easily
print it out and have Kinko's bind it for like $8.

~~~
jsackmann
My experience (creating PDF ebooks at gmathacks.com) has been similar. I
probably get an email every 2-3 months asking about a printed copy. I have a
standard response re: benefits of the PDF & one's ability to create their own
print copy, and nearly all of the inquiries result in the sale of an ebook.

I'm probably losing a handful of customers who don't email me in the first
place, but that's an ok tradeoff for me in that it spares me the hassle of
setting up a print-on-demand deal and (I irrationally fear this) inevitable
customer service issues that arise from having to physically ship stuff (even
it's a turnkey operation and somebody else is doing the shipping).

~~~
ahoyhere
Cool!

Plus - if you get it bound @ Kinko's, you can get spiral bound. And spiral
bound is vastly superior for reference books. :)

------
zackattack
I would give some free excerpts. Maybe even a free chapter. If the content is
really good, this process will happen in the customer's mind:

1\. Wow!

2\. My mind is blown!

3\. This content is top notch, and I can't wait to get my hands on the rest of
it.

~~~
acangiano
Agreed, and it's not limited to books either. My startup's
(<http://ThinkCode.TV>) aim will be selling high-quality programming
screencasts. We immediately decided that the first episode of each course
should be free.

------
albertcardona
I have found "The Pragmatic Bookstore" handling of the beta review process for
Stuart Halloway's book on "Programming Clojure" simply excellent. Of the
listed points in this article:

1\. People are absolutely willing to buy beta books.

[Clojure's beta book was near completion content-wise, and very readable and
usable in everyday learning of clojure.]

4\. ... do not lay out the beta version beautifully in InDesign ...

[They were clearly typesetting in LaTeX.]

5\. Have an update plan in advance.

[The update plan was announced from the beginning and worked really well via
email notifications.

6\. It's never a good idea to publicly promise to ship on X date ...

[They never had a final date. They even waited for Clojure to stabilize to
1.0.]

7\. The types of folks who buy beta books are very involved, and will send you
all kinds of helpful emails about typos, errors, or suggestions...

[My impression is that Stuart got even overwhelmed.]

And to top it, beta reviewers not only got the ebook; they were promised a
free printed book. Hats off.

------
ahoyhere
I'm happy to see all these content-creating people come out of the woodwork!

~~~
markm
if you don't mind me asking, how do you enforce the site licenses? Is there a
setting in creating a pdf that only allows you to make 100 copies or do you
lock the pdf and issues 100 unique copies?

Any answer would be greatly appreciated. :)

~~~
ahoyhere
The honor system.

We talk in the beginning of the book about how buying the correct license is
supporting us creating more awesome stuff, including the upcoming
Scriptaculous 2.0.

If people are going to pirate, they're going to pirate. Nothing is going to
stop them. Except maybe LOOOOOOVE. :)

------
indiejade
Mmmmkay. . . I see that script.alicio.us _is_ one of the projects I'm
promoting in forum number 11 at oss.zentu.net.

Sorry about our old flamewar regarding your previous issues with google
ebooks. However, since I am promoting the script.alicio.us project (read:
talking numbers on pi day) in a useful way that I am sure somehow contributes
to your potential millions as a published author, please forgive me for
defending one of the potential sources of revenue from my sites.

I don't like attention as much as some people do, but sometimes a gal has
gotta defend her work. :)

indie

~~~
ahoyhere
You're joking, right? Defend your work? One of your sources of revenue? I've
never heard of your work, much less said anything about it. Ever.

As I recall, you blamed Google shafting me on my "syntactically sketchy"
JavaScript code samples. In a PDF. You said that must have _conflicted_ with
the Checkout engine.

That was the weirdest comment I think I've ever gotten on HN.

