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Paul Jarvis ( Everything I Know), Sacha Greif ( Discover Meteor), and Nathan Barry ( Authority) invited me to host a Self-Publishing Hangout with them this week. It was a great opportunity for me, because I’m about to publish my first “book” ( Amplification). Our Google Hangout ended being a 2 hour marathon of us sharing our experience with writing, publishing, and promoting eBooks, as well as answering questions from everybody in the chat room.
Show Notes
Paul Jarvis ( Everything I Know), Sacha Greif ( Discover Meteor), and Nathan Barry ( Authority) invited me to host a Self-Publishing Hangout with them this week. It was a great opportunity for me, because I’m about to publish my first “book” ( Amplification). Our Google Hangout ended being a 2 hour marathon of us sharing our experience with writing, publishing, and promoting eBooks, as well as answering questions from everybody in the chat room.
In Part 2 we discuss:
- is the self-publishing market getting saturated?
- the publishing process: what tools do you use to create your books?
- what do you outsource?
- should you publish your book for free?
- pricing your ebook
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Notable quotes
Is the market for self-published books getting saturated right now?
- Justin : “In our space (tech, design, dev, bootstrapping) it used to be there were only a few people doing it (Amy Hoy, Chris Guillebeau). Next, there was grassroots people who followed their lead, and came on the scene: Nathan Barry, Sacha Greif, Paul Jarvis. But now it seems like there are a lot of more established people getting in to publishing: Adii Pienaar, Shawn Blanc, Mike McDerment (Freshbooks). Do you think there’s too many players in this space now?”
- Sacha : “I don’t think so. I think maybe it seems that way to us because we’re so involved in this space. Although it’s true that there are a lot of books coming out now for people like us: books about design, and books about self-publishing; that niche might get saturated soon. But the vast majority of ebooks are about other things: CSS, food… that will never get saturated.”
- Nathan : “I think there will always be demand to pay $50 or less for high quality content that’s really specific to a topic you care about (as a reader). Instead of going through 50 blog posts on the internet, you spend a little bit of money to get the best stuff on that topic in a PDF. I don’t think it will become too saturated. We also tend to run in really specific circles on the internet and so when we see something we think: wow the whole internet is talking about this, when in reality it’s just your tiny little corner, and 12 people.”
- Justin : “The hard thing is… if you’re already ‘in’ and you already have an audience, it’s easier to say that it’s not saturated. Certain niches can definitely get saturated. Rob Walling just commented on his podcast that there’s been a big, noticeable increase in the number of people asking him (and other founders) to do interviews for books. If it’s true, that there is more saturation, it means that everybody’s quality and uniqueness will have to go up – you’ll need to offer something that no one else is doing.”
- Brennan Dunn (from the chat room): “Rob was mainly arguing against ebook “authors” who just publish a bunch of other people’s writing. e.g. email a bunch of people, compile them into book, profit.”
- Amy Hoy (from the chat room): “Yeah, there’s a definitely a saturation level with ‘I’m not gonna do any work on this product but you should still pay me’ LOL”
- Michael Hartl (from the chat room): “This is still early, early days for ebook publishing.”
- Joelle Steiniger (from the chat room): “Everyone always thinks there’s no room left… and there always is.”
- Sacha : “I think the key point is quality. For example: interviews are really interesting, but there also really easy to do; that’s why there are a lot of e-books that are just a collection of interviews. Unless you’re a professional interviewer, your questions might not always be interesting. So that niche might produce a lot of low quality ebooks. But if that gets saturated, who cares? It will only push people to make higher quality books.”
- Justin : “Yeah. And maybe that’s something else we have to be prepared for: the professional ebook critic. Right now it’s a fairly friendly space.”
- Paul : “You should read some of my comments on GoodReads: there are some reviewers that don’t like stuff that are vocal.”
Show notes
Paul Jarvis: Everything I Know
Sacha Greif: Discover Meteor
Nathan Barry: Authority
Justin Jackson: Amplification
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Paul Jarvis, Sasha Grave, and Nathan Barry invited me to host a self publishing hangout with them a couple weeks ago. This is part two where we discuss, is the self publishing market getting saturated? What kind of process do we use for publishing our books, and whether or not you should publish your book for free. Are you creating an application that needs charts or dashboard? Fusion Charts is a JavaScript charting solution trusted by over 450,000 developers around the world.
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Speaker 1:Daily accountability, daily logs on what people have accomplished. You can sign up for a free trial at www.sprint.ly. Okay. That's enough jibber jabber. Let's get to part two with Sasser Graef, Nathan Barry, Paul Jarvis, and myself.
Speaker 2:Justin, you were talking about saturation?
