Comments on: Bits du Jour Results are In.

By: FollowSteph.com - BitsDuJour Ebook Sale Results

FollowSteph.com - BitsDuJour Ebook Sale Results — Thu, 08 May 2008 02:51:53 +0000

[...] spike in sales of the ebook. It wasn’t quite as high as I wanted, I was hoping to replicate Bob Walsh’s success from some months back. Nonetheless it was pretty decent. I was able to sell a 45 copies of the ebook in one day, which is [...]

By: Robin at E-junkie

Robin at E-junkie — Sat, 01 Mar 2008 12:45:34 +0000

Congratulation on a successful campaign Bob.

The “download manager” issue has been resolved now. So, one less thing to worry about for your next ebook sale

By: bobw

bobw — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 19:33:55 +0000

First off, Thank you very much Steve for the excellent CSS advice – god knows, I can use all I can get.

Re hopes/expectations for the sale – I really didn’t know what to expect. But I’m very happy with the results.

By: Steve Moyer

Steve Moyer — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:53:49 +0000

I have one additional question after reading your results – What were your initial hopes/expectations before the sale started? (I know … “One meeeellion dollars”:)

By: Steve Moyer

Steve Moyer — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:17:41 +0000

That only improved it marginally … I suspect you need to get a CRT. If you’re picking your color schemes on an LCD monitor, the color temperatures are warmer and will provide both more contrast AND the extra clarity of a LCD. The screen shots were taken from a 19″ CRT running at 1600×1200 resolution running Ubuntu development with Firefox 3 (default settings). When I’ve chosen color schemes on a CRT first, I’ve noticed a color difference, but not the contrast difference. Must be some physiological effect.

I checked out your site on my laptop, which is running Ubuntu stable with Firefox 2 (the default font settings are the same), and it is indeed more readable, so I suspect color temperature is the culprit.

I didn’t realize that I was seeing the site in the wrong font, but pulled your stylesheet (http://www.47hats.com/wp-content/themes/News/style.css) to determine why there was a font disconnect. If corresponding font is found, the default is used (from the content preferences screenshot). Since it’s set to “serif”, that’s what I see … the choice of which serif font is (in this case), left up to the system, since both the default proportional and serif fonts are set to serif.

I’m also using the default san-serif font (which I believe is Lucida), but your stylesheet doesn’t allow that font to be used. It looks like “#featured p” inherits from body, which is set to:

body {
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;

background-color: #ffffff;

font-family: Arial;
font-size: 12px;
color: #333333;
}

This tells the browser to use Arial as the preferred font, or the browser’s default if that’s not found. Normally, you always want to specify the generic font-family as a fall-back to your preferred font, so the font-family line should read “font-family: Arial, san-serif;” to have the browser fall back to its default san-serif font instead of the global font. Elsewhere in your stylesheet, you use “font-family: Geneva, Arial;” and I suspect these should also be changed.

See http://www.w3schools.com/css/pr_font_font-family.asp for examples for the use of generic font families.

In any case, here are screenshots for the default Firefox 2 and 3 settings on Ubuntu Linux:

http://www.jcware.org/images/misc/Firefox3ContentPreferences.png
http://www.jcware.org/images/misc/Firefox3DefaultFonts.png

Hope this helps!

By: bobw

bobw — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:58:49 +0000

Hi Steve – I’ve tweaked the featured (latest) post – how does it look now? Also, I can see from the screenshots (thanks) that the font I want the site to use (Ariel) isn’t available on your Linux box. What’s the preferred basic sans serif font for your browser? I will >>attempt<< to add it to the font family and that should improve the site’s presentation on Linux boxes.

By: Steve Moyer

Steve Moyer — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:17:01 +0000

Ooops ... I guess comments can't contain images:) Here are the direct links: Example: http://www.jcware.org/images/misc/47HatsExample.png Full: http://www.jcware.org/images/misc/47HatsFull.png.

By: Steve Moyer

Steve Moyer — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 14:14:41 +0000

Bob:

Skimming through the book, it looks like exactly what I need for my “next step” … I can’t wait to read it next week.

I wanted to let you know your site is practically unreadable in Firefox 3 as shown in the this clipping:

You can get the full image here.sf

By: Chris Thompson (Midnightrange Software)

Chris Thompson (Midnightrange Software) — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 07:15:29 +0000

< well done Bob,

I have read the book now (twice) and as usual its of a very high standard.
As a microISV that makes money I get emails every week asking how to start a software business from programmers. My standard reply has now became “Start by reading Bob Walsh”.

I also have a suggestion for a new e-book.
I would love to see a book on the back end of selling software. Google Analytics, Payment (PayPal , e-junky), Web Hosting , Great support applications (things like direct access).

What do you think?

By: Jordan Sherer

Jordan Sherer — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 04:52:59 +0000

Bob, thanks for the insightful post. I’ve been looking into Bits Du Jour and other discount sites for some time now, and am glad to hear of your successes.

Congrats on the sale and the great book. ( I bought it pre-sale BTW )

Thanks again!

Best,
Jordan Sherer