Back in July I sent a survey to our mailing list so that I could get a better understanding of what our customers want and how we can provide that. I was completely unprepared for the huge volume of responses: 2,836 people filled out the survey (even after removing duplicates). Wow! First, let me say thank you. The information you provided was enormously helpful. I truly appreciate your time and the thought you put into your responses. This data will help us make Take Control better as time goes on.
It took a long time to sift through the survey results, largely because I provided far too many free-form “Other” choices and distilling those into consistent, countable options was a bit of a challenge. Well, that’s a lesson learned for next time.
Later in this article (click here to skip ahead), I repeat each of the 20 questions from the survey, along with their responses. After each question, I have a brief commentary. But first, I want to share some important background information that will provide context for the survey questions and their responses. (It’s long. You don’t have to read it. But you might find it interesting.)
We can’t please everyone…and that’s OK
If you look at the summary of responses to question 20, you’ll see perhaps the clearest example of contradictory feedback we get. It’s a recurring theme: one person says we should definitely offer subscriptions (I have more to say on that topic in a moment), another says they hate subscriptions. One person says we must do video; another person says we must not. Many people insist that we offer our books on paper, and many others say they’d never, ever consider buying a printed book from us. For every customer who complains that our books are too basic, someone else complains that they’re too advanced. The list goes on and on. No matter what your opinion is, or how strongly you hold it, I guarantee you that someone else holds the opposite opinion, with equal fervor.
We pay attention to all the feedback we get, and we take it all seriously. Of course, we will never, ever be able to make everyone happy—and it would be folly to try. We’re going to focus on our strengths, do the best we can do with the resources we have, and accommodate as many of the big customer requests as we reasonably can. But we’re not going to lose any sleep about the fact that any decision we make will displease some people, because we’re all just human, and that’s life.
How we decide which books to publish
Our list of potential book topics is a mile long, and constantly growing. Many of those topics were suggested by customers; others came from authors and various other sources. We can’t do everything, though, so we have to give careful thought to which projects we pursue. How do we decide? Well, it probably goes without saying that survey results like these inform our decisions. However, they’re only one small component. We have to ask ourselves:
- Can we cover the topic adequately in a Take Control book? Some publishers put out technical books that are many hundreds of pages (and sometimes over 1,000 pages) long. We’re not in that business. We do short- to medium-length books, and in our experience, the optimal length—what we typically aim for—is about 150 pages. That’s not a hard and fast limit, but when we know a topic is so ginormous that we can’t possibly do justice to it in a Take Control book, we say no.
- Do we have the right author? Although many of our authors have wide areas of expertise, some topics require the touch of a person with extensive experience in a specific area—plus the ability to clearly explain the topic to a general audience. If we can’t find that match, we won’t do the book.
- Will we sell enough copies? As a very rough, ballpark figure, a typical Take Control book has to sell at least 1,500 copies just to break even. That is: we have to pay editors, we have various production and distribution costs, we have the usual overhead of running a business (like paying our employees’ salaries and health insurance), and most of all, we need to do our best to ensure that our authors are reimbursed (in the form of royalties) for the considerable time and effort they put into writing books. (And, of course, books that are more than minimally successful give us the financial resources to do more!) So we have to judge, based on the available information—including what we know about our audience and the past performance of similar books—how well a given title is likely to sell. If we have an idea for the Greatest Book Ever but we’re not convinced we can sell enough copies to make it worth everyone’s time, we won’t do it.
So if you’re wondering why we don’t have a book on such-and-such topic, the above reasons may be why.
But there’s another element here…
How we decide which books to update
Some of our books are updated fairly regularly, some less often, and some are never updated. And some of our books are updated for a while, but then later discontinued.
A number of survey respondents asked why we don’t just keep all our books up to date indefinitely. (And, some wanted to know why we don’t keep them up to date indefinitely for free!)
The simple answer is that updating books takes time, and time is money. If I ask an author to spend two weeks working on a free update to their book, they’ll want to know whether they should reasonably expect two weeks’ wages for their effort (again, in the form of royalties). If the book in question is selling well, and the update results in considerably more sales, then the answer is probably yes. If it’s an older book or isn’t selling well, the answer is probably no.
