I'm going to offer some friendly criticism on marketing. (I can't really comment on the content of the book, given that I haven't read it.)
- Invest $50 and buy a nice Wordpress theme off of ThemeForest, because junior software engineers are picky folk. If it nets you two more sales, then it's already paid itself off.
- The table of contents tells me what I'm going to learn from this book, not why I want to learn them. Often, the answer to "why" is either "to make a lot more money" or "to build a lot of cool things I wouldn't otherwise." The three points you outline underneath the ToC hit those aspects much more strongly, so I'd move those above the fold.
- Throwing up an email list where you send me some snippets and then try to upsell me is advised. I haven't heard of you before, so I'd prefer some credentials before I commit to a purchase (remember, I'm a junior software engineer, so both time and money are scarce resources.) Testimonials would also be helpful here.
- There's nothing wrong with a second call to action at the bottom of the page.
I believe the author's current design is clean, functional, and honest. It won't win any awards, sure. There are some immediate issues with design elements needing a bit more space in which to live. But IMO the most improvement the author can make right now is to improve the book cover. That is practically lost territory compared to the rest of the site's large text and easily-followed bullet points. I recognized the image to the left as a book cover only on my third website view.
Completely agree. They (and themes from other sites, and rather too many open source themes) have been designed with no thought of customising beyond the options on the "Options" page, have badly structured templates and CSS, and rely on graphics in such a way that changing the look of one part has a knock-on effect on others, and needs extensive CSS rewrites.
Rant over. TLDR: themes are great if you use them as-is.
> Invest $50 and buy a nice Wordpress theme off of ThemeForest, because junior software engineers are picky folk. If it nets you two more sales, then it's already paid itself off.
Second this! Being a software engineer is so much more than writing efficient algorithms. It's also about beautiful design in many ways. Average website design gives a feeling it could correlate to average design in other fields.
I couldn't disagree more. I personally see no correlation between the design of his site and his software engineering ability. It's like saying you don't trust that engineer to design a bridge because the ring he's wearing is all jagged along the edges. What?
Also, don't link in the same tab to your blog posts, you are taking people away from the chance to purchase, and they will typically not be back (there is probably a little higher chance because the market is developers that they will remember to come back and purchase). You should at a minimum, open the links in a new tab.
I definitely second the email list, sit down and write up 52(? more/less?) short "tips" and put people that sign up on an autoresponder that emails out every week, that includes a way to come back and purchase in each email. Obviously leave a way to unsubscribe, and keep track of who purchases and put people who have purchased on a slightly different list (can still send the tips, just don't push the sale anymore).
On a more positive note I liked the excerpts (especially the part on interviewing) and will likely buy the book!
I am also not sure who it is written for - pretty much every developer above summer intern thinks of himself as a senior :) Over-inflated self-assessment is a norm.
FWIW, I worked with Dave at LivingSocial and took over a bunch of code that he wrote. Whatever a senior developer is, DaveC is that. He wrote great code, was excellent in terms of executing on tasks, made major contributions to tons of projects, was helpful, cheerful, all that good stuff.
I would suggest though that the author should have solicited a few reviews before posting about it here.
The design is FINE! It communicates what the book is about in a way that takes very little effort on the visitor's part. I think Dave did a perfectly okay job with it.
I've actually been saving up thoughts and writing scraps to write a book like this myself, but I'm probably not qualified and I'm glad somebody else did a better job first. Nice work.
I'm a software engineer myself, and I already believe that great advice can come from unexpected sources, so I visited your website willing to be convinced that you really do know what you are talking about.
These are a few things that I had immediate and decisive opinions on:
- Your title here: "My self-published book on being a great developer" - Sets me up to expect advice from someone like myself (otherwise why would you self-publish?) -- which is a good thing. It's a sign that you relate to me. And "on being a great developer". Concise, I really like that. Off to a great start!
- "theseniorsoftwareengineer.com" - Good domain name. I like you already. Connotes relation to career and adding the "the" makes me think about the true meaning of "senior".
Then I get to your website. Sorry to say, but that's where it goes south.
- It reminds me of those scammy "make millions on the internet" advertisement websites. They may actually make a lot of money with their over-the-top styling, so I'm not saying I'm right, but it's a turnoff to me.
- Excerpts - Good! But they don't stand out. Call them out! Maybe even link some great quotes to the excerpt page instead of the word "excerpt".
- The checklist - it's gotta go. I didn't read it, even though the text was huge.
- Try to neutralize the statement "Not interested in management?". I don't think you need to preemptively limit your audience.
- The cover -- Your style is up to you, but because the text is fairly small, in thumbnail size it doesn't balance well against the huge text on the rest of the page. And I like large text -- but it just needs to balance well.
- Avoid generic statements like "A guide for making the most of your career" or "simple techniques for fixing bugs" -- everyone offers these. What is unique about your take? What did folks like about your blog posts that motivated you to write this book?
- Some of the good content, stuff you should highlight better: Stuff about you, "instant download", "197 page eBook", links to your blog posts.
Sorry if this is harsh -- I think you are off to a great start and I hope this helps even a little bit.
In the 'Technical Debt and Slop' excerpt, there is an example about determining whether an order is free. Basically it compares the customer's store credit plus discounts against the price of the object. It does not account for quantity, or other items in the user's cart. Essentially, the same store credit amount gets applied to every item. This is a bug in the logic, and it took about 30 seconds of me scanning the article to notice it.
