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by walterbell 4316 days ago
Appreciate the insights.

> Yes, if there's demand. I take it there might be. :-)

Customers of softcover.io may be more comfortable spending $150 on additional bundles if there was a well-defined baseline for screencast quality. The pitch to potential authors and customers is to emulate the sales/quality success of the Rails tutorial, so it's in the interest of all parties (platform, customers, authors) to see that baseline met or exceeded.

Edit: will the "powered by softcover" banner/footer be required for authors publishing on their own domain? If so, it would help all authors if the link was directed to a list of domains "powered by softcover", rather than a pitch for softcover itself.
1 comments
mhartl 4316 days ago
Customers of softcover.io

The idea is that Softcover's customers are the authors, much like WordPress's customers are bloggers. Purchasers of an author's products should notice the Softcover name only incidentally. We want to help authors build their own brands.

will the "powered by softcover" banner/footer be required for authors publishing on their own domain?

No, authors can optionally remove the footer.

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walterbell 4316 days ago
> We want to help authors build their own brands.

Don't underestimate the assistance that your brand can give to the brands of your authors. While toolsets for e-publishing may not act as editorial gateways, they still exercise a form of affinity/aesthetic filtering that can provide a discovery signal to book buyers.

Even a quick browse of the leanpub site (cited elsewhere in this thread) showed a clear difference from softcover viewing aesthetics. Over time, you may discover a correlation between "authors who liked the softcover toolchain" and "readers who buy from more than one softcover author". That would last until word got out, then you would have a flood of new authors who were attracted primarily by revenue opportunity, not toolchain/distribution aesthetics.

BTW, it's quite informative whether someone chooses to publish on WordPress, Blogspot, Tumblr, statically-generated html, or Facebook.

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