Very interesting. I can't speak to the podcast but I highly recommend the transcript.
My takeaways:
(1) If you are an expert in something and are disciplined enough to set up a consistent routine for writing you can probably write an ebook.
(2) At least for designers you probably don't need to sell in any format but pdf.
(3) If you want to maximise your reach or the growth in your personal brand it may be best to sell something at impulse buy levels.
(4) To maximise the cash you earn directly, in sales, you should offer different packages at different price points.
(5) Both of these authors spent significant time and money (works out very similarly) on layout, look and feel, different formats.
Personal commentary
Ebooks do not need to be that long, at least technical ones. Sometimes books can be dense or have content that is valuable not because it's hard to understand but because rediscovering it yourself takes valuable time. I don't think either author put in more than 200 hours work; I don't believe either put in more than 150.
You should offer at least three packages if you're price segmenting. This has two purposes, the middle package looks totally reasonable compared to the premium one but if you only have more or less impulse buy and middle people will go impulse. The bigger reason is that most of your money will come from people buying the complete package for whom real actionable advice saves them their time and money, or people with corporate credit cards for whom the difference between $50 and $150 is non-existent.
I doubt if having more than five packages helps because that's about the limit of gradations people can hold in their heads intuitively rather than as abstractions. The reasoning for three packages is given above, anchoring. Probably a good idea to a/b test it.
Regarding the eBook size, that's the approach I'm taking with a serie I'm working on at the moment.
I set myself a limit of 50 pages per volume, the eBook is highly focused on one subject and does it well (hopefully). I found two main advantages with this approach :
- The first one is that I have a short attention span and it allows me to write a page here and there, as the focus is on one subject it's much easier to just drop a draft, come back later, format it and add it to the overall. I do that very often, mainly in my morning commute in the tube.
- The second one is that it doesn't require me to invest 6 months (or even more) of my time on a huge overtake (I started like that, but after 6months of work and being barely half way, I changed the approach and split the work in smaller pieces), the first ebook took me a bit more than a month to write and format, as I had quite a few things to figure out, now I'm two weeks in the second ebook, and I'm almost done.
I'd say I'm around 200 hours in. Probably more. Especially because I wrote really slowly at first. Now I can write my 1,000 words a day in an hour (sometimes less), but when I started it could take 3-4 hours.
I wouldn't use more than 3 packages. 5 would just be overwhelming.
My takeaways:
(1) If you are an expert in something and are disciplined enough to set up a consistent routine for writing you can probably write an ebook. (2) At least for designers you probably don't need to sell in any format but pdf. (3) If you want to maximise your reach or the growth in your personal brand it may be best to sell something at impulse buy levels. (4) To maximise the cash you earn directly, in sales, you should offer different packages at different price points. (5) Both of these authors spent significant time and money (works out very similarly) on layout, look and feel, different formats.
Personal commentary
Ebooks do not need to be that long, at least technical ones. Sometimes books can be dense or have content that is valuable not because it's hard to understand but because rediscovering it yourself takes valuable time. I don't think either author put in more than 200 hours work; I don't believe either put in more than 150.
You should offer at least three packages if you're price segmenting. This has two purposes, the middle package looks totally reasonable compared to the premium one but if you only have more or less impulse buy and middle people will go impulse. The bigger reason is that most of your money will come from people buying the complete package for whom real actionable advice saves them their time and money, or people with corporate credit cards for whom the difference between $50 and $150 is non-existent.
I doubt if having more than five packages helps because that's about the limit of gradations people can hold in their heads intuitively rather than as abstractions. The reasoning for three packages is given above, anchoring. Probably a good idea to a/b test it.