Many people have asked why I’m writing a book without a publisher.  The story has interested a bunch of people so I’ll outline the basics here.

Update: there’s a related article by Marc-André Cournoyer covering how he wrote his “Create your own programming language” eBook.

I started writing The Screencasting Handbook in the middle of this year (about 5 months back).  My primary motivation was to write a useful Handbook that teaches my 4 years of skills to new screencasters.  My main goals were to:

• Release early, release often – so I can iterate based on the needs of my readers rather than the needs I’d guess that they have (based on some support at the Business of Software forum)
• Get the written parts out as soon as possible – I didn’t want drafts kicking around for a year before a publisher released them to the readers, I wanted the chapters out in the hands of readers as soon as possible
• Build a community (Google Group) around the Handbook – so my readers can ask and answer questions without me acting as a bottleneck

To achieve this I needed to create a site and determine if there was demand for the topic.  I had a WordPress theme created which signs potential readers up to an AWeber mailing list (costing $20USD/month) and I setup a Google Group.

I then put the word out to screencasters, mostly through ShowMeDo and by writing some useful blog posts that were picked up by screencasting companies.

At the same time I wrote a proposed Table of Contents (August) and released a survey via SurveyMonkey (free account).  I released this into the Google Group and asked for feedback.  I iterated a few times (September) based on feedback until everyone figured that I would cover the most beneficial topics.  At this point I added the Table of Contents as a PDF to the Handbook’s homepage.

By now I had 50 or so people signed up to the list – between the silent sign-ups and the active users in the Google Group I knew that the book would be in demand.  The survey detailed all the areas that caused problems for screencasters so I could be sure that by answering those questions, others would want the Handbook.

Pricing and releasing

At this point I cracked on with writing the Handbook.  I quickly went from 1,000 words to 10,300 and in October I announced that a new release was being prepared for sale.  I announced that the target price of the finished book would be $39USD and that early-bird purchasers could get it for $26USD (a 1/3 discount).  I also offer an unconditional refund at any time.

The payment gateway is PayPal and the front-end is e-junkie, they take payment and offer downloads for just $5/month.  Integrating the e-junkie basket into WordPress involves copying over a few lines of javascript, it is all very simple

At the start of November I released version 4 into the Google Group and announced it on the mailing list, this was quickly followed by a 5th release which added a new chapter.  I’m also about to decrease the discount by $1 taking the price up to $27USD.

After purchase everyone gets invited onto a second emailing list for Handbook Updates (and they’re removed from the first mailing list).  The second list is used to mail out links to updated versions of the PDF.  I also mail out a second survey about a week after purchase to ask the reader if they found the book useful and to ask what else I need to cover soon.  The feedback from the surveys and the Google Group is invaluable.

Figures so far – in several months with only a little effort at publicity I signed up over 200 users to the mailing list.  Just over 10% of those became buyers in the first week of releasing version 4 (given that the book is only about 1/6th written I’m pretty happy with this).  Next week I’ll be writing a couple of extra chapters and then I’ll be increasing my publicity.

I’m releasing my beginner screencasts on the Handbook’s blog for free, this will help prove the quality of the Handbook and it will bring in more visitors.

Print on demand?

Once I reach ‘edition 1′ I imagine I’ll release a print-on-demand version via lulu.  Several readers have already asked for a printed copy rather than a PDF.  ‘edition 1′ is a way off yet – probably early next year some time.

Tools

I’m writing the Handbook with Google Docs, I can edit it from home or whilst sitting in Cafe Delice.

To publish a new version I download a PDF.  I use Apple’s Preview to open the PDF and then ‘print to PDF’ a shorter version containing just the first 15 or so pages.

I upload the shorter version as the Outline to the Handbook’s homepage.  The longer version goes to e-junkie (for new purchasers) and to my second AWeber list (where everyone who has bought a copy gets notified about new releases).

I’ve used Google Website Optimizer to A/B test the landing page, with the Google Website Optimizer plugin for WordPress you just copy over the javascript that GWO provides to three pages (A, B and result page) and it starts to track conversions.  If there’s interest I’ll write some details on the (few) things that I’ve learned about landing page design.

I’ve already discussed AWeber, SurveyMonkey and Google Groups above.

Having an ‘accountability buddy’ helps!

Andy White is writing Podcasting Unleashed at the same time, we’re meeting every two weeks to push each other forwards and trade tips.  We’re both using WordPress and he’s about to move to Aweber so we’ll have pretty much the same setup.  Knowing that your partner is making progress when you’re having a slow day is a great motivator to write a few more pages!

Edition 2?

I’m thinking about the needs of a second edition, I’m wondering if a book format (with a linear series of pages) is wrong and perhaps a wiki is a better tool.  It would certainly allow collaborative content creation.  I’d also like to build some tools like an automatic de-noiser and a scripting tool.