Speaker 1:Yeah. But what do you guys think about that? Do you think the market for self published books is saturated right now? I I was thinking, like because it would it you know, there was a few people doing it, like Amy Hoy and Chris Gilbo and all those people. And now there's, like, grassroots people that came up, like Nathan Barry and all you guys.
Speaker 1:And now it seems like there's a lot of established people getting in. So, like, Addy just released a book and so I'm wondering if we think there's is there too many players in this space now?
Speaker 2:Don't think No. Think maybe it seems this way to us because we're so like involved in this space and a lot of people are are well, it's true that there's a lot of books that are marketed to people like us. So books about writing books or books about marketing. So that specific niche might get saturated, I think soon, but I think the vast majority of ebooks are still about other things like actual real topics like CSS or food or whatever. And that will never get saturated.
Speaker 3:I think there will always be demand to pay $50 or less for high quality content that is really specific to a topic you care about. So, of going through 50 blog posts all over the internet, you just want to spend a little bit of money to get the best stuff on that topic in a PDF. And I don't think it'll become too saturated. We also tend to run-in really specific circles on the Internet. And so when we see something, we think, wow, the whole Internet is talking about this.
Speaker 3:When in reality, it's your tiny little corner and there's like 12 people who talk about the same thing and and people view that as saturation.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I mean, I I think the the hard thing is that if if you're already in and you already have an audience, it's easy for anyone to say that you you know, it might not be as saturated. I think certain niches can definitely get saturated. And Rob Walling was just commenting on this in his podcast. He says that the number of people requesting interviews from him for e books has gone way way up.
Speaker 1:So he noticed a noticeable increase in the number of people that were contacting him to do either video interviews for that, like a package, or to interview him for the book. So there could be something there, that there's a lot more people jumping in. And if that's true and there is more saturation, it'll just mean that the quality has to go up, the uniqueness has to go up, you're going to have to offer something that no one else is doing. And you might have to be willing to pivot what you originally wanted to do for what you're hearing is the actual need out in the marketplace.
Speaker 2:I think the key point is quality. I mean, interviews are very interesting, but they're also very easy to do. So that's why, I mean, there's a lot of e books that are just a collection of interviews. Unless you're a professional interviewer and you have experience doing that, your questions might not always be interesting. And that results in a lot of low quality ebooks.
Speaker 2:And I mean if that gets saturated then mean who cares because it will only push people to make higher quality books and higher quality content. Overall I think it's good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. And maybe that's something else we have to be prepared for is right now there's not a lot of e book critics. So there's not a lot of people out there like critiquing books. It's a fairly friendly space right now, but I think eventually people are going to start saying because I've downloaded I've paid for a few bad ones. You don't
Speaker 4:You should read some of my comments on Goodreads. There are there are reviewers that don't like stuff that are vocal.
Speaker 1:I'm just saying that there's it's still pretty friendly and and Yeah. You know, it it it might get a little bit more competitive in that sense in terms of quality anyway. Should we move on to publishing?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 1:So the the first we kinda covered this. Do we wanna talk about publishing tools at all anymore?
Speaker 4:We talked about what we write in, but maybe not what we create the end product in.
Speaker 1:Sure. Okay. So why don't we we do a quick round on that? What do you create the end product in, Paul?
Speaker 4:I use pages and then I export to PDF and to EPUB, and then I run it through I think it's called Caliber to make a Mobi file. And I know I'm a professional designer, I should use something like InDesign or whatever. Pages works for me, and it's always worked for me, and it's easy. I draw and I draw my graphics in Illustrator and save them as a PDF, and then I put them into Pages, and it works, and it's easy, and it's quick.
Speaker 2:I actually used Pages for my first book too, I really liked it. But then for my second book, I started out with pages and I started out evaluating, okay, should I do it with pages, InDesign, iBooks, all these apps? And then I realized that maybe the best way is just to do it in HTML. So that's what I ended up doing. The book, the actual content is in markdown, and I use Middleman.
Speaker 2:So Middleman, I don't know if you're familiar with Jekyll, but Middleman is basically the same thing. It's a static site generator, and it takes markdown files and converts them to HTML. And I can then take these HTML files and convert them to EPUB, PDF, mobile, whatever I need. And I actually really like doing it that way, although it's a little bit more work, but it's really flexible. I mean, it's just HTML, so you can do whatever you need.
Speaker 2:You're not limited to headings, paragraphs, lists, whatever you can. Any CSS, any HTML you can have in the website, can have it in the book too. Well, there are a few limits with the EPUB formats and what CSS get parsed and so on, but it's still much more flexible. And, you know, if if you're starting out a big e book project, I would really recommend considering this because although there's a bit more technical problems upfront in the long term, I think it makes sense.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I use iBooks Author. At the beginning, when I first started writing the AppExend Handbook, I looked around to what everyone was using, sent emails to everyone I knew who had self published an ebook, and I got a different answer from everybody. And I tried them all out. InDesign at first looked the most promising, but turns out it really frustrated me.