Paid updates (that is, new editions) change the equation, because they make it much more likely that the author will be compensated for the time they spend writing the update. On the other hand, editing expenses for new editions are also higher. And because we charge much less for updates than for new books, the point of diminishing returns arrives sooner.
In any case, an author always earns more money writing a new Take Control book than updating an old one. So there often comes a point at which we can no longer make a financial case for an author keeping an older book up to date, even if the update is paid.
That said, I want to mention one specific title that many people asked about: Take Control of 1Password. Yes, an update is coming. I wish I’d been able to get it done sooner, and I’m sorry for the delay, but it will be done as soon as I can manage it. Really!
What about subscriptions?
One of our survey questions (number 13) asked about a membership program, and that led many people to ask, in the comments, about subscriptions. Specifically, why doesn’t Take Control offer an all-you-can-eat subscription package (like Netflix or O’Reilly Safari, for example), in which customers pay a flat monthly or annual fee and then get access to all our books? Wouldn’t that be great? (And besides, everyone’s doing it, right?)
We are not going to offer an all-you-can-eat subscription. Here’s why.
Several years ago, while Adam and Tonya Engst were still running Take Control, we had long, long discussions about a subscription offering. In fact, they did most of the infrastructure work that would have been needed to offer such a package. I, personally, pushed for this idea repeatedly. I thought it would be fantastic.
Since this hadn’t happened yet when I took over the business, I looked into it deeply. I wanted to make it work! I did research, made lots of spreadsheets, looked carefully at many different formulations of a subscription model. But no matter how I ran the numbers or how cleverly I tried to adjust the parameters of the program, I came to exactly the same conclusion every single time: it would be great for our customers (Yay! A huge supply of cheap books!) and great for me as the publisher (Yay! A reliable source of recurring revenue!), but terrible for all other authors. There is just no way to spin the math in the authors’ favor: no matter how we structure the accounting, any all-you-can-eat subscription package would definitely result in authors earning way less than they do now.
That’s a pretty big problem, because our authors are all freelancers, and they’re all earning too little as it is. If their Take Control income slipped even further due to a subscription program, they’d have no incentive to ever write a book for us again. That, in turn, would leave us with no books to sell. I think you can see how that would be a bad idea!
I can’t tell you how many people have said, “Yeah, but why don’t you just ____” followed by any number of reasonable-sounding suggestions. Sorry, but if you knew what I know about our business, you’d agree with me that the math still doesn’t work.
However…
There may be a way for us to all have our cake and eat it too. That membership idea from question 13 is one example—in that model, although there are no guarantees, the odds strongly favor authors earning more than they do now. Customers would still have to buy individual books, but they’d do so at a huge discount. What authors lose in revenue per book sold, they’ll likely (more than) make up in volume—that’s what happens every time we have a sale, after all!
There are other possibilities too. We’ve had extensive discussions about other sorts of memberships or subscriptions that might scratch this particular itch without harming authors or the business. It’s just that these other potential models all have limits—in no case do they give customers open access to all our titles. And one thing we don’t want to do is to create a complicated system. We want to keep things simple for our customers, and for ourselves.
So, although you should not expect to see an all-you-can-eat Take Control subscription, there may in the future be other types of memberships or subscriptions that you’ll like because they’ll save you money while giving you access to more goodies. But any subscription or membership will have to wait until our new website is ready (see below).
What I didn’t ask about and why
We got loads and loads of comments about certain things I intentionally left off the survey—that is, things I already know we have problems with, and already have a plan to address. Let me say a few words about some of these:
- Our website: The Take Control website is desperately in need of a complete overhaul. It’s too slow, it’s confusing in several respects, it makes the information you’re looking for too hard to find, and…I think I’ve seen just about enough of that wood grain! I have an extremely detailed plan written down for a shiny new website that addresses all the shortcomings of our current site (and indeed, work has already begun). But because this plan involves quite a few people, many moving parts, and lots of money, it’s not something that can happen overnight. All I can say right now is “sometime in 2019,” though I certainly hope it’s earlier in the year rather than later. Here are some of the many things we’ll be addressing:
- Payments: The checkout and payment process should be much smoother. We also want to accept Apple Pay. In order to accommodate these needs, we’ll be moving from eSellerate to a new payment processor.
- Your library: It should be much easier for you to figure out, for example, which of the books you’ve purchased have updates available, whether those updates are free or paid (and, if paid, how much they cost), and what the process is for getting the updates. You should have more control over sorting and managing your library.