Want to write you own eBook?

It occurs to me that the above process might be useful to other people who want to write their own book, particularly those who want to get early feedback from a potential audience before committing to write a full book.

One possibility is the construction of a site that makes ‘everything easy’ for a potential author.  If you’d like to know if I push this idea in the future, make a comment below which includes your email.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I’m rather chuffed with our two most recent ProCasts screencam productions.

For Igor of MockupScreens.com we’ve produced our first dual-narration screencast, this one shows you a typical use of his rapid UI mock-up tool.  Richard takes on the voice of the client, I take the voice of the contractor who is making the mock-up:

For Armel of Ellié Computing we produced a short demo to walk-through the main features of his programmer’s diff tool ECMerge:

If you want to learn about improving your screencast skills, you should check-out our Screencast Handbook.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Rob Walling has been working to build the Micropreneur Academy – a focused site aimed at MicroISV’s who want to grow their businesses into high-value, fast-growth affairs (original May announce).

He contacted me a few months back to ask if I’d like to contribute an article on how screencasts can boost sales of software products, naturally I jumped at the chance!

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I first logged in.  Rob had sent me a login as I wanted to know what the community looked like, and what they’d need, before I wrote the article.  I was pleasently surprised to see a sort of mini-BusinessOfSoftware forum (i.e. friendly, helpful people who are working on cool stuff) backed by an awful lot of solid start-up knowledge written by Rob.

Knowing that I’d have to add an article of similar quality I spent time dissecting Rob’s articles.  Having worked in start-ups for 10 years and having founded 3 of my own, I had an idea about a lot of the content, but I kept finding nuggets of really useful material in Rob’s articles.

I was left wishing I’d had access to this when Kyran and I had founded ShowMeDo back in 2005!  I must also confess – I ended up using some of Rob’s ideas on market research to help plan my new eBook entitled The Screencasting Handbook.

Anyhow, I ought to cut this long story short.  I wrote the article and found a set of happy readers inside Rob’s forum.  I’m now also a mentor in his group because of my experience with on-line community building in ShowMeDo.

Rob’s about to open up the site to new membership, so if you have an interest in finding a closed group of people who are all building their own online start-ups, backed by lots of solid knowledge, do take a look at the Micropreneur Academy.

You can see two other write-ups by paying members for an idea of the value they see in the site.  Rob’s also very chatty, you can easily get in touch with him if you sign-up to ask any questions.

The following are a couple of the start-ups run by members of the academy (I don’t know any of these, but I did recommend another start-up who has happily joined!):

• Pixur.me
• ThoughtMuse
• BidSketch
• HotNameList
• Flip-start

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I’m very pleased to say that my new screencasting book – The Screencasting Handbook – is now in production.

The website went live this week and once one tiny bug is resolved (the title seems to float a bit weirdly) the site will be finished.

The book’s goal is to present 4 years of my own experiences screencasting, along with the experiences of others, to help new screencasters get up to speed quickly.

My screencasting experience comes from 4 years building ShowMeDo with Kyran where I’ve made over 140 tutorials and founding ProCasts for professional work a year back.

Along the way I wrote a 9-part screencast tutorial but I’ve got so much experience to share…so I figured it was time to write a book.

I’m taking an agile approach to the book’s development.  I’ll release a table of contents with Chapter 1 as the first commercial release, probably in mid August.

Next I’ll release new chapters every few weeks.  The aim is to iterate on the feedback from my readers so I’m delivering the book that answers their questions, rather than the book that I guess might contain what they need.

You can sign-up on the site for emailed notifications and a chance to win a free license.  If you’d just like to keep an eye on things you could always follow our Twitter feed.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I spent the weekend cracking through the creation of a new 12-part tutorial  series for ShowMeDo, the result is OpenOffice Calc 3.1 for Microsoft Excel users.  The overview is embedded below, links to all the episodes are further down.  This series was created whilst wearing my screencast production hat for ProCasts.

The goal is to take the hand of an Excel user and easily and quickly move them over to using Calc with the minimum of fuss.

Common topics like sharing .xls files, using .ods native files, printing, .csv files and PDF export are covered.  I also spend three episodes (just over 20 minutes) going through the creation of a sheet to model a mythical eBook’s sales covering formulas, formatting and charting.  Finally I finish with a look at some of Calc’s easter eggs including Star Wars (heck, I didn’t even know there were any games in OOo!).

Note that this series is a part of ShowMeDo’s Club so you need to be a paying member or contributing author to get access to all the episodes.  I’ve also updated the OpenOffice Learning Path which collates all of ShowMeDo’s OpenOffice videos.

