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PS. you can check it out for free here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EG7BMVY http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EG7BMVY any feedback would be extremely

PS. you can check it out for free here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EG7BMVY http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EG7BMVY any feedback would be extremely useful.

patio11 13y ago
Sell it for yourself at a price of rather north of $5. It is a revenue-generating asset for the right people, right? $40 is very reasonable if it helps someone ship a Wordpress plugin that goes for $25 to $50 a pop, helps them deliver client work, gets them a new job, etc. The single best way to sell virtually any sort of educational content is to give some amount of education on the topic away for free, collect email addresses, and then explicitly sell to the people over email. Read Nathan Barry/Brennan Dunn on the topic -- their blogs go over pretty much every element in detail.
- peacemaker 13y ago
  Hey Patio, thanks for the advice (I'm a subscriber to your emails as well which are great) Selling for myself was my initial thought but my weakest point is driving traffic/marketing. Amazon brings me the traffic I could never hope to get myself. I can code with the best of them but when it gets down to the actual process of getting people onto my website, I have no idea. I've been learning what I can about SEO, social media marketing, using adwords and so on but I still feel like I'm missing a trick. These so called 'internet marketing' experts tell you they can drive masses of traffic but I just don't see how! Anyway, I completely agree with your point about giving away some of the topic for free and I've read a lot of yours (and Brennan's) articles on doing that. I shall look into it in more detail, thanks!
mechanical_fish 13y ago
It doesn't matter how much traffic you get if none of those clicks are from people who are ready to buy your product. The Kindle format is a killer for me: I see it and I want to click away and never come back. Let me guess a few reasons why. The price is obviously a signal of low quality. Kindles are a pain to work with when I'm sitting at a computer (which nearly 100% of Wordpress-plugin authors will be doing). I have to click the link. I have to dig out my book reader. I have to avoid getting distracted by various novels. Just sell me a PDF like everyone else does. Check out Gumroad or getdpd.com. (I've never used these, but folks in the 30x500 group speak highly of them.) (Yes, I know there are people who read Kindle books on their PCs, using the web client or the PC client or whatever. Do you want to limit your market to these people? All of us have PDF readers on every device, and use them.) Amazon is the wrong neighborhood for you. It's full of professionally-edited and marketed books with real covers that make yours look silly and yet sell for a dirt-cheap $9.99 (they make it up in volume), which anchors your price to a low value. And Amazon is also stuffed with absolutely lousy vanity-published dreck, which makes me leery of buying anything on there that doesn't look like a professionally-marketed book. On Amazon people literally judge books by their covers, just like we do in a physical bookstore, because the cover is generally the most prominent, best-designed thing on the Amazon sales page. You could pay for a professionally-designed cover, but that is the wrong move: You do not want to compete in that market. Just go sell in a venue where nobody cares about the cover because they're too focused on the goal. A venue like: Your website about Wordpress plugins. There is no magic trick to selling a book on Wordpress plugins. You set up a website. I presumably don't need to tell you what tool you could use for that. On the website, you put up many short articles about building Wordpress plugins. On every page you put a tiny form that says something like "Do you need to build a Wordpress plugin? Get a free sample chapter of my book 'Creating Wordpress Plugins': [form field labeled "email address"] [button labeled 'Get Sample Chapter']". How much of your book should you give away for free, a few paragraphs at a time? Well, Michael Hartl gives away 100% of his book for free at http://ruby.railstutorial.org http://ruby.railstutorial.org and still does okay. I'm not sure that's the optimal strategy for you, because that depends on your goals, the size of your audience, how ready the audience is to buy, whose money the audience is spending, the amount and kind of value that you provide, and so on. But it's good to understand that your content isn't some kind of precious jewel that you need to hoard.
- peacemaker 13y ago
  Thanks for the great advice. You make a compelling argument for moving the book off of Amazon. You're right, I can't hope to compete in that space with this offering and I probably wouldn't want to. As for the price signalling quality, well honestly I didn't have much of an idea how to price it! I did some research on similar books on Amazon and priced it to sell. I think perhaps I got carried away with the idea of having my book for sale on Amazon that I didn't think through all the implications that you (and patio11) have pointed out. My ultimate goal is to have a range of technical books so I'm trying to learn as much as I can with this first one. Your advice has helped a lot, thanks.
  - thejteam 13y ago
    I don't think having an amazon version is a bad idea. Just glancing at the description, which you should add a significant amount of detail to by the way, it sounds like a beginners cookbook for wordpress plugins. That is probably worth having for sale for 5 dollars on amazon. Now create a second book with more technical detail and some sample code. Sell that on your own for significantly more money. And if I am wrong about this book being a beginner's cookbook, then take everybody's advice and sell it yourself. And work on your sales pitch, because to me that is what the description made it sound like.
    - peacemaker 13y ago
      You're correct, it is mainly aimed at beginners so I'm glad that came across in the description. My goal is to move onto more detailed/technical books after this one - I just wanted to test the whole process first.