Speaker 3:And iBooks Author ended up being really, really great at just generating a nicely designed PDF. And it was just the right amount of design flexibility with just letting me get the book out the door quickly. So I've really enjoyed designing in iBooks Author. It has quite a few limitations but those limitations also help you, I think. I should say that I only use the export to PDF function.
Speaker 3:I've never actually published an iBooks file to the Apple Store.
Speaker 1:Mhmm.
Speaker 4:That's a good topic as well.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I'm using iBooks Author too because it's free. And I like I said before, I use draft draftin.com for writing the the initial part. Someone just asked about usage statistics. So iBooks Author does have some usage stats in there in terms of how many words you've written and things like that.
Speaker 1:And draftdraftin.com also has like a daily counter and it'll give you a chart on how many words you're writing a day, etcetera. What about outsourcing? Do any of you I think Do any of you guys outsource illustration? We talked about editing, but other kinds of things for your book?
Speaker 4:I'm having somebody illustrate the cover of my next book, yeah.
Speaker 2:I actually outsourced the actual conversion process from HTML to EPUB and mobile, because there's quite a few steps. So I had a guy run through it and then write down the steps for me so I didn't need to figure out the exact settings and Caliber. I think it's, I mean, people when they think about outsourcing, they usually think about outsourcing big things like editing or illustration. But even small processes, small things that will still take you like a day to figure out, you can outsource them to somebody has the experience and who does this all the time, and it will save you a lot of time.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3:I outsourced video editing for the videos to go with authority and designing web apps. But I think oh, and I outsourced coding up the sales page for designing web apps. Like, I designed it in Photoshop and then just spent $80 to have it coded up by somebody. I mean, a good rule of thumb is whether or not you doing it would add more value. And for coding up the sales page, it wasn't going to add any more value so I didn't do it.
Speaker 3:And it saved me half a day or more of time. So I felt that was a good use of money.
Speaker 2:And also when you're writing a book, can really figure out, okay, if I outsource this and it costs me $80 it's the cost of four books. If I sell four more books, it's almost like it was free. It makes it very easy to outsource things.
Speaker 1:Yeah. This is actually another thought I keep having is that in this space now, because there's so many people interested in in doing this, I think there's a lot of opportunity for people that want to get some experience in self publishing, but don't want to write a book yet. If you have some skills in design and copy editing and illustration and web, anything like, anything that you could use to help authors. I think there's a lot of opportunity right now. So if you wanted to become like a professional iBooks author theme creator, I think that there's a market for that right now.
Speaker 1:And I would probably, you know, need your services for my next thing. So that's one idea. If you're looking to get into this stuff and you want to learn from some people that are really good at it, you might want to start offering services around ecosystem here.
Speaker 2:Can we take a question from the chat room?
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Because people have been talking about, for example, publishing the HTML version for free online and then charging for the download. There was also somebody who pointed out that Frank Kimmerer has his he open sourced his book's content. Yeah. Yeah, I'd like to talk about that idea of giving actually the whole book for free.
Speaker 2:Also, like Amy said, the idea of publishing a book for credibility, not for money, must have been invented by a publisher.
Speaker 3:You know, we've got Michael Hartle in the chat room right now. He wrote Rails Tutorial. So railstutorial.org, I believe. And he's been insanely successful at giving the book away for free and charging for other versions of it. If he wants to pipe in the chat room with how much it's made him in the last year, you know, he can do that.
Speaker 3:But I will tell you it's a lot of money.
Speaker 2:Well, I actually learned Rails with his book, but I didn't pay for it. So I just used the free version. I guess I should go and go back and buy it. But I don't know. I mean, I'm sure it's a valid strategy, but it's also kind of risky, right?
Speaker 2:Because it depends on your market and how many people you can reach. I don't know, I know that it's something like people ask us, Oh, is your book about Meteor gonna be open source? And from the start we knew it wouldn't be because our goal was to make a living with that. So I don't know, have any of you guys Would you consider publishing something like that for free?
Speaker 1:I think one of the risks is that people use it as an excuse. So they're scared of sales and so they use it as an excuse like, Oh, I'll put this out for free and then see what the response is. And the problem with that is that people who will read something for free is is completely different than people that will pay for something. And the feedback you get might not be helpful at all. So I think the one thing is, you know, to think about whether this is an excuse or if you actually have a plan for how you're going to, you know, move forward with it.
Speaker 4:I've used samples before. I have my Biaspora Online Business, I think has the first three or four chapters, so it's enough to get people interested, but then on the last page, there's a link to buy it. And that's like I have it through a Bitly link, which keeps track of clicks, and that the conversion on that is way better than the conversion on my sales page. So having a bit of the book for free and then having it's just like on iTunes where you can listen to a minute or thirty seconds of an album. You see if you like it and then the likelihood of you buying it after you've listened to it or after you've read it in the case of a book is much higher.