- Other content: Did you know Take Control Books has a blog? And that each individual book also has a blog? If not, I don’t blame you. They’re hard to find, and rarely updated. And there’s lots of other stuff we could put on our site too, such as articles that cover topics too short to make a book out of. We need to do a better job of offering useful information on our site besides just the books, and giving our customers reasons to keep coming back to our site even if they’re not in the market for a particular book.
- Email: Our current system for sending email messages about new and updated books is incredibly clunky, and we can’t offer our customers much control over what types of email they receive or how often. We plan to redesign our entire email system along with our website. (One likely result of that redesign is a greater likelihood that our messages will get through to you rather than being rejected by a spam filter along the way.)
- Book formatting: The current design of Take Control books—including both the covers and the interior layout—is due for a big makeover. We think we can make our books more attractive, easier to read, and more adaptable to other formats (notably print).
Did you know?
Based on many, many comments in survey responses, I discovered that there are several things we’ve apparently done a poor job of communicating. I was surprised at how many people were unaware that we offered these features:
- Free samples: We offer free samples of all our books! These samples (in PDF format only) contain all the front and back matter of the book, including the table of contents, plus the first two pages of each chapter. If you visit the page in our catalog for a book you don’t already own (or if you’re not logged in to your account), you’ll see a little yellow “sticky note” in the lower-right corner of the iPad frame that holds the book cover. The note says “Free Sample”; click it to download the sample.
- Your library: You can always see what books you’ve purchased from us, re-download any book, or download other formats (PDF, EPUB, or Mobipocket) at any time. To do this, go to our website. If you see “Logged in as your name” at the top, just click the Your Books button to see your library. Otherwise, fill in your email address and password and click Log In. You can also use this link as a shortcut to go directly to your library.
- Contacting authors: Near the end of every one of my books, in the About the Author topic, I include contact information for myself. Most other Take Control authors do the same. If you have a question or comment, use the link provided there to contact us directly. If an author doesn’t include contact information, you can use our general-purpose contact form. (I can’t tell you how many times someone has Googled my name, and then gone to my personal website, and then found my own contact form there, in order to send me a message, when they had my email address in their book all along!)
- Discounts and other special programs: See the comments after question 18 for information about other Take Control features you may not have known about, including discounts of various kinds.
Remember, we’re just people
Take Control Books is part of alt concepts inc., a company with exactly two employees—me (Joe) and my wife (Morgen). We work out of our home. All our authors and editors are freelancers. Most months the business earns enough money to stay in the black, and the occasional extra-good month usually balances out the occasional extra-bad month. But we’re not a mega-corporation with cash to burn or lots of people to throw at every new project or challenge. We’re just ordinary folk doing our best to make a living by helping people understand technology better. We appreciate your support! We like talking to our customers, and we hope you’ll think of us as friends (or at least neighbors). We also hope you’ll be understanding if we can’t accommodate every request, or do so as quickly as you like.
With that, let’s get on to the survey results!
SURVEY QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Note: The graphs may be hard to read on an iPhone screen, especially in portrait orientation. If you’re having trouble seeing them, try this version in Pages for iCloud instead.
1. In general, which broad categories are you interested in reading books about? Check all that apply.
The top two responses here were exactly what we expected. Given the percentages of people who expressed an interest in reading about privacy and security, protecting your data, and digital photography, I would have expected our books on those topics to sell much better. That makes me go hmmmmm. In any case, looks like there’s not much of an audience for those last few categories, and that’s useful to know.
2. Which of the following platforms do you use regularly? Check all that apply.
No surprises here, considering so much of the Take Control audience originated with TidBITS and, to a lesser extent, with Macworld. We will of course continue to publish books on Apple’s platforms, but where it makes sense, we try to include coverage of other platforms too, to make our books useful to the widest possible audience.
PRODUCTS
Some Take Control books cover specific hardware or software products. The next three questions have to do with product-specific books.
3. Which of the following APPLE software products would you potentially be interested in reading a book about? Check all that apply.
Within the Other category, there were quite a few write-in responses for apps we already have books on, such as Pages, Numbers, Photos, Apple Mail, and Preview. A few people said they meant that response to mean they wanted updated copies of those books, but we asked about updates in a later question. I suspect many people were unaware that some of these books our in our catalog already, and we need to do a better job of making that obvious.
