Kathy Sierra wrote a great post back in 2005 called Featuritis vs the Happy User Peak. It’s well worth a read if you’re involved in any sort of product development - software, dog houses, electronic voting machines. The general gist of the post is that adding features does NOT add value - the secret to creating a great product is adding just the right features to give the most value, making them perfect, and then stopping.

Software companies don’t like this. The last company I worked for in the UK had what might have been a great product, but ruined it by continuously piling on feature after feature. They did this so their sales team could say to a customer: “Yes, our product does that too!” The end result was two years of development, a product that kept crashing through lack of testing, a dissatisfied customer base, and an even more dissatisfied work force. And of course, low sales.

To borrow a line from Kathy’s post: “Don’t give them new features just because your competitors have them!”

I’ve tried to follow this advice with PageFour, choosing to add features only when they add value to the product for most users, and impact little on usability. The Search and Merge Pages in the recent release are examples of this. But I haven’t always been so successful in the features I’ve chosen to add. My feeling is that version 1.50 strayed a little off course, with the inclusion of Smart-Edit.

This is a great feature, and I use it all the time. It was designed to identify over-used phrases - something that has always plagued my own writing - and I’ll be running it on this post as soon as I finish. But it’s complicated. And it doesn’t really fit in with the rest of PageFour.

The problem, is that recently I’ve been thinking of numerous additions that could be made to Smart-Edit, making it much more powerful. Each one would benefit a certain proportion of users, but these users would, of necessity, be people who have no problem running complex bits of functionality, adjusting configuration settings, and playing with the features until they obtain the best results. And this is NOT most PageFour users.

PageFour was designed with simplicity in mind, and Smart-Edit, and the extra features I’ve been thinking about, are not simple. But don’t panic! The current incarnation of Smart-Edit will be staying where it is.

So I’ve been considering a spin off product - a product built around Smart-Edit, and incorporating all the extra functionality that would only weaken PageFour. To offer a general outline: the product would be designed for use on a first draft of your 80-100,000 word manuscript, just as you begin editing and revising. As with Smart-Edit, it would not tell you what to do, only highlight areas that you might want to look at in more detail.

I’ve drawn up a list of features it might contain. It’s a very rough and ready list I put together yesterday evening, but should give a taste of what I believe IS achievable through software.

• List of over-used phrases, as with the current incarnation of Smart-Edit.
• Highlight excessive use of certain phrases at the beginning of sentences.
• Flag potentially awkward tags used in dialog. For example: ‘she snarled’, ‘he bellowed’.
• Over us of ‘…’ of ‘-’ in dialog. A lot of amateur writing tends to suffer from an abundance of dialog interruptions through ellipses and dashes.
• Frequency of adverbs in sentences. How many or what proportion of sentences include adverbs? And are multiple or strings of adverbs used in the same sentence?
• Highlight weak qualifiers - such as very, a bit, fairly, quite, slightly.
• Excessive use of The, A and And to begin sentences, as well as There was or There were.
• Highlight redundant words. For example: a cold chill, the end result.
• Use of weak phrases: The fact that - of the (students of the college instead of college students), She began to - He started - appeared to - seemed to, etc.
• Use of ‘then’ in place of ‘and’ or a new sentence - she did this, then she did the other…
• Flag clichés - a trusted servant, a mighty warrior…
• Flag sentences without verbs - excluding dialog, of course.
• Excessive use of punctuation - exclamation marks, for example.

Before anyone leaves an angry comment along the lines of “But Faulkner did that ALL the time!”, I should point out that features like those above, and like Smart-Edit in the current version of PageFour, only point out POTENTIAL problems. It’s always down to the writer to decide if they actually are problems, and make corrections where needed.

The intention would be to make the product fully customisable, with the user capable of editing lists of ‘weak’ words or phrases and saying whether something constitutes a serious problem or not. Creating a separate product independent of PageFour means that the potential user base would be far larger, while PageFour itself would not be contaminated with new and complicated features.

I’m very interested in hearing feedback on this - do you you think it’s a good idea or not? Does it have potential? Would YOU use it? If not, why not? Have I left anything obvious out?

About 6 weeks ago, I noticed a gradual increase in Google traffic to this site. Without revealing precise figures, I’m getting about 4-6 times more hits from Google today than I was only a few months ago.

It’s always difficult to pin down the precise reason for such an increase, as many different factors come in to play. Back in April, I redesigned the site from the ground up. The old site - in all its green ugliness - was the first website I ever designed, and it suffered from many of the more common website design mistakes: poor wording in page titles, no use of header tags (h1, h2, h3 etc.), static content…

It was not designed with search engines in mind, and the traffic reflected this. The redesign addressed these issues, as did pulling the PageFour blog into the site. To this day, I have no idea what possessed me when I decided that hosting the blog under a separate domain was a good idea.

