I am looking for ways to promote my Free Ruby eBook. I have come up with some ideas. Some zany, impractical and okay maybe a bit stupid.. but some are simple, fun and easy to do. Will you help me come up with even more? Any idea is acceptable …. this is just a fun brainstorming session – to spread the book as far and as wide as it can go! Leave your comments below (you will have to register to do that…..which is safe, simple and allows you to make comments for other posts as well).. but if you don’t want to do that…. (there are a lot of loops to jump through)… just send me an Email with your idea. and I will add your comments to the list!
Okay.. so I leeched a little from Sister Patricia Proctor but hey that’s just flattery, don’t you think? Sister Patricia Proctor, author of 101 Inspirational Stories of the Power of Prayer, shared 101 ideas for marketing her book with the readers of her blog. Since posting that list, a number of readers have sent her almost 20 more ways — good ways — to market her book.
Okay.. let’s get serious. Please help me make this list!
- Make a screen-saver
- Tell friends
- Announce on radio and TV
- Share on Craig’s list
- Buy a billboard
- Make T-shirts
- Decorate a bus
- Make bookmarks – leave everywhere
- Add a line in all emails
- Banner on web page
- Promote via Peepcode (by Ryan)
- Make News-Suggestions to print-magazines (by Michael Uplawski)
- Translate to Japanese and ask Matz for a testimonial
- Make a screencast “Ruby in 5 minutes†and put it on YouTube (by Chris Porter)
- Send out a press release to all the top Ruby blogs / podcasts (by Chris Porter)
- Add it as a prize for all the Hackfest winners at WWR (by Juanjo)
- Streak across a morning news show while waving your book in the air… (by Tim Kadom)
Technorati Tags: Free eBook, Ruby eBook, Ruby programming
Posted by Satish Talim
{ 16 comments… read them below or add one }
I would promote via Peepcode
Start by linking to the ebook in the phrase “my Ruby eBook”. It wouldn’t hurt if you change it to “my free Ruby eBook”. Otherwise people won’t know that they should click on the image to get this eBook. They would be lost finding it in your website.
Update from Satish: Thanks Zakaria. Updated the post.
Make News-Suggestions to print-magazines (did that). Omit those with ‘IT’ in their names, they know nothing and it might hurt more than it helps.
Make a screencast “Ruby in 5 minutes”
put it on YouTube
???
Profit !!!
Send out a press release to all the top Ruby blogs / podcasts I’m sure they would be happy to link it.
Love the cover BTW !
You can add it as a prize for all the hackfest winners at WWR: http://workingwithrails.com/hackfest/
The Copyblogger at http://www.copyblogger.com/ has tips for online marketing as well as using blogs to use as a marketing tool.
An easy way to promote it, would be putting a link to it in your email signature, and have other Ruby bloggers review and link to it, and Ruby websites like Ruby Central, ruby-lang.org or so.
Railscasts, Peepcode and so come to mind, but RubyInside could help. You could also put a link to Ruby Flow (from the Peter Cooper, too), and place a Link to the Ruby reddit group.
Comment on RubyFlow – I think it mainly depends on the quality of the book. If the quality is good, people will tell each other.
For the record, I caught it on rubyflow, and I will link you from my blog. Here are my suggestions:
I would contact the folks at rubylearning.com and ask if they would host it.
submit a wiki entry to http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails
streak accross a morning news show while waving your book in the air…
Good luck!
Tim
Make it Free as in Freedom: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
Comment on RubyFlow – If you want more people to check out your book you should make it easier to download. Remove the requirement to sign up and just have a direct download link.
Comment on RubyFlow – Seconded. Locking stuff up doesn’t do anything for me. You gain more from releasing things for free (if the product is free itself) unless, of course, a mailing list is extremely valuable to you (which may well be the case here).
Have you considered using the Google books partner program?
https://books.google.com/partner/
It says: “By matching the content in your books with user searches, Google Book Search connects your books with the users who are most interested in buying them.”
Kind regards,
Rainer
P.S.: This should work with free books just as well: Just upload the complete pdf.
Three thoughts come to mind:
1) Make the book available in print. Some people (like me) are too cheap to replace their aging computer monitors, so having your book in print could be handy. You already have the book in PDF form, so it probably wouldn’t be too much of a headache to make it available using Lulu http://www.lulu.com/en/products/ to print the book as orders came in. They process the orders and handle the shipping for you. And you could choose whether to sell at cost, or have a dollar or so from each purchase go to supporting your free ruby course.
2) Cross promote using your mailing list. I assume that you have kept the names and emails from people registering to get your book. Find someone (or a few people) with a ruby related mailing list, and provide them with a 30 or 40 word blurb promoting your free ebook, and offering to send an email of similar length to your list, telling them about whatever free and valuable product or service they are offering to the ruby community. Be aware that this could lead to a lot of downloads of your ebook over a short period of time. You’d need to plan for the burst of traffic and bandwidth. Just don’t give anyone direct access to your list, ever.
3) I think its pretty clear that both your ebook and free ruby course should be mentioned on this page: http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/documentation/
I don’t know if there is anything that you could do to encourage them to list you, but if there is, I think it would be worthwhile. I’ve checked out most of the resources that they list there, but your book and course have taught me far more, and I think that would be the case for others as well.
Regards,
Jim
Make the simple review or report with PDF format. Make sure to put the URL that linking to your order page. Submit it to free ebook directory / giveaway site.
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