Speaker 4:I also gave Eat Awesome away for free one Black Friday just because I was pissed off with vapid consumerism. And then and I think I gave away I think people downloaded it 14 or 1,500 times. But then the next day, my sales skyrocketed. So even though I gave it away, it was only for a very short amount of time and it wasn't even a marketing check. I was just I just didn't feel like people buying more stuff that day.
Speaker 4:But then the next day, I sold a ton I like, I sold way, way, way more. And then I got also I got a lot of requests for interviews and publicity because of that. So I think if you are gonna give it away for free, maybe it's limited. But still, I think if you're writing books, then you should be hopefully trying to make a bit of money off of it even if money isn't the main goal. You should be, if you put all that work into it, it's worth money.
Speaker 4:So
Speaker 3:I I would say charging for your book should be the default. Unless you have a strategy where giving it away for free is going to benefit you more in some other way. And Michael Hartle, through some signals, Pat Flynn, He wrote an architecture guide years ago. It's made him close to half a million dollars, I believe, that he he gave all that away for free and then sold another version of the same thing. Plenty of examples that it has worked, but I would say that your default should be to charge unless you have a good strategy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, think that makes sense. Also one thing I want to point out, if you do decide to give it away for free, I mean think about the people who already bought it. You never want to charge full price, then the next day start, Hey, it's free now. Then you have all those people who, like your best fans, your best customers who bought it early, who won't be very happy about it.
Speaker 4:Yeah. It's good to go the other direction, to reward the people who buy it first, who are the biggest supporters, if you're really part of your tribe and your inner circle and the the biggest fans of what you do. If you offer the first if the early adopters get a bit of a discount and then it goes back up to full price, I found that's worked a lot better. Instead, I've done that for one of my books, but not for the other. I did it the other way.
Speaker 4:And having it a bit cheaper to begin with to get the traction and to get the ball rolling, and then putting it back. But saying, it's on sale now for this day or for this week, and it's going to be a regular price. So people know what's coming, so they can make the decision. Do I wanna be an early adopter and get it before anybody else is talking about it? Or do I wanna buy it at regular price once I see that people are actually enjoying what they're what they bought?
Speaker 2:So should we talk about pricing then?
Speaker 3:Yeah. Sounds good.
Speaker 1:Yeah. We're into that already. So how let's well, Nathan's talked a lot about this. Let's let's start with let's start with Jarvis. What what how do you price your books?
Speaker 4:Share divining rod maybe. Well, I have I have I've tried it both ways because I've read I was reading Nathan and Sasha's back and forth with pricing high versus pricing low, so I figured I'll do one book low and then one book high. So my first book, I priced at $5. Now it's a dollar. And then my second book is $17.
Speaker 4:So I tried it. I've tried it at different different places. And the one at 17 has actually made more money. It sold half the copies, but made a lot more money at a much higher price point. But I also think the subject matter is important.
Speaker 4:Like, a vegan cookbook isn't going to have as much value for people with more spending money as, like, a business book. So if it's a business book, you can tend to charge more. At least that's what I found. And as well, it just I I played with pricing for all of them, and I kind of found a sweet spot for for both of the books. So it's kind of whatever what you think is is worth it to you to release it kinda does have some merit.
Speaker 4:And it's also a bit of a science and a bit of a guessing game at the same time.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think pricing is very, very subjective. I mean, even for the same product, the way you market it and the way you present it can have a huge impact. I think maybe we'll talk about posting your book on Amazon later. But for example, if I see a book on Amazon, even $10 will seem expensive. And $20 it's double what any other e book would cost, so it seems like a huge price.
Speaker 2:On the other hand, if I see Nathan's book for $39 it will seem like a good deal because I know there's good value and I know it will help me do my job. The way you frame the whole context of the book is very important. So yeah, for our book, it was the same thing. Like we knew this was a book that would teach people skills that they can put to use in their job, that they can use to earn money. So it made sense to price it high, At least for the second book.
Speaker 2:My first book was priced low, and that was partly because it was much, much shorter, and also because it was my first book, so I wasn't sure what to expect.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think for me as a beginner, pricing's tough and I it is hard to figure that stuff out. I think what I ended up doing is, and we kind of alluded to this, is instead of me marketing this as a book, I'm I'm marketing it as a downloadable course. And so the idea is that it's not just a a, you know, an e book that you're going to read. It's going to have videos and some worksheets and some other things.
Speaker 1:And this is going to be the equivalent of you taking a course on topic. And I priced it at $29 and I did presales for $10 off.
Speaker 2:And people are asking about how to test pricing without pissing people off. Do you guys AB test prices or do anything like that?