Most of the ‘new’ Google traffic is very relevant to PageFour, with search values such as “creative writing software” and “software for writing novels” appearing regularly. What has surprised me though, is the high number of people searching for “page four software” rather than “PageFour.” This breaking of the name in two is a VERY recent phenomenon, and I don’t know where or how it began.

Someone, somewhere, must be writing about PageFour in this way, or speaking very slowly when they talk about it, pausing after the ‘page’ to catch their breath before moving on to the ‘four.’ I’m convinced of this, because these searches only began two months ago. To date, I have had no luck in tracking them down.

The title of this post is a signpost to Google - just in case any of these potential PageFour users have difficulty finding me.

By far the most common ‘useless’ search value is a variation of “strikeout shortcut”, with MS Word often appearing alongside. I can’t help but feel there’s a message here for the Microsoft Word development team.

On a lighter note, I’m always amused to come across a search value such as “pagefour license crack.” Those cracks may or may not be out there, but if they are, does anyone really believe they’d be hosted on the PageFour site?

It’s always difficult to work out what you should charge for software. In one sense, as a digital download, the software has no ‘real‘ value. Despite what Microsoft or the record industry would have us believe, digital goods, delivered down a high speed connection, are not the same as a DVD you’d buy in a record shop or a loaf of bread freshly cooked at the local bakery.

The costs are mostly in the development, and once the product is completed, tested, and reasonably stable, that’s pretty much it. Sure, you have website costs and bandwidth costs - all ridiculously cheap these days, as well as support costs - not that high when you have a stable, easy to understand product.

Which brings me to PageFour. Over the past year I’ve played around with the pricing many times - all in an effort to determine which figure produces the greatest return. Apologies for my capitalist tendencies. The conclusion I’ve come to is that for small software products such as PageFour, there is a $30 price barrier.

Moving beyond the barrier, even by as little as $5 seems to have a seriously inhibiting effect on buyers. I’m not sure why this is, as $30 is not a vast amount of money, but the barrier does exist. People seem to hesitate, as if what might have been an impulse buy at $29.95 suddenly becomes cause for serious consideration at $34.95.

With that in mind, the price of PageFour will be returning to a more modest $29.95. The crowds have spoken.

The first thing I would like to say is that I am not an expert in website design, and I am not an expert in Search Engine Optimization. The second thing I would like to say, is that neither are many people who claim to be.

Over the past year I have made so many mistakes with my own website, many of which I only learned about and corrected recently. And the site is still far from perfect. When starting out, I visited forums all over the internet - forums on web design, on SEO, on small businesses, and forums on the pitfalls facing startups.

What I’ve learned from these forums is that a HUGE proportion of the ‘web experts‘ who offer advice are anything but. They don’t know that much more than you or I. Sure, they can offer yes-or-no answers to basic HTML questions, or tell you why Wordpress is better than Blogger, regurgitating the same old discussions you’ve already read twenty times elsewhere.

Anyone can claim to be an expert or a professional when it comes to SEO. Search Engine Optimization is a new field, and without being an expert yourself, it’s difficult to know who’s talking crap and who’s actually speaking the truth.

So before you decide to listen to an expert you meet on a forum; before you pay them money to ‘redesign‘ your website and get you listed in pole position on Google, or, God forbid, ‘submit‘ your site to search engines - take my advice and pay a simple, brief visit to THEIR website.

I’ve drawn up a small checklist of my own that I use to filter the posers from the real thing. It’s by no means comprehensive but I’ve based it on my own experiences and the mistakes that I’ve made. You would be amazed how many SEO ‘experts’ fail many or all of these tests. (more…)

Sales of PageFour have been encouraging over the past few months. It seems that word is slowly spreading as more and more people try it out. In the early days, soon after version 1 was released, people tended to stumble across the product through Google search strings relating to writing, or via software download sites. The numbers were never great, and sales slow to come.

Over the past six months, a large proportion of visitors who reached the site, did so through typing ‘PageFour‘ into Google - not blind searches, but specifically looking for the product. The release of the FREE EDITION and the removal of the 30 day trial limit back in September may also have contributed. As for the download sites, they still play their part, but only in a small way - providing incoming links which help with Google Page Ranking. In terms of numbers of downloads, they account for very few.

So where in the world are the buyers coming from?

As expected when it comes to buying downloadable software, the largest proportion is from the US. The figures that have surprised me over the past year are the comparatively high number of sales to Australia, as well as some of the ‘other‘ countries that pop up.

