Yes, how to make successful product launch? One of our sellers here at Sellfy, Paul Jarvis, recently published his cooking ebook called “EatAwesome” and had a really great start. He sold 100 copies of his book just in two days since launch and it’s still going strong!
We went ahead and did a little interview with Paul where he shares some useful tips for anyone who is considering selling their own products trough Sellfy, here you go!
Tell us a little about your background, as I understand you are a web guy?
I am! I’ve been designing and developing websites through my company Twothirty for the last 13+ years. I’m also a touring musician, in the band Mojave. I’ve always been the type of person with interests that vary and swing quite wide – so I’m sure if you asked me the same question even next year, I’d have a totally new and different answer.
How did you get involved with food and publishing your own cooking ebook “EatAwesome”?
Food and cooking has always been a passionate hobby for me. The geeky/science-y part of my brain always needs to learn how everything works, so in terms of cooking, that means figuring out each ingredient and getting down the source (i.e. whole foods as ingredients). I love figuring out new “food hacks” by creating vegan versions of traditional non-vegan dishes.
As far as publishing goes – I’ve also always been a “do it yourself”er. I started my own web company, I have a record label with my wife for our band, and for the book I wrote, I knew i wanted to do it myself. Tools exist right now that allow independent creative people to publish and promote their creative endeavours fairly easily. It’s just a matter of figuring out how that works and then using it your advantage.
Tell us a little bit about the process of creating the book itself. How long did it take to make it?
The actual writing of the book was oddly enough the easiest part. My book is divided into two main sections: information and recipes. The information part and ideas for each recipe only took a week or so to write, since it just flowed out and it’s all things I’ve talked about dozens of times to people. The harder (or actually more time consuming) part is everything that goes along with a book – like editing, recipe testing, photography, marketing + promotions, even formatting and creating all the different e-reader file formats.
So all in, it took three months. Which to me seemed like ages, but I think that’s probably pretty quick to turn around a cookbook.
You had a pretty successful launch. Any tips for other independent publishers?
Thanks! My biggest tip would be to figure out the line between annoying people and promoting to them on social media (which I’m not even saying I do perfectly, haha). You definitely need to let folks know you have something they can buy, but you don’t want to constantly ask them to buy it. There needs to a nice balance between talking at your social media followers and interacting with them.
Another big thing would be to start building a buzz BEFORE you launch your product. Set a launch date. Offer freebie advance copies to publications and fellow publishers of creative content. Have a contest! Collect emails on a mailing list with incentive to sign up. There are so many ways to get people interested and then excited about your launch, so when launch day comes, they are already eager to give you money!
So what’s for you next? Do you have ideas for your second book/project?
I’m actually not sure! I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want to write a sequel – I just need to come with a better name than “Eat Awesomer”. I am actually going to wait and see how things go with this launch first, as well as really talk to the people that bought it and see what they would want in a sequel, if they even are interested in one. I’m a big proponent of talking to customers, since if you don’t, you can only guess what they might want.
My immediate next thing is actually to go on a three month road trip with my wife.
Remember to check out his book “EatAwesome” here!
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Now you have ability to add product thumbnail to the purchase page as well as product description. We see that many merchants decide to simply tweet the product or share it in Facebook. The problem was that buyers didn’t have the chance to learn more about product itself, it was confusing. With these improvements product page will serve much better and potential buyers will be able to learn more about the product that is being sold. You can add additional information to your existing products by going to product edit page.
We now support four currencies: US dollars, Euros, British pounds and Japanese yen. Merchants selling products mostly in these regions/countries will be able to choose one of these currencies for each product individually. We will continue to add more currencies depending on the demand from our merchants. Important: you need to have PayPal balance in chosen currency to accept payments (you can have multiple balances in your PayPal account).
Now you can enable/disable social network discounts for Facebook/Twitter individually. We have also improved Facebook sharing message and it now goes with little thumbnail as well (if you have added it, of course). We have made discounts a bit easier for you to setup and for buyers to use. We think it will give positive impulse of people using it and promote your product among their friends.