Hey, I'm Thomas, the author of the article. I do agree with your observations pretty much entirely.
I'm mostly talking about the "throw a component, library or jQuery plugin at everything" sort of mentality. That just yields and unmaintainable buggy mess—unfortunately I've encountered this all too often in the wild. (While I was a consultant, I could make a good living from cleaning up these messes, so I won't complain too much!)
It all boils down to, however, a willingness to actually think about the things you're doing, and trying to do good solid work. IMO not enough people do that, or even aspire to do that, which makes me a bit sad about "my" profession.
Ohai, I've been hell-banned and don't know why. I guess as someone successfully running a software business _and_ being a well-known open source person I have to place in a forum for people who want to run successful internet businesses and are into tech.
I've made $60k in a year with a highly topical 60-page ebook (PDF only) that I wrote in about a week, mainly by promoting to a mailing list with only a few thousand people on it.
As Nathan says, you need to set a price. Plus, tell people why it's worth more for them to buy and read your book than to either not have the information in it, or spend the time researching themselves.
My book is on supporting Retina screens on web browsers[1]. Yes, you can spend a week reading all you can ok the web about it. Or you spend $49 and know all about it in half an hour and spend the other 39 1/2 hours of the week making money with client work.
I replace my main computer (MacBook Pro) every 1-2 years with a maxed out top of the line model. I keep the one I had before around as a backup in case my laptop breaks or gets stolen.
Yes, it doesn't make too much sense tax-wise. However, it would cost me much more in productivity to wait 2-3 years longer to replace it. This thing needs to run bunches of stuff for development, like various DB servers, multiple VMs (yay 4 different versions of Internet Explorer) and should be as light as possible so I can take it everywhere easily (usually servers go down when you're mid-vacation).
So it might save a few hundred dollars by taking advantage of tax laws, or I might earn thousands more because I can develop faster and things are just more enjoyable. I know what to pick.
I can see how my comment could be taken this way. It's not want I wanted to express. I wanted to state, as a disclaimer, that I'm the author of the post.
As for answering the comment, it's really more of an ad hominem so that's why I wrote the snarky "That's interesting".
I am interested in what he developed though, especially as he's so sure of his one true way.
I, for one, think it's delightful that more people are getting to understand the vagaries of product development from an investment standpoint. The more people experience the pain, hopefully the less broken things will become.
This is advice for non-fiction ebooks. :) The most important thing really is to learn how to do marketing right. It's not that hard at all and will yield great results.
I don't have a general download link, when you buy it I'll send out an email with a personal download link that will expire in a week or so, and can only be used 5 times.
Of course you can just write to my support email box and I'll send you a new link if you loose the file. I also send out free updates whenever I update the book.
No—I've had the experience that it doesn't work for the types of technical books we (my wife and I) write. Or we're just really better at email/twitter/blog marketing. :)
But it's definitely a good option for many types of books.
You can't get around this. People will pirate it and they do. However, those who pirate it wouldn't pay money anyway so there's no loss.
And because it's literally two clicks to buy it with PayPal, it's easier to buy it on my site than to try and find a pirated copy, so for those who want to buy it legally it's really easy.
Disclaimer: I'm the author of the book and blog post.
I've been asked on Twitter about student discounts, short answer is don't do it. Long answer: if you have a book specifically targeting students, price it so they can afford it, otherwise don't bother as it's more work for you and they probably won't buy it anyway.
I'm mostly talking about the "throw a component, library or jQuery plugin at everything" sort of mentality. That just yields and unmaintainable buggy mess—unfortunately I've encountered this all too often in the wild. (While I was a consultant, I could make a good living from cleaning up these messes, so I won't complain too much!)
It all boils down to, however, a willingness to actually think about the things you're doing, and trying to do good solid work. IMO not enough people do that, or even aspire to do that, which makes me a bit sad about "my" profession.