Speaker 3:I've never AB tested pricing. No.
Speaker 4:Me neither. I've I've lowered the price on my first book, but I haven't. Don't see a good way to be able to raise the price without pissing people off other than if it's on sale and you're clear that it's on sale.
Speaker 2:Yeah. I don't think it's very ethical to a b test prices. I mean, aren't there laws against that or regulations? Not that, you know, even if it's if there was a warrant, I mean, it's not very fair to customers just to charge them $10 more because they have the wrong cookie, you know. I don't know.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't do it personally.
Speaker 1:I think I think one idea of testing pricing is to just start selling stuff. And so here's an example. So I wrote this post called Just Fucking Do It. And at the bottom was no. Actually, the hacker news thread, I posted a little link to this thing for going into a campfire room with other bootstrappers for $10 a month, and it sold out in an hour.
Speaker 1:I said, there's 12 spots. We're just gonna get whoever comes, and it sold out in an hour. And that was just an interesting exercise to say, I'm just going to put this out here. There's really no nothing bad can happen from me testing this out. And I was like, Woah, like people will pay Obviously I could have priced it a lot higher.
Speaker 1:And so you kind of start to learn like, Oh, okay, I understand this. And the other thing that I do is I use Gumroad and it does allow you to have to do deals. And so, like I said, I'm doing the presale for $10 off. And I kind of always track like, if I tweeted out a link, did that get any sales? If I had it in a PDF sample, etc.
Speaker 1:And you can kind of get an idea of what people are willing to pay.
Speaker 3:Yep. So I would say always price based on value. And so that would be a combination of what it's worth to you to do the work to put this whole thing together. And then price based on the amount of value that the reader is going to get out of it. So for example, Brennan Dunn has a book called Double Your Freelancing Rate.
Speaker 3:He sells it for $50. You may think that's insanely high for a book. But if you raise your rate from $50 to a $100 an hour, then you just paid for the book in the first hour of working at your new rate. I've read the book. It's fantastic.
Speaker 3:Totally worth $50 For a lot of people, it could make them tons more money than that. And so I would say, and something that, Sasha, you said earlier, but if you're teaching people skills that make money, it's much easier to justify higher prices. The closer you are to the money, the easier that equation is. So if you're selling fiction, it's gonna be hard to sell it for $50. But teaching people design skills, $250 for a course around that is an easy sell, especially if people are using the company credit card to pay for it.
Speaker 3:Always keep that in mind. Always have an option. If it makes sense for companies to buy it, always have a way for them to do that and let them pay more. The biggest pricing win that I've ever encountered is multiple price tiers. Would say I make sure it makes sense for your product.
Speaker 3:Don't just add it because I said to add it. But on the AppSite handbook, multiple price tiers doubled revenue, and on the other two books, it tripled revenue. So if you know of any other areas where it's like a quick win to triple revenue, I'd love to hear them, but that's the only one I know of right now. Definitely give it a try. I wrote about it more on Jason Cohen's blog, which is asmartbear.com.
Speaker 3:I'm sure someone will paste the link into the chat. Sasha, you actually used multiple packages on your first book and that worked really well, right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So the first one I just had two packages and there wasn't such a big difference between them. On the second one, I pretty much copied what you were doing. And yeah, that worked really, really well. And the way I see it is allowing people to pay how much they want to pay, right?
Speaker 2:So if I'm really rich or if my company is paying, maybe I want to support the author, so give me a reason why I can give you more money, basically. But it also works the other way around. Maybe if I'm a student or if I have less money, have a special plan for students, have a light edition of the book. So think that's what having multiple tiers like this is all about. It's just letting everybody pay at their own level.
Speaker 3:Yep. You know, something that somebody said to me was, you would make more money if you just doubled the price of everything. You know, say if you sold the entire book at $99 or $250 or something, and got rid of the $39 price tier. And I think they would be right. I think I would actually make more money doing that.
Speaker 3:But I don't want to exclude There's a whole group of people, whether it's freelancers, students, people who just encountered my work and don't trust my advice yet. Whatever it is, there's a whole market that I don't want to exclude. And so multiple pricing lets me optimize for the largest group excluding too many people. I would also say that just because people are setting a trend at $39 or whatever price in there doesn't mean you should necessarily follow it. Because, Sasha, I really liked the example of your first book.
Speaker 3:And I actually really liked the prices that you have it at now. I believe you have it at $6 and $12 Is that right?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So
Speaker 3:it's a small book. And you put it out in a couple of weeks, like three weeks, start Yeah, yeah, to
Speaker 2:yeah. Three weeks, yeah.
Speaker 3:And so writing your first book doesn't have to be this huge process that you work on for months and months and months, feel like you have to price high to do it based on the value, you could come out with a really good design tutorial that you put a week or two worth of work into and sell it for $10. And and that could be a great way to start into the self publishing market without coming out with something huge right right up front. So I would say if you're hesitant, then start small.