PageFour is not friendly to languages other than English, either in terms of menus and documentation, or dictionaries and spell-checkers - which is why for a product aimed at creative writers, sales to non-English speaking countries always come as a bit of a surprise.

These countries include Sweden and Norway, Mexico and Brazil, Germany, Spain and India. Over the coming weeks, I’ll be looking into providing friendlier options for those writing in other languages.

Over the past year, there have been a number of enquiries about the possibility of a Mac version of PageFour. My response has always been that the probability of releasing a version for the Mac is very low. I’m a Windows developer, and have been for many years. Despite having a lot of respect for the Mac software community, I have never been tempted to join. My training and working life have been focused primarily on Big Business software - an area that tends to impinge little on Mac users.

Every time someone queries me on the Mac, I point them to Scrivener, a neat piece of software, written - like PageFour - for creative writers. For many months, Scrivener was available as a free beta, as the product was still undergoing development, but version 1.01 of the completed version has just been released.

Definitely worth checking out if you’re a Mac user, as it does share some features with PageFour (the use of Snapshots being the most obvious). You can download it here, or check out the authors blog here.

Most of the referrals for PageFour come from the actions of other people. Now, this may be simply because we’re more inclined to believe something if the person talking about it does not have a vested interest. If you hear someone saying ‘Buy my product, it’s the business,‘ you’re not going to believe them, are you? Why would you? They want your money. If, on the other hand, your favourite blogger or best friend says to you ‘Check this out, it’s cool,‘ you probably will. I know I do.

I’ve bought books, CDs, DVDs, even kitchen appliances, because strangers I’ve never met raved about them on their blogs. I don’t think I’ve ever bought anything in response to an add in a newspaper or magazine. I take Amazon reviews far more seriously than the blurb on the back of a book, or the ‘expert‘ opinion in a newspaper, and I do this because these people have no reason to lie to me. Similarly, user reviews on www.download.com mean far more to me than ‘What our users say‘ pages on software web-sites.

The last television I bought was a 26″ wide screen Panasonic. It cost almost £200 less than the equivalent Sony model, and I bought it because all the user reviews I found online said it was better than its more expensive (though stronger branded) competitor.

Like all small web businesses, I track my referrals religiously. Dodgy Warez sites aside, most incoming links come from blogs and message boards, both of which I have little or no control over. Of course, as soon as new links appear, I’m faced with the question of whether I should actively participate in the discussion of my own product, or simply step back and let nature take its course? When anyone speaks about PageFour, chances are I know about it. Searches on Technorati, and Google Alerts, make this a simple, even daily process.

NaNoWriMo is kicking off next month, and registration has already opened. For the next two months, the NaNo message boards will be the most active writing community on the web, with hundreds and even thousands of users online at any moment. In situations like this, I’m always faced with a dilemma. Taking part in the discussions, starting and participating in threads etc, is not allowed for commercial reasons, and this is as it should be. Should I pretend to be someone else and drop links, or wait until a PageFour user does it for me?

I see opportunities like this all the time and ask myself ‘Should I really do that?‘ or ‘Is it quite ethical?‘ And the answer is no. But does everyone else play by the same rules? Am I just being naive, and should I grow a thicker skin? Are all marketers really liars?

I’ve never written a review for PageFour, which in a way makes all the genuine user reviews that much sweeter. But would I make more money if I were less honest? I’ll be watching the NaNo boards carefully over the next couple of months, but I might be watching in vain.

I knew a guy years ago who began every other sentence with the phrase: “As the man said.” I kept asking him who this man was, because for a stranger nobody had ever met he certainly had a lot to say for himself. Blind advice is easy to come by, but when you actually break down these words of wisdom and ask yourself are they true? the answer is often no.

They say love is blind. They also say you should work on something you’re passionate about. They can’t all be right.

Most software startups fail, and it seems to me they fail because they design the wrong product. They design products they’re passionate about, not products anybody else is passionate about. These one man shops work on pet projects out of love, and often turn their feelings into crazy market projections and dreams of wild commercial success. For over a year now I’ve been hanging out with the multitude of startup owners who frequent the Joel on Software message boards, where everybody offers advice and blunt criticism to their fellow passionate software designers. Most of the readers of this forum are working on failed or failing projects out of love.

Should you be passionate about a commercial product you’ve just started working on?

I don’t believe so. Anyone who’s been in love knows it makes us do crazy things. Our thoughts turn irrational. We make assumptions about the person we love that a sane man would call insane. We make allowances for defects and character failings. The same is true of software design. Passionate programmers assume everyone else will be just as passionate about their product. How could they not love it just as you do? It’s so cool it leaves Microsoft in the shade. It’s sure to be the next big thing, because in your own mind it already is the biggest thing.