Anyway, we hear you loud and clear that you’d like to have a book on Siri and a book on Notes! I’m happy to say we have authors in the early stages of working on books on those two topics already. After we see how well those books do, we’ll consider what topics to tackle next.
4. Which of the following THIRD-PARTY software products would you potentially be interested in reading a book about? Check all that apply.
As with the previous question, the Other category included numerous votes for third-party apps we already have books about (including Adobe Lightroom CC, DEVONthink, 1Password, and Scrivener); the same statements apply.
Note that the scale is different between this question and the last—although Evernote got the most votes, that figure is only a fraction of what the highest-scoring Apple apps from the previous question received.
Unfortunately, because of the comparatively smaller numbers, the responses to this question do not give us a clear mandate. Many of these apps are extraordinarily complex, meaning the books would be long (both in page count and in time to write and edit them). The number of votes don’t convince me that we’d sell enough copies to break even. I’ll also mention in passing that given recent news stories about layoffs at Evernote, I’m not terribly sanguine about the app’s future.
5. Which of the following CLOUD APPS or SERVICES would you potentially be interested in reading a book about? Check all that apply.
Yet again, numerous people asked for books on cloud apps and services we already cover (including Dropbox, iCloud, and Slack).
I was surprised to see so many votes for a book on Gmail. Indeed, that figure made me quite sad, because—speaking both professionally and personally—I have rather strong negative feelings about Gmail. I told the other authors, only half in jest, that if we ever did a book on Gmail it would have to be called Why You Should Not Use Gmail (and How to Quit). I wasn’t surprised to see such a strong showing for WordPress, but that’s another one of those apps that’s fantastically complex. It would be a challenge to do it justice in a Take Control book, and given the number of votes, I’m skeptical that it would be financially viable for us.
PROCESSES
Many Take Control books describe processes—for example, backing up your Mac, organizing your photos, managing your passwords, running a paperless office, or upgrading to a new operating system. The next question involves processes, as opposed to specific products.
6. Which of the following processes would you potentially be interested in reading a book about? Check all that apply.
Networking guru Glenn Fleishman is already hard at work on the #2 topic in this list—managing your Apple ID. I think it’s going to be fantastically useful. Numbers 1 and 3 (file management and using an iPad as a primary computing device) are actively under consideration. I expect we’ll do both at some point, though considering everyone’s schedules, I’m not yet sure when. And we’re considering whether some of these topics should take the form of a conventional book or perhaps a course of some kind.
UPDATES
The next question is about updates to existing Take Control books.
7. Which of the following existing Take Control titles, if any, would you like to see a (paid) update of? Check all that apply.
I deliberately omitted from this list certain titles that are already in the process of being updated, or that will definitely be updated in the near future (for example, Take Control of 1Password and Take Control of Getting Started with DEVONthink 2). I also omitted titles that just haven’t sold well, and that are unlikely ever to be updated (such as Take Control of BBEdit and Take Control of Keynote).
Nevertheless, I was delighted to see that Photos: A Take Control Crash Course was solidly at the top of the list, because Jason Snell is working on a major revision to that book right now! I hope to update Take Control of Your Online Privacy, Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal, and Take Control of Your Digital Legacy over the next half-year or so, and Kirk wants to update his iTunes book when the next major version of iTunes (iTunes 13, we presume) ships. No, we don’t have any idea when that will be. As for the Apple Watch book, we’re going to try to get an update together in the next few months.
FORMATS
People have different learning styles, needs, and preferences. The next three questions ask about various ways in which information might be packaged and used.
8. All things being equal, in what format(s) do you prefer to learn about technology-related topics? Check your top THREE only.
(A lot of people checked more than 3. Grrrr.) Most Take Control books are “medium” books by this scale—between 100 and 300 pages. So yay for us, because that seems to be what you like best. A lot of you are also interested in shorter books, and we’re going to be doing some of those too.
But we realize that a book is not the only way to package information, and not necessarily the one that works best for every person or every topic. We’re having lots of discussions about using video, in various ways, to supplement the text and screenshots we’ve been using to deliver our content for the last 15 years. We also have some ideas about how articles might make their way into the Take Control world, but that’s a bit of a longer-term idea.
