5 ms·

What I learned from screwing up my first ebook launch

73 points by ahoyhere 17y ago

vaksel 17y ago
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?
- patio11 17y ago
  Isn't the price a little high? It seems your frame of reference is to a paper book on a non-technical subject. If you compare it to a scifi paperback, yes, it is high. However, your frame of reference is borked -- this is a technical product designed to stop the problem which is preventing your customers from paying you money. Here's my frame of reference, then: an experienced Javascript programmer from my company would be charged out at $100 an hour. Compared to a few hours of their time to resolve a Javascript performance problem, $25 doesn't look too expensive.
- ahoyhere 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
      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. :)
    - ahoyhere 17y ago
      Speaking of pinging you... you're a hard man to track down. Is your email address bprater @ BFL (abbrvd)? Or is there a better way? You can email me @ amy at slash (number) 7 dot com :)
- thesethings 17y ago
  In an effort to not make her validate her own rep :D, I'll chime in and say she has a lot of street cred on this topic, and her price is fair. I'm not even deep in the Javascript/Ruby/Interface communities (where she's most known, and I'm a Linux sysadmin more into hypervisors), and I've heard of her, her work, and some of the things she's created. (http://twistori.com/ http://twistori.com/ for example.) When/if I'm ever ready to dive deep into a topic she writes about, I'd definitely buy/attend something she produced. Not only is she knowledgeable, but she's just a really solid, clear communicator, things that don't always go hand-in-hand :( Thanks for the blog post, ahoyhere. Lots of lessons to apply for people in many industries.
  - ahoyhere 17y ago
    Hey, thanks a lot for the kind words! I think we posted at the same time so I ended up validating myself anyway. Ha. But I appreciate it, thank you :) EDIT: typo
- thesethings 17y ago
  I'm voting vaksel's question up. Though I disagree that the price was too high, asking about choosing the price point led to a great, helpful thread. It was a fair question.
zackattack 17y ago
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.
- ahoyhere 17y ago
  Yeah, I didn't want to do that for the beta. I didn't actually think anyone would buy it during the beta, that was a surprise. And then I wanted to spend all the time working on the book, not optimizing for sales... prematurely. ;) There will be a sample chapter up next week. Believe it or not, I wrote this post more to A) keep in touch with my readers, and B) turn (smart, non-sleazy, geeky) people's minds towards creating their own informational products than to C) promote the book. :)
  - kalid 17y ago
    Hi Amy, thanks for posting! You're helping me with B) -- I'm working on an ebook for my website (http://betterexplained.com http://betterexplained.com) and your first-hand experience is really useful. Unfortunately many of the ebook tutorials seem to be of the "get rich quick" variety, it's nice to hear from someone interested in communicating with the community and helping people learn.
- thesethings 17y ago
  That's a great idea, and bridges some of the gap between an ebook and a paper book that one could leaf through prior to purchase, or even the ol' Amazon excerpts.
- acangiano 17y ago
  Agreed, and it's not limited to books either. My startup's (http://ThinkCode.TV http://ThinkCode.TV) aim will be selling high-quality programming screencasts. We immediately decided that the first episode of each course should be free.
  - deleted 17y ago
vaksel 17y ago
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 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
- thesethings 17y ago
  That's a cool idea. I think 37 Signals did that with Getting Real (first an ebook, and then printable at lulu.com.)
- ahoyhere 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
ahoyhere 17y ago
I'm happy to see all these content-creating people come out of the woodwork!
- markm 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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.
albertcardona 17y ago
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.

73 points by ahoyhere 17y ago

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?

patio11 17y ago
Isn't the price a little high? It seems your frame of reference is to a paper book on a non-technical subject. If you compare it to a scifi paperback, yes, it is high. However, your frame of reference is borked -- this is a technical product designed to stop the problem which is preventing your customers from paying you money. Here's my frame of reference, then: an experienced Javascript programmer from my company would be charged out at $100 an hour. Compared to a few hours of their time to resolve a Javascript performance problem, $25 doesn't look too expensive.
ahoyhere 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago
    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. :)
  - ahoyhere 17y ago
    Speaking of pinging you... you're a hard man to track down. Is your email address bprater @ BFL (abbrvd)? Or is there a better way? You can email me @ amy at slash (number) 7 dot com :)
thesethings 17y ago
In an effort to not make her validate her own rep :D, I'll chime in and say she has a lot of street cred on this topic, and her price is fair. I'm not even deep in the Javascript/Ruby/Interface communities (where she's most known, and I'm a Linux sysadmin more into hypervisors), and I've heard of her, her work, and some of the things she's created. (http://twistori.com/ http://twistori.com/ for example.) When/if I'm ever ready to dive deep into a topic she writes about, I'd definitely buy/attend something she produced. Not only is she knowledgeable, but she's just a really solid, clear communicator, things that don't always go hand-in-hand :( Thanks for the blog post, ahoyhere. Lots of lessons to apply for people in many industries.
- ahoyhere 17y ago
  Hey, thanks a lot for the kind words! I think we posted at the same time so I ended up validating myself anyway. Ha. But I appreciate it, thank you :) EDIT: typo
thesethings 17y ago
I'm voting vaksel's question up. Though I disagree that the price was too high, asking about choosing the price point led to a great, helpful thread. It was a fair question.

zackattack 17y ago

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.

ahoyhere 17y ago
Yeah, I didn't want to do that for the beta. I didn't actually think anyone would buy it during the beta, that was a surprise. And then I wanted to spend all the time working on the book, not optimizing for sales... prematurely. ;) There will be a sample chapter up next week. Believe it or not, I wrote this post more to A) keep in touch with my readers, and B) turn (smart, non-sleazy, geeky) people's minds towards creating their own informational products than to C) promote the book. :)
- kalid 17y ago
  Hi Amy, thanks for posting! You're helping me with B) -- I'm working on an ebook for my website (http://betterexplained.com http://betterexplained.com) and your first-hand experience is really useful. Unfortunately many of the ebook tutorials seem to be of the "get rich quick" variety, it's nice to hear from someone interested in communicating with the community and helping people learn.
thesethings 17y ago
That's a great idea, and bridges some of the gap between an ebook and a paper book that one could leaf through prior to purchase, or even the ol' Amazon excerpts.
acangiano 17y ago
Agreed, and it's not limited to books either. My startup's (http://ThinkCode.TV http://ThinkCode.TV) aim will be selling high-quality programming screencasts. We immediately decided that the first episode of each course should be free.
- deleted 17y ago

vaksel 17y ago

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 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

thesethings 17y ago
That's a cool idea. I think 37 Signals did that with Getting Real (first an ebook, and then printable at lulu.com.)
ahoyhere 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago

ahoyhere 17y ago

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

markm 17y ago
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 17y ago
  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 17y ago

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 17y ago
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.

albertcardona 17y ago

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.