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"...That means about 8,000 RSS blog readers and 10,000+ twitter followers that knew about my book while I was writing it..." I always find these articles inter
by DanielBMarkham 13y ago
"...That means about 8,000 RSS blog readers and 10,000+ twitter followers that knew about my book while I was writing it..."
I always find these articles interesting. Usually the real story is more like "I know how to market stuff and made a lot of money" but the article titles are something along the lines of "How I made 40K by picking my nose online in one weekend!"
So the reader gets this great story of some guy picking his nose. All kinds of details about how he did it, why he did it, what tools he used, what kind of nose he has, and so on. All kinds of little details here and there to get lost in. Maybe some graphs of his nose, or a bunch of charts showing traffic to his site hour by hour and a discussion of how using a bold font increased conversion by .2%. In short, nerd candy.
Once again, the important story here is marketing, in-depth interaction with a target audience, but this is always downplayed or ignored by the author, a specialist in getting your attention and engaging you. LeanPub is not the story, although it has a role. E-books are not the story, although they also have a role. Having a huge blogging audience and Twitter following, and leading them into a meaningful conversation about value? That's the story.
"...I do very little marketing, and it is mostly on my blog and twitter, in the form of sidebar links from my various websites..."
Right now somewhere around 100K HN readers are reading this story, thinking about team leadership, making money online, agile, and so forth. Some significant percentage are going to sign up for the RSS feed, perhaps buy the book. They are going to begin a process of discussion around what's important to them and what they're willing to pay for.
Dude. If that isn't marketing, I don't know what is. Great job.
(ADD: This looks like a great book, btw. I don't mean to impugn the author or make it out like he's purposely trying to trick anybody. HN is traditionally a startup forum. Just trying to take a fresh look at material like this from the viewpoint of somebody who might want to do it themselves one day. What I learned from this piece is that my current Agile Team Tune-Up email list of around 200 (http://bit.ly/15sz0Pl http://bit.ly/15sz0Pl) needs to expand by about 40-fold before it would be worthwhile to start a conversation about books. Perhaps more than that depending on my engagement skills. This is really good stuff to know.)
- royosherove 13y agoslow clap Daniel, I think you are absolutely right. Having a real conversation is the point. KNowing what touches people is part of that too. But tools like leanpub didn't exist until a year ago. They enable a conversation while something is being done (like kickstarter a bit).
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoKudos on the book! Need to check it out. You're right about LeanPub. Interesting stuff. But I'm much more curious about how you built such a great following over the years, especially since we both work with similar audiences. Flashy tools are cool and all, but people been making lots of money on books having conversations with target audiences long before things like LeanPub came along.
- royosherove 13y agoGood point. Perhaps this conversation needs to be continued elsewhere. You can ping me at roy at osherove dot com
- babuskov 13y agoI wish I could give 100 upvotes for this ;)
- patio11 13y agoIt is worth noting that people who do not have 8,000 blog subscribers or 10k twitter followers have used essentially the same playbook and made significant amounts of money doing so. Take Nathan Barry or Brennan Dunn, for example. I think some HNers know who they are these days, but a year ago, "nobody" knew them, and they both have published stats in the mid five figures for their first books. Also, if you're savvy about things, the "$ per audience member" has enough dynamic range in it such that it makes up for a smaller audience size. "Revenue divided by Twitter followers" strikes me as a pretty silly metric, but if we accept it as a rough test of the proposition "Being Internet famous means you make mad bank, conversely, there is no profit without Internet fame", I have personal knowledge of enough data points to say that that metric has greater than X to 100X dynamic range.
- DanielBMarkham 13y agoIt's also worth noting that 1) HN is it's own market now, with people who sell into the crowd, and 2) "I'm an expert on X" is becoming a cottage industry, with folks claiming to know all sorts of interesting things that may or may not be true. Not trying to be cynical. Once again, my goal here is to separate the things we consume on HN from the actual business models in the background. Yep, it's certainly not as simple as $ per Twitter followers. There's also a Heisenberg Effect here, where the closer the HN audience looks at a thing, the more distorted the results we get are. I'm a big fan of Brennan and Nathan's. I've also spent quite a bit of money on things the HN crowd thought was cool for startups which didn't amount to a hill of beans. It's very difficult having a discussion with 100K of your best buds about ways to find your own way in the X arena. Too many slightly diverse interests all playing out at the same time in the same forum :) Geesh. I could start a list of high quality services offered by great HNers for startups. Things that, if you need them, could easily pay for themselves. Some of your stuff would be at the top of that list. It would not be a short list.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- thenomad 13y agoThat would actually be an extremely useful list, if you fancied creating it...