Freemium Economics

Congrats on the launch, @eric_seufert! I had the pleasure of reading an early version of Eric's book. Highly recommended for product managers or data analysts building a freemium business or free-to-play games. Eric - how are you marketing the book?

@eric_seufert - yup! Not to sound cliche, but the blog is the MVP for many writers now. If you don't already have an audience, blogging is a great, low-risk way to build one and get feedback on what people care about. What about distributing in schools or universities? Freemium Economics is a very academic book and suited for that audience, imo.

I wrote this book, and it is available today. Big thanks to @rrhoover for being a reviewer. I wanted to write a book about Freemium that went beyond simply outlining the concept and dug into the fundamentals of what, in my experience, makes freemium products successful: deep instrumentation, analytics-driven product development, and large-scale, profitable user acquisition (with a focus on facilitating virality and quantifying LTV). I'm happy to answer questions about the book; the full chapter list can be found at the Amazon link.

I'm mostly marketing the book through my website, Mobile Dev Memo, as well as various speaking engagements planned for 2014. What's cool in writing about stuff you're really passionate about -- and I'm sure a lot of Product Hunt bloggers can relate to this -- is that you never really stop marketing your work, and the effort you put into that doesn't feel tedious or forced.

Definitely, but that's a pretty insular market and harder to crack. My publisher is handling that through their contacts (they do a lot of textbooks / academic books for CS classes). I think blog as MVP for a book is an apt analogy. Blogging allows the content to be honed, for readers to provide feedback, and probably most importantly, for interest in the topic to be verified via pageviews.

@eric_seufert one thing that worked very well for me and @acroll with Lean Analytics is giving away a free e-book of case studies. It's still on our site. We get a lot of signups for it (we ask for your email), and I've had lots of people tell me that they buy the book after seeing those examples. Lean, in this particular case, still suffers from lack of "proof", which we tried to address with the case studies. Also makes things more practical than theoretical. Speaking is also a good way of marketing the book. Alistair and I have done many webinar type sessions with accelerators (which you could pretty easily tap into), which helps promote the book. In some cases we've secured pre-orders for those sessions (and certainly for other on-site speaking gigs--we ask people to order books in advance.) Book sales replace speaking fees. PS. Just bought your book. :)

Cheers, Ben -- those are very good suggestions. Also, nice work on Lean Analytics: I grabbed it off of a co-workers desk one day and really enjoyed it.