That’s great news! I’ll get in contact with you directly later this weekend and take this discussion offline. And you’re right, it’s going to be hard for me to resist getting to many software company based people. I’m trying my best though, I already have two aligned that aren’t software based.

As for your series, I can already tell you I had some similar and some not so similar experiences. I suspect this is due to the nature of our different products, demographics, etc. Nonetheless the overall experiences were more similar than not. I’ll send you more details after I read the sixth part. I can wait to read the next two!

I would be delighted to provide something for your book – I am a sucker for seeing my name in print and a bit more promotion of PerfectTablePlan never hurts. I think you’ll have resist featuring too many of us software types if you want the book to appeal more widely though.

I expect the ‘promoting your software’ series to reach to about 6 parts. I would be interested to hear at the end if there is anything I missed or areas where your experience differs widely from mine (either as a blog comment or privately).

Absolutely! And please don’t hesitate to send me any comments on what you’d like to see in the book. I really appreciate all feedback.

Additionally as part of the book I’d like to share other people’s (entrepreneur’s) stories, those sections you see that are a page or so and highlighted in boxes to emphasize a point. I’m in the process of starting to contact people personally to see if they’re interested in sharing their stories and you’re actually on my list of people to contact. You can expect to also see a posting here on this blog within the next week or so asking the same thing. I suspect that these stories will add some weight to my points when they’re comping from other people than just my company. I just haven’t had the time yet with LandlordMax version 3.11c being released this weekend.

That being said, I’ve been reading your Promoting your software series and it’s very interesting! If you’re up to it, again I’d love to share a story or two from this series in regards to your company Perfect Table Plan. I hadn’t realized you had tried so many of the same venues we had at LandlordMax. It’s great to hear someone else whose not afraid to experiment!

Thanks for the link, it was very interesting. I agree with a lot of what was said in the discussion.

From my perspective I don’t plan to make that much money from the direct sales of the book. Actually once I include my time and lost opportunity costs I’d be happy to just break even.

My goal is more to generate interest and publicity, and hence revenues, to my blog and company indirectly from the book. It’s more in the lines of how Joel Spolsky from JoelOnSoftware.com generates traffic. He’s a perfect example. A lot of his traffic, and therefore revenue, is from his publicity efforts. If no one knows you exist, then it doesn’t matter how good or who you are. You need to be out there.

In essence I’m expecting my blog to interest people in the book and the book to interest people in my blog. It’s a reciprocating circle that should grow both. My business model is a little different than those discussed in the forum you mention in that I’m not expecting direct revenue from the book (or vice versa), much like I don’t expect direct sales from this blog.

That being said, having an honest and open blog has increased my company’s sales. Firstly the blog gets more traffic than the company (blogs are always more interesting than a corporate face), which gives me more exposure. Secondly, I have more leeway as to what topics I can discuss. Yes I still have to limit the range of topics otherwise I’ll lose readers, but it’s definitely not as constrictive as a company. And because of this I can also have an opinion, even a strong opinion.

Basically there’s a lot of benefits to having a blog go along with a company and at the end of the day, because I’m giving the company a face and giving them an inside view of the company it makes it more appealing. If you know how a company acts and behaves and its in line with your values and philosophies you’re more likely to buy from them. It’s as simple as that.

Here’s a few of the reasons I prefer POD instead of self-published:

1. I plan on publishing a lot more than 20-50 books, my personal target is actually in the thousands. So if I consider this quantity then self publishing quickly becomes a lot more of a logistics issue. I’d need to warehouse a lot of books (dealing with humidity, etc.), shipping, returns, etc. This is not something I personally want to deal with, even if it adds to my bottom line. I already have my hands full with my company LandlordMax, this blog, and the book, as well as some other stuff I’ll share in the near future. So if I can offset this work, even if it means less revenue, I’m willing to do it.

2. Although getting an ISBN, etc. doesn’t seem to be rocket science, I’d rather not have to deal with the little details if I can. My personal objective is to write and market the book. I don’t really want to be involved the finer details. I’ve already got my plate full.

3. I like iUniverse because they also have links into Amazon.com, Chapters, Indigo, Barnes & Nobles, Google Book Search, etc. Basically I don’t have to take the time to figure out how to get listed everywhere. They manage all this for me.

4. I like POD because they can manage all shipping for Amazon, etc. Although I’ve already got a shipping system working with LandlordMax, I don’t see the real value of building another one for a book when I can offload that work out to the POD for a nominal fee (assuming sales in the thousands).

5. In regards to rights, that’s also one of the reasons I prefer iUniverse to the other POD services. You keep the rights. They would actually prefer you move to a traditional publishing company should your work get too big. You retain all rights.

6. It’s also a much smaller upfront costs, assuming you plan to sell a lot of your book. No printing runs, no warehousing costs, no returns. Honestly I’d be very disappointed if I didn’t sell at least in the thousands. I know that might seem like a tall order, but I wouldn’t take the time and effort if I didn’t think it was possible.

http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?biz.5.493074.11

You have to write the book, get it edited and take care of sales and marketing – the same as POD.

Getting an ISBN number just takes a few days and it’s free or costs next to nothing (at least here).

With digital printing shops you can do very small printing runs for a very resonable price (my mother did two runs so far, 20 and 50 books).

With POD you get 10-20% of the money, when you self publish (and do very small print runs) each book costs 10-20$ to print and the rest of the money is yours.

Also, I have no idea what are the details of the iUniverse contract, but when you self publish you really get to keep all the rights for your work and have the flexability to do anything you like with it later (for example switch to a “real” publisher if it becomes a best-seller)

I don’t know anything about POD or iUniverse, but from your description I don’t see any advantage of POD over self publishing.