Wow. Thanks. That strategy was coincidental; I only knew I'd have to promote the book once I finished it, but I didn't know how I'd do that. As about a week ago, I got ranked in the top 50 bestsellers in 3 different categories, so Amazon is basically promoting the book for me right now. I'm trying to understand how the Amazon ranking algorithm works--I reduced the Kindle price from $9.99 to $2.99, and I am still unsure whether they weight downloads or absolute revenue higher. If I had to guess, they look at number of downloads first to rank your book, and I also assume reviews and ratings play an important role so I've been encouraging people to write reviews if they like it. I'll bump the price back up to $9.99 tomorrow and see how it affects the rank.
As for other methods of promoting, I'm always experimenting. I've noticed that giving away more content is a good thing, for example. You mentioned after reading Wufoo's interview that you decided to buy, but that was not intuitive to me; someone else who is an expert in the publishing space advised me to give away more interviews. I wanted to give away one interview per day for a week, and then realized I'd have to get the founders' permission. The first person I asked said he didn't want his interview to be cached by Google because it's too personal. So I thought maybe I'd just open the interviews up after companies get acquired, for example.
I'm interviewing John Resig tomorrow, and I'll make all of that publicly open. If you have some questions you want me to ask, please let me know, my list of questions so far: http://bit.ly/mHhA37. Stuff like that helps promote the book to varying degrees. Still in an experimental phase with everything.
Someone is interviewing me for an article on Friday to talk about how I've made sales post-AppSumo. So I'll cover everything I've done to promote the book in that interview (will post a link on the blog when it's ready). I have a blog halfway written on the topic, so hopefully will finish that soon (this book is paying my rent while I'm trying to focus on doing my other startup, so I'm not giving the book 100% of my focus right now).
Looks good, there are a bunch of questions he answered in his reddit interview that you have up there that probably don't need to be there (e.g. Resig knows Alexis and briefly did a YCombinator startup in Cambridge).
I didn't realize until I read that IAMA yesterday that he was in YC. He didn't provide much detail on it, maybe I can get him to talk more about that--maybe other projects he would have liked to build instead.
People seem to be most interested in why he went to Khan Academy and how Javascript should be treated moving forward. He didn't talk much about Khan Academy, so will try to ask more questions about that since he has probably been there for a while now.
Was telling Hacker News that your Kindle edition is currently $2.99 part of your marketing strategy? Either way, thanks for the heads up. Purchased! :)
(I was thinking of buying it anyway, but this was too cheap to pass up.)
That wasn't intentional, but if a few sales came from it I can't complain about that. I made the page more explicit to point this out though, near the end. Thanks for checking it out.
As for other methods of promoting, I'm always experimenting. I've noticed that giving away more content is a good thing, for example. You mentioned after reading Wufoo's interview that you decided to buy, but that was not intuitive to me; someone else who is an expert in the publishing space advised me to give away more interviews. I wanted to give away one interview per day for a week, and then realized I'd have to get the founders' permission. The first person I asked said he didn't want his interview to be cached by Google because it's too personal. So I thought maybe I'd just open the interviews up after companies get acquired, for example.
I'm interviewing John Resig tomorrow, and I'll make all of that publicly open. If you have some questions you want me to ask, please let me know, my list of questions so far: http://bit.ly/mHhA37. Stuff like that helps promote the book to varying degrees. Still in an experimental phase with everything.
Someone is interviewing me for an article on Friday to talk about how I've made sales post-AppSumo. So I'll cover everything I've done to promote the book in that interview (will post a link on the blog when it's ready). I have a blog halfway written on the topic, so hopefully will finish that soon (this book is paying my rent while I'm trying to focus on doing my other startup, so I'm not giving the book 100% of my focus right now).