1. Series Overview in 3 minutes (OpenOffice 3.1 for Excel users) (Free)
   
2. Installing OpenOffice 3.1 on Windows XP (Free)
3. Working with .xls Sheets in Calc
4. Saving as an ODF Spreadsheet (.ods) and PDF
5. Where to get help
6. Constructing a Sales-Forecast Sheet
7. Formatting your Sheet
8. Creating a Chart
9. Printing your Sheet
10. Import and Export CSV files
11. Re-associating .xls files with Excel after OpenOffice installation
12. Light relief – Star Wars Easter Egg and others

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

We had a fab £5 App last night – sorry to those who tuned in looking for the live broadcast.  We had some itty-bitty bandwidth issues and uStream wouldn’t play ball so I had to record off-line.  Vimeo serves the videos just fine now.  Thanks to Jon and The Skiff for hosting us.  See photos here.

We had:

1. Darren Fell telling the story of Pure360’s birth and sale followed by his second start-up Crunch.co.uk
2. Andy Gill on the launch of ChatBadge.com – see Andy’s write-up
3. Richard Dallaway on the launch of Taykt.com
4. Ben Sauer on the super-memory techniques used in Anki

Five Pound App #17 – Darren Fell on Crunch from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

Five Pound App #17 – Andy Gill on ChatBadge from IanProCastsCoUk on Vimeo.

Five Pound App #17 – Richard Dallaway (taykt.com) and Ben Sauer (Anki) from Ian Ozsvald on Vimeo.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Over in ProCasts we’ve just delivered a sales screencast production to Andy Wright (CEO) at Orchestrate to demonstrate their workforce scheduling software.  Andy and I first spoke after he created his own screencast for Orchestrate’s launch, you can see some more details and our critique of his earlier screencast here.  Andy’s blogged a very supportive entry too.

Our solution shows you ‘a day in the life of Orchestrate’, it shows you how easy it is to schedule jobs and see that they’re completed.

Thanks to Richard for the logo and concept work and Ellen for script re-writing.  My team rocks.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Recently I’ve given two podcast interviews for ProCasts (Startup-Success Screencasting, How to Start Screencasting).

A user had asked if a written transcript would be available, knowing that not everyone likes listening to 45 minutes of discussion I figured a transcript would be a smart idea (and letting Google read the text couldn’t hurt too).

I returned to eLance as I had no way of judging whether the transcript companies advertising in Google were any good.  I posted a job description with a 2 week limit and received 34 proposals with an average bid of $61USD.  The majority of the bids were from the US rather than the Far East, compared to my previous use of eLance.

Sharon (nctranscription) offered a bid of $50USD for the 45 minute podcast (I added the second 9 minute podcast into the job later).  She had a couple of questions and returned the finished transcript almost overnight.  I’m very happy with her work, you can see both the transcripts in the blog entries: Startup-Success Screencasting, How to Start Screencasting.

Bob Walsh (47hats) also recommends CastingWords.

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

I’m rather chuffed to say that our ProCasts has just received an award from TechSmith for our Adblock Plus open-source advocacy screencast.  I’ve blogged a few more details at ProCasts, our video is played 600 times a day and has already won popularity awards in YouTube.

“I liked this screencast for several reasons. Ian made great use of Camtasia Studio’s SmartFocus feature – he used it to focus your attention on certain areas of the screen and show greater detail.

The audio quality is great on this screencast which is important as viewers are generally intolerant of poor audio. The background audio music was a great touch and added polish to the screencast. And, Ian has a great voice for narration! The screencast runs 1:32 and is short and to the point. Perfect!”

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.

Bob and Pat, long-time supporters of Joel’s Business of Software forums, were kind enough to interview me last week on the art and science of creating screencasts that sell your software.

The podcast (mp3) is 42 minutes long, they question me to help MicroISVs and tech companies learn more about using screencasts to demo and sell their software.  I’ve written up a bit about it on the ProCasts blog.

“In show #21 Bob and Pat interview Ian Ozsvald, founder of ProCasts on the art and science, mystery and drama of creating great screeencasts for your startup’s product or web site. Ian generously shares his expertise about how to target your screencast, techniques that make a huge difference, a range of free and non-free tools, ways to improve your video communication abilities and more. If you want to know how to create a screencasts that shines, this is the show for you!”

Would you like a free eBook that covers all of this (and more)? ProCasts’ Little Book of Screencasting is in the works, to receive a notification when we release it send an email to: ebook_notify@procasts.co.uk

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Ian produces professional screencasts (ProCasts), writes The Screencasting Handbook, programs Python, researches Artificial Intelligence (Mor Consulting) and is also a sea-side dweller and consumer of fine coffees.