PS. you can check it out for free here: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EG7BMVY http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EG7BMVY any feedback would be extremely useful.

patio11 13y ago

Sell it for yourself at a price of rather north of $5. It is a revenue-generating asset for the right people, right? $40 is very reasonable if it helps someone ship a Wordpress plugin that goes for $25 to $50 a pop, helps them deliver client work, gets them a new job, etc. The single best way to sell virtually any sort of educational content is to give some amount of education on the topic away for free, collect email addresses, and then explicitly sell to the people over email. Read Nathan Barry/Brennan Dunn on the topic -- their blogs go over pretty much every element in detail.

peacemaker 13y ago
Hey Patio, thanks for the advice (I'm a subscriber to your emails as well which are great) Selling for myself was my initial thought but my weakest point is driving traffic/marketing. Amazon brings me the traffic I could never hope to get myself. I can code with the best of them but when it gets down to the actual process of getting people onto my website, I have no idea. I've been learning what I can about SEO, social media marketing, using adwords and so on but I still feel like I'm missing a trick. These so called 'internet marketing' experts tell you they can drive masses of traffic but I just don't see how! Anyway, I completely agree with your point about giving away some of the topic for free and I've read a lot of yours (and Brennan's) articles on doing that. I shall look into it in more detail, thanks!

mechanical_fish 13y ago

It doesn't matter how much traffic you get if none of those clicks are from people who are ready to buy your product. The Kindle format is a killer for me: I see it and I want to click away and never come back. Let me guess a few reasons why. The price is obviously a signal of low quality. Kindles are a pain to work with when I'm sitting at a computer (which nearly 100% of Wordpress-plugin authors will be doing). I have to click the link. I have to dig out my book reader. I have to avoid getting distracted by various novels. Just sell me a PDF like everyone else does. Check out Gumroad or getdpd.com. (I've never used these, but folks in the 30x500 group speak highly of them.) (Yes, I know there are people who read Kindle books on their PCs, using the web client or the PC client or whatever. Do you want to limit your market to these people? All of us have PDF readers on every device, and use them.) Amazon is the wrong neighborhood for you. It's full of professionally-edited and marketed books with real covers that make yours look silly and yet sell for a dirt-cheap $9.99 (they make it up in volume), which anchors your price to a low value. And Amazon is also stuffed with absolutely lousy vanity-published dreck, which makes me leery of buying anything on there that doesn't look like a professionally-marketed book. On Amazon people literally judge books by their covers, just like we do in a physical bookstore, because the cover is generally the most prominent, best-designed thing on the Amazon sales page. You could pay for a professionally-designed cover, but that is the wrong move: You do not want to compete in that market. Just go sell in a venue where nobody cares about the cover because they're too focused on the goal. A venue like: Your website about Wordpress plugins. There is no magic trick to selling a book on Wordpress plugins. You set up a website. I presumably don't need to tell you what tool you could use for that. On the website, you put up many short articles about building Wordpress plugins. On every page you put a tiny form that says something like "Do you need to build a Wordpress plugin? Get a free sample chapter of my book 'Creating Wordpress Plugins': [form field labeled "email address"] [button labeled 'Get Sample Chapter']". How much of your book should you give away for free, a few paragraphs at a time? Well, Michael Hartl gives away 100% of his book for free at http://ruby.railstutorial.org http://ruby.railstutorial.org and still does okay. I'm not sure that's the optimal strategy for you, because that depends on your goals, the size of your audience, how ready the audience is to buy, whose money the audience is spending, the amount and kind of value that you provide, and so on. But it's good to understand that your content isn't some kind of precious jewel that you need to hoard.

peacemaker 13y ago
Thanks for the great advice. You make a compelling argument for moving the book off of Amazon. You're right, I can't hope to compete in that space with this offering and I probably wouldn't want to. As for the price signalling quality, well honestly I didn't have much of an idea how to price it! I did some research on similar books on Amazon and priced it to sell. I think perhaps I got carried away with the idea of having my book for sale on Amazon that I didn't think through all the implications that you (and patio11) have pointed out. My ultimate goal is to have a range of technical books so I'm trying to learn as much as I can with this first one. Your advice has helped a lot, thanks.
- thejteam 13y ago
  I don't think having an amazon version is a bad idea. Just glancing at the description, which you should add a significant amount of detail to by the way, it sounds like a beginners cookbook for wordpress plugins. That is probably worth having for sale for 5 dollars on amazon. Now create a second book with more technical detail and some sample code. Sell that on your own for significantly more money. And if I am wrong about this book being a beginner's cookbook, then take everybody's advice and sell it yourself. And work on your sales pitch, because to me that is what the description made it sound like.
  - peacemaker 13y ago
    You're correct, it is mainly aimed at beginners so I'm glad that came across in the description. My goal is to move onto more detailed/technical books after this one - I just wanted to test the whole process first.