9. When you read a Take Control book, do you do so MOST often on:
I was frankly stunned to see that more people read our books on iPads than Macs! And, although I didn’t ask what format you read on your iPad (e.g, PDF or EPUB, typically in the iBooks/Books app), this tells me that we should pay more attention to making high-quality EPUBs. That’s surprisingly tricky, but we’re going to work on it.
As for “Paper, after printing it yourself”…
10. Take Control is considering once again offering printed books, in addition to ebooks. Keeping in mind that a print book would likely cost $5–10 more than an ebook (plus shipping), how would you feel about printed books?
Compared to printed books, ebooks are quicker and easier to create (and update), more portable, easier to search, and less expensive. Most of our customers prefer ebooks, but a significant number of people still prefer to read on paper—and many people print Take Control books themselves. We’d like to offer printed books once again as an option, but before we can do that, we have to come up with a new interior layout, a new cover design, and (most importantly) a new production process that addresses issues like internal cross-references, external links, and indexes—all of which have much different requirements in print than in ebooks. If 12% of our customers buy our books in print, it will be well worth the effort. But it does take time to put all that stuff together. We hope to offer printed books some time in 2019.
MONEY
The next four questions ask about pricing, sales, and payment methods for Take Control books.
11. Take Control books are priced between $5 and $20 (based on length and other factors), with most costing around $15. Do you feel the current prices are:
We were pleased to see that the vast majority of survey respondents thought our books are priced correctly, and that a few even thought they’re a bargain. Book price correlates roughly with length, so that both authors and editors can be fairly compensated in proportion to the time they put into a book. We try to make our pricing (especially for upgrades) as generous as possible, but ultimately we need to feed our families, and given the size of our audience, we can’t accomplish that by selling a 200-page book (which took months to write) for less than $10. Long story short: expect our ebook prices to remain about the same for the near future. (However, we might have shorter books that are less expensive, and we might have other products besides ebooks that are more expensive.)
12. From time to time, Take Control has sales and promotions of various kinds, during which customers can purchase either specific titles or all books at reduced prices. How do you feel about sales?
The responses to this question kind of vexed me, because they do not even remotely correspond to our actual sales figures over the last 15 years. What we’ve seen consistently is that a large majority of our customers wait for sales whenever possible. We sell huge quantities of books during sales—especially 50%-off sales—and at other times of the year, the volume of books purchased has been sharply and steadily decreasing. (I’ll note in passing, however, that the 70.9% of customers who said they’re willing to buy a book at full price closely matches the 68% who said, in question 11, that are books are priced “about right.”)
And look, that’s our fault. By making sales a fairly regular, consistent occurrence, we’ve inadvertently trained our customers to expect them. And that has resulted in, among other things, huge peaks and valleys in our income (which are not good for our cash flow!), frustrated authors whose great new titles don’t see much action, and a loss of interest in new titles by the time the next sale rolls around.
Although we like the brief boost we get from sales, we dislike the huge dips in between, and we’d love to get rid of sales altogether if we could do so in such a way that kept our customers happy. So that leads to the next question…
13. Imagine that Take Control offered a membership program such that you could pay an annual fee (let’s say $15 for the sake of discussion) that entitled you to save 50% on all ebook purchases for the entire year. How would you feel about that?
The idea behind this proposal is basically, what if customers could have a permanent, year-round, 50% off sale? Would that induce them to buy more books, and to buy new titles as soon as they’re released? We suspect it would, but simply cutting all our prices in half wouldn’t have the same effect, because discounts have a more powerful psychological effect in motivating sales than intrinsically lower prices. (Go figure!) So we’re imagining offering that as an option. You can either pay full price for books, as usual, or buy an annual membership for a nominal fee that then lets you purchase any or all of our books over the following year for half off. Our calculations suggest that even though we’ll make less money per sale, we’ll make more overall due to higher volume—and the membership fee is both a bit of insurance in case we don’t, and a nudge to make more purchases (to get your money’s worth).
To spell out why we think the math will be compelling, suppose you buy two $15 books today. Total cost: $30. But imagine you’re about to check out, and we say, “Wait! How would you like to pay exactly the same amount but also get 50% off on all our books for the next year, starting with this order?” So, you’d pay $15 for the membership, and then $7.50 for each of the two books you’re ordering right now—the same $30 you were going to pay anyway. As long as you buy at least $30 in books per year, you’ll at least break even, and you could potentially save hundreds of dollars.
