Do some people join blogs just to play “devil’s advocate”
Don’t get me wrong. In my many years as a teacher, I have done this to get my students to think. In developing their minds or in approaching especially a controversial issue, I wanted them to look at all sides. When I made a comment or more frequently when I asked a question, it was designed to make them stop and consider all sides.

This thread seems “just to stir the pot” for the quest of showing off the “intellectual” abilities of the antagonist.

I was using a simple analogy to respond to your earliest posts.

My point was simply that Paula’s time, and the content she authored, has REAL value to real people.

It is not a hardcover bound tome, true. But it has real value.
In fact if I can download it now, tonite, it has much more value to me than driving 26 miles to Borders to buy a hardcover on writing my first book. In fact, with gas, wear and tear and time, her ebook is almost free. 😉

My analogy with Seth was simply addressing your point that ebooks cost little or nothing to produce. Yet I believe the value is in the content.

Hey, you know what? If he got caught in a traffic jam, and the crowd was getting restless, perhaps my presentation value to tide them over for awhile would skyrocket.
Talk about scarcity!

Good Health to All!
Ed S

Mark, apparently the WF thread you started was removed as it was becoming a bit of a love fest and may have been construed as me paying people to jump to my defence for publicity for my eBook, or even John paying people for a bit of exposure. Now that’s synical –but I suppose people have been known to do such things — sad!

Great thread, I’ve enjoyed reading it.

Paula Brett
http://www.PaulaBrett.com

You’re VERY correct about the web space thing. I can now see your point MORE clearly. Certainly, if hosting cost (say) only $200 a year and you were already making that much with just ONE ebook, all other ebooks you host on the same account would have only UPFRONT costs.

Product pricing is always in the hands of the person who creates it. Irrespective of whether people buy at that price has nothing to do with what price he sets. You can set a price for your product (whether physical or digital) at $197. This is your NORMAL price. If people know that it is your normal price but don’t buy it at that and you REDUCE your price to $97 “for a very limited time”, it isn’t scamming. Just something to help the buyer make a quicker decision.

And thanks, I’m glad you liked the point about instant gratification.

Some will
Some won’t
So what
Next

😉

This is not a personal attack on anyone but as someone who has followed John and purchased a few products from him it does appear he is trying to help. I believe even in this blog his main goal was to show people to, DO something… DO anything… JUST build your business.

Oct 25th ***I am doing nothing special, there is no real secret to what I do, it’s all about action. If I can give you any advice that means you can stop buying these $1000 courses and $97 eBooks it would be this. Do something each day that builds your business.***

Oct 31rst ****Are you starting to understand the concept of ‘Do a Little Every Day to Build Your Business’? You have watched me build my business in real time this month and there is absolutely no reason why you can’t do the same. Remember, if you do nothing you will achieve nothing.****

So when the comment is made “ blogging – it paints a more accurate picture of a person” just my opinion but the whole point was to show people that are scared to take the first step, that it’s really not that hard

You just need to take action, and do something each day that builds your business and if you don’t get to everything on your list, it’s ok but keep going.

Now maybe that is not the point to this conversation but that is what I got from the blog maybe I’m ignorant?

Jonathan
http://www.jonathanmcguire.com

I can see a tear in John’s eye about now…

The posts here have been quite interesting to read.

The bottom line as I see it:

Paula – produces excellent products – NOT A SCAMMER!

John – produces excellent products – NOT A SCAMMER!

Anyone here I forgot – NOT A SCAMMER!

I missed Paula’s intro price on Operation Ebook. My browser just kept stalling every time I hit the buy button. The price increased just as Paula said it would. Am I mad about the increase in price, or do I feel like I’m being cheated cause I have to pay more? NO!
Moral to that – don’t wait till the last minute!

Are some marketers scammers? – Yes
Do some marketers use crappy tactics to sell over priced, rehashed, crappy products? – Yes

They are out there waiting for you to hit their BUY NOW! button.

It’s your choice to buy or not to buy.

Isofarro, good luck in your future endeavours. Just don’t include IM
as one of them.

I joined your mailing list after buying a product from you on ebay about June 2006. Don’t remember what it was, part of my fiver a week on something outside of my normal area of interest. I initially joined your mailing list with a different disposable email address mainly because I was interested in your customer-first approach, and because you were then starting to write about writing your own ebook. I didn’t classify you as an internet marketer before – well right up till this blog.

My interest lies in the authoring of ebooks – inspired by your own encouragement of others to “create their own products”. I have no interest in internet marketing, and I probably never will.

One ebook I have bought is Cameron Moll’s “Mobile Web Design” – to be particularly blunt, it surpasses every ebook I’ve seen in the Internet Marketing niche – in terms of quality, of presentation, of content. But then it focuses on a topic that’s closer to my profession. Price: $19 – from a mobile expert, a regular on the web standards speaker circuit, a freelancer – so someone acutely aware of his value, and perhaps the value of the work he provides.