Speaker 1:Yeah. I think that's good advice. Do we want to move on to promotion? We're getting a lot of questions about using a would you ever use a traditional publisher now that you've self published? And also a lot of questions about different platforms.
Speaker 1:I'm sure you guys have seen these. There's tons and tons of platforms for writing and then promoting a book. Would you guys use any of those? Yeah, why don't we just take that one?
Speaker 2:I think the only reason why I would use a publisher if I was doing a print book and I really wanted like if I didn't care so much about money but I just wanted to get the book out there to as many people as I could, have it in bookstores, then I would consider a publisher. But other than that, I don't really see a reason because I honestly think, especially for e books, you can do a better job yourself than with a publisher.
Speaker 4:And it's a bit of a Like I know a lot of people who've gone the traditional publishing route, and a lot of publishers it's not always the case, but if you're not their their top like dog at the publishing house, then they're you're gonna be doing all the promotion anyways, so you might as well get a 100% instead of 10% or 12% if you're lucky. And I mean, I'm this Sacha, you mentioned you would do it if you wanted a print book. My next book will be a print book, but I'm using Kickstarter to raise the money and to pre sell a set number of copies for the next book. So it will be a hardcover, and I get to control the design. That's another thing I've I've worked with.
Speaker 4:Because I work with a lot of authors, they don't really get to choose what the designs of their books look like. And I mean, for for us designers, like, the cover is kind of important, and if you don't get to choose that, that's kind of a big deal, and I've seen that happen before. So I mean, I've talked to publishers before and I've not I've ended up not working with them just because I feel like I have a better grasp, I mean, everybody on this panel has a better grasp of how to market and promote ourselves. And I mean it's a bit of an ego thing to say like, my books in a bookstore, so I don't know that many people that go to bookstores as opposed to just like buying a book even if it's print or digital on amazon.com or Barnes and Noble or from one of our sites directly or from somebody's site directly kind of thing. So I don't know.
Speaker 4:I don't I've been approached and I'm still not I'm still not that interested in going in going that route at the moment.
Speaker 2:Well, maybe like if you really want to focus only on writing and do nothing else, then maybe a publisher is a good thing. But all of us, we all like doing promotion and design and interacting with people, so maybe that's why we don't like publishers.
Speaker 4:The days of 6 and seven figure advances for authors, they're so gone anyways. That's not really a reality. It's more an exception to the rule from what I've seen with the people that I know.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Okay. So I do plan to go with the traditional publisher some Not for the style of books that I've been writing, but I have a few ideas of a marketing book that I would like to get out to a much bigger audience that I don't think I would be able to reach on my own. And so on that model, I'd probably be following more Chris Guillebeau. He's done very well with his self published books or guides that follow a lot of the models of what we're doing, or I guess I follow a lot of what he does.
Speaker 3:But he also has two books traditionally published. His most recent one hit the New York Times list. So I think he balances that really well. Just whatever decision you make, know what the publisher is going to do for you, what you're going to have to do, and don't go into it with the expectation that the publisher's going to promote it for you.
Speaker 2:Well, also, you're probably in a much better position to deal with a publisher now than two years ago when you didn't have all of these ebooks.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 4:Yeah. Publishers are interested in you when you don't need them as much. That's the way the game goes.
Speaker 3:But I would never take a technical book to a publisher because they may pay you $5,000 as in advance, and that would probably be all the money you would make off of it. So any of the three books I've written already would be a terrible fit for a publisher.
Speaker 1:And what about the iBookstore and Amazon? Do you guys have any experience with them, and would you recommend it? I have
Speaker 4:my books in on Amazon and on iTunes, but they account for maybe 1% of my revenue and sales. I don't promote it just because if I'm doing a promotion, I'd rather promote somewhere where I'm gonna get 95 percent. I'm gonna get the cost of the book minus PayPal and Gumroad's fee versus selling it on Amazon or iTunes where I get 50 or 60% or whatever their percent is. So I have my books on there. In case people are looking there and wanna find them, they can.
Speaker 4:But they account I think people there's there's an idea that, oh, I self publish my book on Amazon, then Amazon's gonna drive sales or traffic to it. Never ever ever happens. Like, unless you're promoting your Amazon book from to your audience, nobody's going to find your book on Amazon or iTunes unless they're really, really looking hard or looking for it anyways.
Speaker 2:Another downside of Amazon is that you don't get people's emails. Right?
Speaker 4:Yeah, you don't know who your customers are.
Speaker 2:And like for our Meet Your Book, one thing we do is give people access to an online area where they can download the book, read it online, and all that. And that would be impossible to do with Amazon, because don't have a way to know who bought the book.