I think it’s likely we’ll try this, but we can’t implement it until our new website is up and running, so it will be well into 2019 before this happens.
14. Given the choice, how would you prefer to pay for most Take Control books?
You can already pay for our books by credit or debit card, or PayPal. But clearly a huge portion of our customers would like to use Apple Pay instead! We’d like that too. Apple Pay makes it both easy and safe to make online purchases, and we’d offer it today if we could. Unfortunately, eSellerate (our current payment processor) doesn’t support Apple Pay, so we can’t offer it until we switch to a new payment processor, and that in turn (like so many things we want to do) requires a new website, because our current setup is hard-wired to use eSellerate. Don’t worry, it’ll happen as soon as we can manage!
COURSES
A number of years ago, we offered a four-part, interactive video course about iPad productivity called Take Control Live: Working with Your iPad. Since then, we’ve thought off and on about offering courses of other sorts, including ones on topics that wouldn’t work as well in book format. What we call a “course” might potentially include any or all of the following: live video presentations, prerecorded videos and screencasts, group discussions/Q&A, “homework” assignments, quizzes, and PDF support materials. The next three questions have to do with courses.
15. In general, would an in-depth course of this sort interest you, assuming the topic was relevant to you?
A lot of people found this question confusing or frustrating, and I’m sorry about that. The chief complaint was that the description I offered was too broad and vague to enable people to form a solid opinion. I haven’t told you what topic this hypothetical course covers, what the exact nature of its format is, or how much it costs. How can you tell me whether you’d be interested?
I was merely trying to find out to what extent our customers are interested in the course model generally. Lots of companies offer online courses on technology topics, and they follow a variety of different presentation and pricing models (compare, for example, Lynda.com and Udemy). We may or may not offer courses, and if we do, I can’t yet say what our model would look like. But we had to start somewhere to begin gauging interest, and this is where we started.
16. If you answered "Yes" or "Maybe" to question 15, what topic(s) would you like to learn about in a course format?
Here are the top 10 responses:
And, as you can see, there were a zillion “Other” choices. So, long story short, this question didn’t tell me much! But that’s OK. I just wanted to find out what sorts of topics people thought they might prefer to learn about in an interactive or multimedia format, as opposed to a book, and…let’s just say the jury’s still out on that one.
17. If you answered "Yes" or "Maybe" to question 15, how much would you be willing to pay for a course like this, assuming the equivalent of about four hours of live or prerecorded video content?
The numbers above are in U.S. dollars. For people who specified a range, I took the top number in the range, so these represent the maximum amounts people would be willing to pay.
Once again, I know I didn’t give you much to go on here, and I get that it’s hard to say how much you’d pay for an abstract something on an undefined topic. What I was looking for was a general sense of how valuable course-like content seemed compared to our ebooks. The sense I was trying to convey is that a course would provide richer content than a book, and that it would likely have some interactive elements as well. Because a course would be more work to create, we imagine that it will cost substantially more than a book. Although these results are far from definitive, they suggest that most of our customers wouldn’t be interested in, say, a $100+ course (regardless of topic or contents).
MISCELLANEOUS
The final three questions didn’t fit into another neat category.
18. Did you know that Take Control offers the following? Check all that apply.
Well, this question was a big FAIL. My intention was that respondents would check all the items they knew about. (That is, I intended a checkmark to mean “Yes, I did know.”) But some people interpreted this to mean they should check only the items they did not know about, and others didn’t understand what to do here at all. I’ll be more careful with how I word questions in the future.
In any case, it’s clear that many people did not know that many of these options exist! And that points to another big failure on our part to communicate clearly on our website. I will be paying careful attention to that stuff during our redesign. We want our customers to know about all the special deals they can take advantage of!
In the meantime, let me run down the details of these items for you right here:
- Discounts for members of Apple user groups: If you’re a member of a MUG (Mac user group) or a similar organization, you can get a 30% discount on any Take Control ebook, at any time! We have a special MUG discount code that shows up in Apple’s official user group newsletter, and we also include it in our own mailings to user group leaders. (It’s the responsibility of each user group to pass along the details to their members.) If you’re in a user group and none of this rings any bells, talk to your group’s leaders and ask them to share this information with you. If you’re a user group leader and your group is not already on our mailing list, we can fix that in a jiffy! Just contact us with your group’s name and location and we’ll add you.
