Shareware Business Blunders

NetCaptor's Adam Stiles just announced his new eBook, Shareware Business Blunders...and How to Avoid Them. Adam contacted 38 shareware authors - including myself - and asked them to talk about their mistakes, then compiled their answers into a 124-page PDF eBook.

If you're a shareware author or you're interested in becoming one, this book is certainly worth the $47 Adam is asking for it.

Comments

[Bryan Nystrom]

Thanks for bringing this to our attention. Quite the "whos who" of the shareware scene (including yourself!) I own serveral of the 38 authors apps myself. Should be very insightful to those of us that make a living in the shareware field.

[philip]

Does this apply to Flash component developers?

[Burak KALAYCI]

Content seems OK and with Nick Bradbury recommending it, it can't be bad.

On the other hand I didn't like the page or how he's trying to sell it a bit. It's like pages that sell useless reports: it's all one page, there's a huge discount, on top of that you get free bonuses that cost 3 times the book, you have the 90 days money back - no questions asked thing... Probably you know what I mean, sounds too good to be true. I had come across a few of 'pages' like that and normally wouldn't even bother with them...

Anyway, it's also not cheap comparing it to some books on Amazon.com - and you won't get a hardcopy. No sample chapter. 124 pages don't mean much to me; probably the same info can be fit into 80 to 250 pages without much hassle. I wonder if the experts contributed are getting any money from the sales?

I'll have to think a lot more before a purchase, just because of his marketing style...

Best regards,
Burak

[Aaron Epstein]

That's funny Burak, because I was thinking the same thing. I was very interested in purchasing until I hit the site/page and was turned off by the infomercial style marketing. If he had just said the 3-4 sentences Nick wrote up in his blog and given a sample page of content, I think I might have purchased.

Still, I'd love to know what people like Nick had to say. Has anyone read it yet?

[Adam]

Thanks for the feedback Aaron and Burak.

I'm going to be revamping my marketing for the ebook... I chose the informercial style because that is how I've seen a lot of ebooks sold, but I've gotten feedback similar to yours from several people I trust. So, back to the drawing board :-)

Adam

Adam Stiles
Stilesoft Inc.

[Richard]

Glad your changing the site, when i read it it looked to much like those "hello i'm stephen ducharme and i'm gonna make ya rich" sites, kinda put me off to be honest.

[Adam]

OK - the redesign is done. I'll definitely continue to tweak it, but the old "huckster" version is gone.

[David Ancell]

I just looked at the new page, and it looks much better. I see that you used Nick Bradbury's story as an example. Although I'm not likely to become a shareware author, I might be interested in the book just to hear his story and possibly others from authors that I knew. I remember both the solo Nick Bradbury days and the Allaire days back when I was in pharmacy school and learning to develop web pages. HomeSite is still a great program, but it isn't getting the development from Macromedia that it deserves.