37 signals self-published a book last year called Getting Real. They are a well known and established web application development team focused on building exceptionally usable apps. If you’ve ever heard the term ‘Ruby-on-Rails’, these guys are the pioneers of this framework – their application of quality cannot be denied regardless of the size of their egos. ebook price: $19. (No I haven’t bought this, or read the online version)

O’Reilly publish a series of ebooks called ‘Short Cuts’, which focus on a variety of niche web development areas. Each authored by an established developer (most of whom blog, for instance Shelley Powers). price $9.99 (I’ve bought several of these, and the quality of content matches O’Reilly’s paperback range, but focuses on small subjects and ideas)

It is this sort of ebooks I’m interested in producing – focused on improving the quality of web development (its in a very shoddy state currently, and has been for well over a decade). The web development area is big, getting bigger. There’s no substantial profit in writing web development books – that’s not the main reason for writing them. The reason, for me, is to solidify development techniques into a manual that can be used by people wanting to improve the quality of their web development. As an accessibility specialist, I have insights to offer which can complement existing paper books.

I’ve turned down three approaches to writing a real book with established publishers, partly because the weight of responsibility of such an undertaking I do not want to bear. Ebooks offers that same outlet without that responsibility. Self-publishing is an effective way, I do it at my own pace within my own timeframe. Ghostwriters, copywrighting, endlessly long sales pitches – I have no need of. Pricing/Licensing – Mark Pilgrim’s approach is one that fits nicely – its the GNU Free Documentation License.

So what your material offers is a little light towards that path. But the choice of tools could do with an overhaul (the ebook reader is just bad – 500K exe wrapper around an HTML file). There are much better tools around today: Open Office, for instance, offers a save as PDF. I’m playing with Pocket CHM as a way of producing CHMs – its quaint.

John Thornhill to me was just a guy who sells ebooks on ebay. Over the course of a year I’ve seen that change from someone who was strongly supported in customer satisfaction through to someone who seems more interested in leading affiliate rankings. Maybe its a conscious change he’s made, or maybe my initial impression was just naive. Unfortunately, my impression of John was going downhill before he started this blog (I recall recognising text from an autoresponder as being lifted almost completely out of his 90 day powerseller book) – his postings have only served to accelerate that concern.

Its one of the things about blogging – it paints a more accurate picture of a person, and in John’s case, for me, his blog has done him no favours. But that’s just my opinion.

And that means its time for me to unsubscribe from your mailing list.

Paula asks: “But answer me this, if Asda negotiated a deal with the publishers for, say, 10,000 Harry Potter books and sold, say, 1,000 at 20 quid, making 20,000, wouldn’t it make more profit lowering the price, to, say 10 quid (which is what they actually did) and have more people grabbing them cos they were more affordable, so they sold 8,000 copies making 80,000 at a tenner?”

Depends on the cost to Asda for acquiring the 10,000 copies. It normally can be profitable, since Asda are seeking to move their stock before the cost of storage starts to significantly affect their profitability.

Paula, your point is well made – and I offer an unreserved apology to you for the incorrect accusation that what you were doing was a scam. Thank you for your time, your patience and contributions. I think you’ve added a great deal of value to this blog – and that’s one of the great pluses of blogging, the value is defined not by the original author, but by the conversations it creates, and the relationships it forms.

My argument – initially badly outlined – isn’t about a change in price. Its about the implied reasons behind the change of price (the implication that an ebook is a scarce resource, and that there are finite copies of it). You’ve been the only one in this conversation that’s picked up on that, with your earlier comment ‘Nor did I say anything like `only 50 copies left’ as many marketers do. ‘ – there you’ve hit on the purest example of what I strongly object to.

I note with curiosity that, apart from yourself, no other internet marketer has expressed a position on this. That in itself says nothing about Internet Marketers themselves, except that only one had the integrity to stand up firmly and clearly against this practice. I note that the argument about raising a price of a product has been vehemently defended multiple times by different people in at least two separate threads, so the disparity in volume is unusual.

Ed, your response is very interesting. What Seth Godin represents is a well known speaker on a speaker circuit. None of the people in this conversation are as well known on the speaker circuit as Godin, so I contest the value of ebooks being based on the fame of the author. Maybe Internet Marketing is so niche that its an isolated community?

Sagar, what you list are up-front costs that are independent of the number of ebooks sold. I’m interested that hosting costs have been brought up a few times – particularly because decent hosting is fairly cheap these days. You guys are buying cpanel accounts that allow multiple domains right?

(Seriously, if you are buying separate hosting accounts for every ebook minisite, you throwing money to the wind. A simple cpanel account should allow you to host your main site, plus enough domains to cover all your ebook projects to the extend that the outlay for a mini-site is very close to zero. Well, it costs me zero to host a new website right now, and has been that way for at least 5 years or so. Its not like your buying brand new hosting for an ebook – what’s an internet marketer without a presence on the web?)

Sagar, you make a great point on the instant gratification.