I respect the "If you don't have enough money for this, I will give it to you for free" notion. However, given that that policy should totally resolve all of your moral qualms about charging proper prices, this should probably cost $25 ~ $50, which will a) compensate the author better, b) underwrite more giveaways (either of this book or of other projects), and c) ensure that among purchasers of the book it gets treated as a valuable resource rather than as a disposable impulse-buy. (You can add to this the somewhat shocking observation that you may actually sell more copies.)
I completely understand this, and believe it to be true.
My motivation for writing the book was primarily to get the information out there. I really love the Heroku platform, and would like to spread the knowledge around as much as possible. Charging for this book was really a way for me to recover a tiny amount of my time back, I have no intentions of really turning a profit from this.
After some feedback I set the pricing to be variable (5$+), and I've been giving away free copies to anyone who asked.
So far, the project has been a success (in my mind): over 600 copies distributed total, which means a large amount of users get to (hopefully) make use of the information :)
So I hopped on over here (after I bought the book) to make this one comment, the price is too low!
Seriously, the amount of value I've already gotten out of this book today well exceeds the $5 buy-in.
I'm not saying to raise it straight to the "typical" $27 e-book level, but I wouldn't have thought twice paying $12 for this. In fact, at $5, you're doing yourself a disservice and signaling a lack of quality.
To add another datapoint, $10-15 is typically fair in my book. Basically for unknown content, the price of a decent lunch or a cheap dinner seems reasonable.
The key to getting a higher price is to "derisk" the investment for people. Demonstrate value with table of content, links to previous blog posts maybe a free chapter of intermediate level (not to basic to make the book seem trivial, but not so advanced as to not be understandable and useful without context).
Books with code in a github repo are worth more to me. The most valuable are those that go as far as to create an immersive environment for learning and experimenting with the concepts. Marijn Haverbeke's Eloquent Javascript book is one of the few that has achieved this with the console/repl that accompanies the book and is integrated with the example code in the text.
I also think $5 is way too cheap for your ebook. OK I understand you don't want to turn a profit. But price is not only for you. It is also for the market. It is viewed by customers/users as a quality element. Low price = Ho! That's just a tiny ebook = Why should I care? (I bought it, looks very interesting)
Hey, if you'd like a preview I'd be happy to email you a free copy (don't have any preview stuff setup yet). If you email me (rdegges@gmail.com) I'd love to send you a copy :)
Heroku has really been amazing for me. As a college student its free and very cheap upgrade plans make it extremely easy to deploy web apps. It's helped my learning process and allowed me to release stuff I don't think I ever would just because of its ease of use.
I couldn't buy the book earlier so I emailed the creator and he generously gave me the book for free (DRM free to boot!). I took a quick look through it before my last class and so far am loving it (yummm free quality content!). Thanks again Randall!
Gumroad was down, so rdegges emailed a preview to me. After a quick skim of the preview, I checked and gumroad was back. The book is definitely worth at least $1 / chapter to me, so I contributed $15. I'm looking forward to digging in.
After buying the ebook and taking a browse, I agree with the others. As a first-time web developer who has been using Heroku for a few months, I would gladly pay more than $5 for this now (and even more a few months ago).
Skimmed it through -- very, very useful for me! Will be using it to deploy my first real Heroku project this week. Author was also very responsive via email. For 5$ it's a no-brainer if you want to start using Heroku.
$9 isn't the new black, variable pricing is. Happy to spend (and write off) more to learn some new stuff and support projects like this. I'd love to see a blog post about the pricing in a few weeks / months.
Just bought it -- thanks for all the hard work. I'm a long-time and high-scale App Engine user and now have a couple small but growing projects running on Heroku. I like a lot of what I see!
Both (I'm the author). It covers Heroku from the ground up. I've had people of many different skill levels review the book, and so far its had extremely positive feedback.
If you're on the fence, send me an email (rdegges@gmail.com) and I'll give you a copy for free :)
anybody else buy this and can't download it? hnews flood brings another server to it's knees.
it's cool that the part that takes your payment information works great, but the part that allows you to download what you paid for no worky. urge to kill rising...
UPDATE!! the author is a cool cat and sent me a copy via email like 30seconds after i let him know i was having problems. HAPPY CUSTOMER!!
Hey there, I'm using Gumroad to accept payment / etc. If for some reason you can't download the book, let me know and I'll email you a copy personally.
Sorry for the issues!
You can also email me if you prefer: rdegges@gmail.com
Hey, sorry about the issues. Not sure if it is gumroad or what. I'll be happy to send you a copy of the ebook if you'd like, just send me an email: rdegges@gmail.com
Wrote the book using Sphinx. If I had to do it over again, I'd likely use Markdown + custom tools. I'm actually planning to write a blog post about this next week some time :)
Right now there's just a PDF, but I'm working on getting it into the kindle store. If you'd like a PDF before the Kindle copy comes out, send me an email (rdegges@gmail.com) and I'll send you a free one to hold you over :)
I was actually about to ask the same question. I haven't seen the book but I expect it contains a lot of command line snippets and code, and in my experience the Kindle does a ... shall we say unsatisfactory job of rendering those.