Speaker 3:Yep. Yeah. So for me, the two big downsides are not getting an email address. And if you don't have any information about the customer, they're not your customer. They're Amazon's customer.
Speaker 3:And I'm used to that from selling iPhone applications. It really sucks to have people buy your iPhone app and all you know is like 12 people in The United States bought it. That's all you know about your customers. That's a bad business model for you. It's wonderful for Apple and Amazon.
Speaker 3:But then the other thing is pricing. There's no way I could do my pricing tiers or anything that I do around pricing using those platforms.
Speaker 4:Yeah. They both max out in the teens for pricing for the max price you can set.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, Amazon will let you go above $10, but they'll start taking 70% of your revenue. Yeah. So if you're into that, yeah. But I think, Paul, what you said is really important about how you've tried it out and they're not driving you a lot of sales.
Speaker 3:And that's what most people are looking for. They're expecting that if they put it on Amazon, they'll get a bunch of sales. And the truth is that everyone I know who's done that has driven almost all the sales they've gotten.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Well, why switch don't to talking about promotion now? Is that okay with you guys?
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So why don't we I mean we said that the point is how do you promote your book? Maybe let's start with mailing list because we've talked about that quite a bit. And I think that can seem like a really overwhelming thing to people that are starting at zero. So how did you guys build your mailing list? And maybe talk a bit about the progression.
Speaker 1:Like, was it always slow and steady? Did you see a big jump with certain things? So let's talk about building a list. Let's start with Sasha.
Speaker 2:Sure. So I've been building my list for about ten months I think now. And there's about 4,000 subscribers. And concept of my list is that I write one email per week every Sunday. At least it was that until maybe one month ago where I just got burned out and decided to take a break.
Speaker 2:But yeah, I wanna go back into that groove, because it's like we're talking about writing a thousand words a day. It's kind of the same concept, like writing one email a week. It's something that even sometimes you're not sure what to talk about, but just the act of starting to write and brainstorming ideas helps you a lot and makes it easier for you to come up with ideas. So my mailing list has been very helpful with this. Actually, the way I started it was with emails from my first book sales.
Speaker 2:So I just emailed everybody who bought the book and asked them. I subscribe them automatically. I just sent them an email letting them know that I was starting the list and that they could join if they wanted to.
Speaker 1:How many subscribers you get from the initial sale of your book?
Speaker 2:I think I got about 1,000.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow. So pretty big jump. So that might be one advantage to having cheaper book to begin with is that you got a lot of subscribers that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Exactly. So usually, yeah, the the normal way would be to have the list and use the list to promote the book. But in my case, I did it the other way around. So I used the book as a way to kick start the list.
Speaker 2:And what's funny is that my second book was about Meteor, so it was very specific. So I ended up creating a separate email list for that. So my first list, has the most people, has never been used to sell or promote anything. Ended just up just being like a second blog or a more personal blog actually.
Speaker 1:Yeah. How about you Nathan? How did you build your list?
Speaker 3:So I blogged for about a year trying to get RSS subscribers and anyone to pay attention. And the end result of that was I had about 80 RSS subscribers after a year of blogging. Not what I would consider a success. Then I started working on the App Design Handbook, and I put up a landing page specifically for that. Started asking people to sign up through Twitter and talking to friends and all of that.
Speaker 3:Got about 50 people. Then I just started writing blog posts related to the book, know, in-depth tutorials. And then by the time I launched the book, like two months later, I had 800 email subscribers just through that content promotion. And that was the biggest, by far the biggest factor in the book being successful.
Speaker 1:Was it always slow and steady growth or did you were there times where you saw a spike of subscribers?
Speaker 3:If an article got featured in Hacker like on Hacker News or something, which I think happened once or twice, where it hit the homepage for a little while, then I'd see a jump of like 50 subscribers maybe in a day.
Speaker 2:Want to point out something. Sorry.
Speaker 4:That
Speaker 3:Yeah. Go ahead.
Speaker 2:I've had like at least three or four posts at the top of Hacker News. And I've had my blog for close to two years. And I have maybe 2,000 RSS subscribers over this whole period. And in less than one year, I have over 4,000 email subscribers. Yeah, I mean it's actually for some reason much easier to build an email list than a blog following.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I would definitely build, focus entirely on an email list and ignore everything else. I get flack for saying that now that I run an email marketing company. But I promise that I built an email marketing company because I learned how successful email was. Based And on my numbers, ran some calculations, email converts at about 15 times what a Twitter follower does. So, anyway, I guess to finish building the building my list story, after the first book, I just contacted those people and let them know you know, stayed in touch.