Over the past year, I’ve come to the conclusion that when designing new software, it’s far better to go for an arranged marriage. Arranged marriages often succeed because the two parties involved are compatible beyond the lingering gaze across a crowded room, because the passion often comes later when the relationship is established and has proven itself. If you fall in love with your wife or husband a year down the road, you know their failings just as well as their strengths. You’re not blinded by passion.

I designed PageFour because I wanted to. Commercial considerations were pushed to one side as I stumbled on in blissful ignorance, convinced that my own love of the product would be reflected in the market as a whole. I made the fatal and all too common mistake of working on something I was passionate about. The response was lukewarm. Feedback was encouraging, but rarely translated into a love to match my own, and only very rarely into sales. No matter how good the product, it’s difficult to compete in a crowded market where many of your competitors are free. The incentive to try something new is simply not there. A more commercially aware mind would have seen this straight away and considered the wisdom of designing yet another word processor, however unique and different some of its features may be.

Over the past couple of months I’ve been researching product number two. Note the use of the word researching. It’s a novel concept for me that has nothing to do with passion and love. I’ve learned my lesson, and it was a lesson worth learning.

The question in my mind now is what to do with PageFour. Should I let it carry on, earning a small amount each month and building up an equally small user base? Or should I release it as freeware, the place most passionate software truly belongs, and build up a much larger user base?

Ten days ago, PageFour was picked up by a series of British computer magazines, nost notably Computer Active, What PC, and Computing. When I say picked up - it featured as a recommendation on their software download sites and appeared in the newsletter they send out to subscribers. This has resulted in a large increase in downloads, sales, and enquiries. My first thought when the figures shot up was that yet another dodgy download site in Hong Kong or Russia had found me.

PageFour ships as a thirty day trial version, so it’s too early to say how effective this push will turn out to be, but even now, ten days on, the download figures remain high and sales keep trickling in.

I played no part in this whatsoever.

Just over a week ago I attempted a marketing push of my own, where I offered free copies to anyone prepared to blog about or mention the product on their web-site. The plan was to generate some sort of buzz around PageFour, as up to now it had had limited exposure, popping up on blogs and discussion boards only rarely.

They succeeded. I didn’t.

The strategy had merit, as other companies had tried similar drives before. A few months ago, a company called Axosoft released their flagship product for five dollars, with all the money going to the American Red Cross. They shipped thousands of copies over a three day period and appeared on the front pages of del.ic.ious and Reddit.

So the question is, why did I fail where Computer Active succeeded? They had little to gain from promoting a small software product owned by another company, whereas I built PageFour and invested much time and energy in making it as perfect as possible.

What it boils down to is that they have a voice that is heard, and I don’t. Sending a targeted newsletter with a list of new software recommendations to people who’ve specifically asked you to do so, is very different from standing on a soapbox in the middle of an empty square and offering your product to a busy world.

If no one is listening, then it doesn’t matter what you say or how loud you say it.

Marketing was never my thing. I’ve posted here before about the major shortcomings of small software companies; that we understand the developing of the product all too well, but that what comes next - the hard sell - is where so many of us fall down.

Every few days I get an email from someone telling me how much they love PageFour, how it’s so much better than other software packages aimed at writers, such as Dramatica, Treepad, and such. Downloads are increasing, and sales have definitely picked up, but it’s all happening very slowly, and for this I can only blame myself.

There’s never been any real momentum building around the product - no buzz. It’s had mentions on the odd discussion board, and an appropriate number of downloads as a result, but that interest is rarely maintained once the initial posts become old.

I’ve been considering offering free licenses to anyone who blogs about PageFour.

Similar strategies have been tried before by other software companies, and with mixed results. Recently, a company called Axosoft shifted over 2,500 copies of its flagship product by offering them for five dollars a copy, with the five dollars going to the American Red Cross. This generated huge interest and featured on many prominent blogs, as well as leading to a front page post on del.icio.us.

So the question is, could this strategy work? The product is strong enough now to come under any form of scrutiny, so I’m not particularly worried about people trying it out and hating it.

Is there a downside?

There is no direct link from PageFour’s commercial web-site to this blog, so any offer made here would be unlikely to prevent genuine buyers from paying for the product. The only negative I can see would be a slow or non-existent response to such an offer, and though that may be a little embarrassing, it would hardly have an adverse effect on the business itself.

PageFour needs exposure - not enough people have heard about it, so not enough people are trying it out. An offer of a free license to anyone mentioning the product on their blog could provide this exposure, and as long as there was a time limit on the offer, I don’t see how it could have a negative impact.

What’s the worst that could happen?