- Discounted classroom copies of our ebooks: If you’re teaching a class based on one of our books—whether that’s in a school, a community group, a club, or even a consulting business—we can offer you significantly discounted class copies of our books (in sets of 10) for your students. To get complete details, fill out our Class Copies form. Note that the books we provide through this program are strictly for class use, and we provide you with a special PDF stamped with the name of your class that you can distribute to your students.
- Bulk purchase discounts for businesses and large organizations: If your company wants to buy hundreds or thousands of copies of any of our books for your employees, you can take advantage of our generous bulk discounts, which start at 20% and go up to 50%, depending on the volume purchased. To take advantage of these prices, don’t go through our public catalog; instead, contact us for complete details.
- Opportunities for businesses to sponsor custom books on their apps or other topics: If your business would like a custom, professionally written and edited Take Control book about an app or product you develop, or a specific topic or area of interest relevant to your customers or employees, we can probably make that happen—we’ve done it many times over the years! We’ve created books that the sponsoring company then resells to the public, or gives away as a promotional tool, or uses internally for employee training, among other applications. We’ll work with you to determine payment and distribution terms that meet your needs, preferences, and budget. Once again, contact us to get the conversation started.
- In-person or live video presentations on Take Control topics for your organization: Most of our authors are happy to give presentations about their books—either in person or by remote video—to user groups and other organizations. If you’re interested in hearing an author talk about a book, your first step should be to contact that author directly; most of us include contact information in our books, in the About the Author topic near the end. (If you can’t find contact information for an author, use our contact form.) Depending on the circumstances, you may pay an author an agreed-upon speaker fee or reimburse them indirectly through book sales.
19. Take Control emails customers about new and updated titles, sales, and other promotions about three times per month on average. How do you feel about this volume of email?
I was relieved to see that two-thirds of our customers are content with our current (average) email volume. Right now, our website and email infrastructure has no way for us to offer more granular control—for example, allowing individual customers to choose their own frequency of email messages, or specifying which particular topics they want to hear about. In the future, after our website redesign, we will investigate ways of making email preferences more flexible.
20. Is there anything else you’d like to tell us or ask us?
There were hundreds and hundreds of responses to this question, ranging from “Thanks and good luck!” to thesis-length treatises. I’ve contacted some people to respond directly to their comments; unfortunately I haven’t had time to email everyone who deserved a response. Although I can’t provide all the free-form answers here, I can mention a few broad categories:
- Good job, thanks, etc.: 327
- I want the thing I said I wanted in one of the survey questions: 32
- Your books are too short, cursory, or basic: 13
- Your books are too long, detailed, or advanced: 18
- You should offer subscriptions: 15
- You should NOT offer subscriptions: 8
- You should do video: 9
- You should NOT do video: 3
- I have complaints about your website: 28
- I have complaints about your email messages: 6
- I have complaints about this survey: 12
- I have complaints about book formatting: 12
- I have complaints about book contents: 11
- Your books are too expensive: 6
- I have thoughts about print books: 12
- Where’s my update? 10
- I have a book idea I didn’t mention elsewhere in the survey: 42
- I want something you’re not going to give me: 28
And then there were the (optional) demographic questions…
What is your AGE range? What is your GENDER?
I hope you won’t take this the wrong way, but it looks like our audience is mostly a bunch of old guys. I wasn’t surprised about the age, but I was surprised about the gender distribution. Huh.
What is your favorite ICE CREAM flavor?
The approximate top-10 ranking was:
- Chocolate
- Vanilla
- Chocolate Chip
- Coffee
- Mint Chocolate Chip
- Caramel
- Strawberry
- Cherry
- Pistachio
- Butter Pecan
I say the ranking above is approximate because many people included multiple flavors, or phrased flavors differently, or in some other way represented their answers in a fashion that made it difficult to count accurately.
I put this question on the survey solely for fun. (And remember, it was optional, like all the other questions.) There was no deeper meaning or ulterior motive. Most of the respondents appeared to take it in that spirit, and boy did we get some opinionated answers! (I found it particularly amusing how many people added “of course” to their favorite flavor.) One person was so offended by this question that they said they’d never fill out a survey for us again. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