Speaker 3:Said, hey, I'm working on another book, and rolled that into everything I was doing with designing web apps, and tried to build a bunch more followers the exact same method. And then just keep kept going. Once I came out with ConvertKit, I got a lot more aggressive with giving out free PDFs and other things in trade for people signing up for my list. Things like I came out with one called the productivity manifesto, and that added about a thousand subscribers, because it got shared around quite a bit. So now my whole list is at 10,000 email addresses, And that just just makes launching every product from here on out so much easier.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 1:And Yeah.
Speaker 4:I started both of my both of my books. I focus entirely on mailing list first. Like, my first book I don't even have a blog, and I have a one page website for eat awesome just because all I care about is the mailing list, and the mailing list is really what drove the sales. I did what Nathan did. I put up a launch I was getting a lot of interest on Instagram with my food photos, So I put up a launch page.
Speaker 4:I I put a photo of it on Instagram. I got probably three or 400 subscribers in a few days from that. And then the list slowly built. So when I launched, think I had about 1,500 people on that list. But then I wrote a book about online business.
Speaker 4:So I didn't want to use the same mailing list, so I have two mailing lists now. One for the vegan cookbook, one for my main mailing list, the PJRBS mailing list. And I found that the mailing list is like I couldn't care less if Twitter goes away or even my blog goes away. My mailing list is really where I feel like it's easier to connect with people because you're connecting with people where they are. You're everybody's always checking their email all the time.
Speaker 4:So I found that the mailing list, like if I write something new, I share it with my mailing list before I put it on my blog just as kinda just to show them the the value that they have from being on the mailing list. And I mean, I see jumps, like, I don't really write in the realm of, like, hacker news type stuff. But if I write a guest article for, like, fake Fast Company or ninety nine U or something like that, then I'll get a couple 100 subscribers that day kind of thing. But otherwise, it's just like a a slow and steady build basically.
Speaker 1:Mhmm. Yeah. So like I said, I think my list is about a thousand now. And most of those came from Hacker News from being from this is a web page and that being on Hacker News for about eleven hours. I know some people don't like things like that, so Hacker News and Reddit and all that stuff.
Speaker 1:But it drives a lot of traffic. And even if you're not converting very well on your mailing list link, it's just that much traffic is going to convert into subscribers. And so for me, it's definitely helped build the list fairly quickly. That's basically been my whole strategy so far is writing things that every once in a while I get an idea that I think something is a little bit special and I'll try to promote that like hack and get as many signups as I can.
Speaker 4:You put it in the Will This Go Viral app and if it says yes, then you write it and you can format it. I totally know your secrets.
Speaker 1:It's true, man. It's true. Just look it up. And people are asking what we use for mailing list stuff. I work for email service providers so that's who I use.
Speaker 1:I do for WordPress people, there's a WordPress theme called Launch Effect. That's what I'm using on buildandlaunch.net. And that's been really good. It'll collect all the addresses within WordPress. And so that's one way to start collecting a list even if you don't have a service provider.
Speaker 1:You guys wanna quickly talk about who you're using?
Speaker 2:I use Mailchimp. One thing that's really cool about Mailchimp is that they have an API. So for example, with Discover Meteor, we are segmenting the mailing list according to which package people bought. So that lets us send targeted emails. So if we have a promotion or something coming up, we don't need to spam everybody.
Speaker 2:And especially, we don't send the promotion to people who have already booked the book, cause again, you don't want to piss people off. This way we can only send the discount to people who haven't bought it yet, or maybe upgrade discounts to people who have bought the lowest edition. So that's one really cool thing you can do with Mailchimp.
Speaker 4:Yeah. I use Mailchimp for the same reason. I can you can segment you can automatically add people to your list in a segment based on what they purchase. And then, yeah, hit the hit people that aren't on that segment with discount codes or talk to people that bought the book if there's a new a new edition or something. So you have that information from the subscribers, and it does it automatically.
Speaker 4:You we we don't even need to do anything. Just it automatically puts those names and and email addresses onto the list.
Speaker 3:Yep. I use Mailchimp as well still. I'm gradually phasing off of them just because I have ConvertKit and it works a lot better for, gathering subscribers in a lot of different ways. If you wanna know about how I use that then I wrote if you go to masonberry.com/emailmarketing I believe, as my detailed post on all of that. But yeah, Mailchimp is really good and and but ConvertKit's where I'm going moving forward of course.
Speaker 1:Thanks again to Paul Jarvis, Nathan Barry, Sasha Graefe for allowing a rookie like me to be a part of that conversation. I ended up releasing my first book, just this past weekend. It's called amplification. It's actually a downloadable course, and you can get it for $10 off if you go to productpeople.tv/download. Productpeople.tv/download, and that'll get you $10 off my first course.
Speaker 1:So far, the response has been really great. I think you'll like it. You can follow me on Twitter at m I Justin. You can follow the show on Twitter as well at productpeopletv. Thank you to our sponsors, fusioncharts.com.
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Speaker 1:Stay tuned for that.