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 :)
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)
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
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 $5 for this now (and even more a few months ago).
Both (I'm the author). It covers Heroku from the ground up. I've had people of many different skill levels review the book, and so far its had extremely positive feedback.
If you're on the fence, send me an email (rdegges@gmail.com) and I'll give you a copy for free :)
Heroku has really been amazing for me. As a college student its free and very cheap upgrade plans make it extremely easy to deploy web apps. It's helped my learning process and allowed me to release stuff I don't think I ever would just because of its ease of use.
Skimmed it through -- very, very useful for me! Will be using it to deploy my first real Heroku project this week. Author was also very responsive via email. For 5$ it's a no-brainer if you want to start using Heroku.
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.
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!
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
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.
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!
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 :)
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 :)
$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.
45 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 74.3 ms ] threadPreface
- Why Heroku?
- Simplicity
- Age
- Popularity
- Polyglot
- Solid
- Best Practices
Getting Started with Heroku
- Create an Account
- Install the Toolbelt
- Install heroku-accounts
- Project Prerequisites
- Create an Application
- Follow the Required Quickstart Guide
- Push Your Code
- Check it Out
Dynosaurs
- What Are Dynos?
- Understanding Dynos
- Dynos Run Services
- One Procfile to Rule Them All
- Testing Your Procfile
- Scaling Up and Scaling Down Dynos
- Handling Failure
- Calculating Dyno Costs
The Environment
- Best Practices and You
- The Config Command
- Benefits
Take the Pain Away (with Addons)
- What are Addons?
- How do Addons Work?
- The Addon Catalogue
- Adding, Removing, Upgrading, and Downgrading Addons
- Addon Cost
PostgreSQL Patterns
- Why Heroku PostgreSQL?
- Bootstrapping a Database
- Connecting to Your Database
- Destroying a Database
- Creating Read Slaves
- Creating a Duplicate Database
- Promoting a Slave Database to a Master Database
- View Slow Queries
- Backing Up Your Database
- Downloading Your Backups
- Restoring From a Backup
- Final Thoughts
Caching with Memcached
- Why Cache?
- Using Memcached
- Memcached on Heroku
Scheduling Tasks with Cron
- The Scheduler
- Debugging
- Cost
Logging
- Log Types
- Viewing Logs
- Viewing Select Logs
- When to Check Your Logs
- Log Storage Options
Monitoring with New Relic
- Why New Relic?
- Installing New Relic
- The Overview
- A Visual Map of Your Application
- Web Transactions
- Database Monitoring
- External Services
- Dyno Monitoring
- Background Tasks
- Final Thoughts
Talking to the World
- Using Custom Domains
- Updating Your DNS
- Encrypt All the Things! (with SSL)
Managing Releases
- Heroku’s Model
- Viewing Your Releases
- Rolling Back
- Final Thoughts
Working with Others
- Who is the Application Owner?
- Sharing Access
- Sharing Permissions
- Managing Collaborators
- Transferring Ownership
Do Great Things
- Build Services, Not Apps
- Building Service Oriented Applications
- Heroku and Services
- Be Dynamic
- Final Thoughts
References and Further Reading
Special Thanks
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 $5, you're doing yourself a disservice and signaling a lack of quality.
I'm extremely flattered by your comment. I didn't really think about pricing it any higher than 5$. Will definitely reconsider.
Really appreciate the feedback.
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.
P.S I bought it. It's 61 pages of great material. Go give this guy some money.
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!!
Sorry for the issues!
You can also email me if you prefer: rdegges@gmail.com
If you're on the fence, send me an email (rdegges@gmail.com) and I'll give you a copy for free :)
Question, is the $15 price difference between the pdf and paperback the money the publisher is charging you?
on my way of buying the pdf right now
My motivation for writing the book was primarily to get the information out there. I really love the Heroku platform, and would like to spread the knowledge around as much as possible. Charging for this book was really a way for me to recover a tiny amount of my time back, I have no intentions of really turning a profit from this.
After some feedback I set the pricing to be variable (5$+), 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 :)