I spent the first half of 2017 on a massive project: Launching The Complete Software Developer’s Career Guide, written by my business partner, John. Overall the launch went great—we hit #2 on all of Amazon for non-fiction (actually it was #1, since we only lost out to a John Grisham novel that was *ahem* completely […]
Continue readingRecently I shared the results of an interesting study. A group of researchers looked at hundreds of A/B tests for ecommerce stores, and basically validated what experienced copywriters have said for generations: Don’t waste your time fiddling with cosmetics. Test big things like your guarantee or adding customer testimonials. In response, reader Karl points out […]
Continue readingChad has a bone to pick with me. Recently I responded to another subscriber who was looking for a quick way to share blog posts and score some easy traffic, and my response bummed Chad out: Strange email this time, Josh. I’d put this one in the “negative promise” category. MeetEdgar — doesn’t sound like […]
Continue readingThe “help us choose the next Simple Programmer book cover” poll I ran a couple of weeks ago surprised the heck out of me. When the smoke cleared, one of my *least* favorite covers was the one our audience rated the highest. The second place finisher wasn’t one I personally liked all that much either. […]
Continue readingEver read “Moby Dick”? One of the characters in the novel, a peg-legged seaman by the name of Captain Ahab, is obsessed with hunting and killing Moby Dick, the huge white whale that bit off his leg in a previous battle. Ol’ Cap keeps chasing Moby Dick, convinced that if he can just harpoon that […]
Continue readingA consulting client of mine named Geneve offers a high-end marketing service for photographers, and she’s looking to haul in some new clients. She asks: Do you publish any of your work/articles/insight anywhere else? Just curious. I’m thinking of doing a series of articles on the photography business on Medium?? I want to start getting […]
Continue readingFew weeks back I sent out a survey asking whether you had any questions about launching and marketing a book. I happened to be traveling the day the email went out. Heh. Pro-tip: Don’t ask your list for replies when you’ll be away from your computer. Took me *days* to dig out from that. But […]
Continue readingThis week a programmer named Eddy hit me up about testing out a piece of software he’s prototyping. I won’t go into too much detail in case he moves forward with it, but basically it’s a tool for “scraping” email addresses to put together lists of potential prospects that you can reach out to. We […]
Continue readingNot long after I published my first ebook about Sublime Text I found myself getting impatient with the slow growth in my sales. At the time I was earning maybe $1,200 a month or so from the book—not bad for a side project, but I wanted to build a little publishing empire and quit my […]
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