Now I realize that's not the point of the excerpt. It's about code duplication. But it's still sloppy writing. That's fine for your blog, but if you expect me to pay, I expect content that is of high quality. Code examples should be complete, and free of bugs.
I understand that the author does not have an "Order" because that is supposed to be somewhat definitive (a domain object stored in the database). If that is the case, a much better approach would be to have a "PreOrder" object, that is basically the same but lives in the session scope.
This PreOrder object (or ShoppingCart, or whatever) should basically "extend" (share everything with) the Order object, inheriting all its capabilities _except that of being persistent_. This includes the logic for computing prices based on discount codes/rates/delivery chargers/whatever that you normally apply to a regular Order.
Now, if you want to check if a product would be free, you just add a helper method "free?(product)" to the PreOrder. That method would just get the "price()" of the order, add the product to the PreOrder (itself), check if the new "price()" is higher than before, remove the product, return the result of the price increase check.
At this point you have accounted for any possible interaction between product quantities, discount codes and rates, user credit, delivery costs and whatever. No code duplication involved _at all_.
Moreover, I would say that it is actually _less_ complex (as in difficult to understand) to build such "PreOrder"s than to add random methods to your domain objects...
Also, is this your final product? Knowing that it's going to increase in refinement over time would add to the value proposition for me.
Anyway, congrats on writing a book! It's a great accomplishment.
Based on initial impressions I'll agree the book isn't giving off the vibe that it's worth much more than 1-2 coffees of value ($5-$10), but after looking into it a bit more there's no reason why it can't improve that (it is after all a decent length book by a previously published author who has relevant experience, so $25 sounds quite reasonable).
1. Better site design would make me more confident the book is well designed.
2. Include chapters in the same format/design as the book (rather than just HTML pages).
3. Tell me front and center that the book is 197 pages (that's quite a lot!). First impression I thought this was a couple of blog posts worth of generic advice, not a decent length book.
4. Make the links to the successful blog posts that spawned the book more prominent (bonus: site adds credibility).
5. Make it easier on scanning that he's already an accomplished well-reviewed author (Build Awesome Command-Line Applications in Ruby). Include reviews from here initially in the context of showing author credibility (need to make it clear they're not for the current book though obviously).
6. Highlight the experience in an easier to skim way
7. Make the book cover look different, e.g. 3D rotate with imaginary book pages, or border, or on a darker background or something (the white edges for me at least didn't look like part of the book, so I see the slim narrow purple band and think "booklet" not book).
For reference, Nathan Barry does some of the best sales pages I've seen (Patrick McKenzie aka patio11 happens to agree).
Nathan's advice:
http://nathanbarry.com/learned-selling-6000-ebook-today/
http://nathanbarry.com/step-by-step-landing-page-copywriting...
Samples:
http://www.amazon.com/Coding-On-Software-Design-Process/dp/0...
I hope that as a senior software engineer, you make your points using other languages than Ruby in your book.
Out of the first 9 paragraphs in 'Focus on Delivering Results' you use "I" in 6 of them - you start 3 of them with "I". The excerpt reads more like a biography.
I don't know whether you worked with a copy editor - if you didn't, you should have.
You also should have had some independent reviews prior to publishing - maybe someone would have been kind enough to tell you about all of those "I"s - they make the text "feel" rough and unfinished.
You could go crazy with the "I"s in your "about the author" section, yet let the book's content speak for itself.
Given this, the excerpt diminishes the book's value for me, so it's unlikely I would pay $25 for it. If I wanted a biography, I would get a biography.
Somewhat related, there's a 914kb 1007x1024 black-and-white PNG for a 197x200 image of the author. That should probably be fixed, if for nothing else than it's killing your bandwidth. I only noticed because I thought I was back in dial-up days with how slowly it came through.
All of that aside, I'm intrigued. I'm going to bookmark this and come back in a couple weeks, I'll have to see how it looks after you've taken the other comments here on HN into account.
Reading the excerpts, what the author is doing is quite clever. He creates an identity, the reliable, effective Senior Engineer.
The reader wants to be more like that identity, so he takes you through different situations and says, 'This is how a Senior Engineer would act and think in this situation'. For example, [A senior engineer would not ship his code until it was really production quality, even when rushed].
The situations and issues he talks about are often a result of social pressure (to ship, to deliver features that don't matter in order to show progress on the burn chart). It's easy to get caught up in those moments. If the book allows you to step outside that, and think 'What would a true Senior Engineer do here', and the answer is 'The long term right thing', I think it's valuable.
But not $25 of valuable. Sorry, that is too much for a speculative purchase (which this is, given the author isn't a known quantity like Jonathan Locke at bottom of the thread.
Since I've now made real revenue just on the first days' sales, I feel more confident spending actual money on the site design.
I opted NOT to use a template because none of them seemed adaptable to what I wanted to do.
Anyone willing to help me out, or can recommend someone who would?
Good luck with the sales and again, congratulations on becoming an author!
Don't worry about all the criticism on this page, particularly from anyone who has never written a book before.
Take the negative criticism on your book and reverse it. Every time we got dinged on a problem with the text in our book we worked on that chapter until we felt like no one could ever complain.
In relation to the comments about the price--I think it is reasonable. It really depends on how much you think you can get out of this book, or a book like this.
I'm also not certain about the price. I would pay that price from a big name. For anybody else, I wouldn't go above $10.
ePub (iPad and most other e-reaeers)
