If you have even a passing interest in marketing yourself or your product on the internet, you need to know who Seth Godin is, and you need to understand his message.

A good introduction can be found in a speech he gave at Google last month titled ‘All Marketers are Liars.’ It’s a forty minute video and well worth watching.

Should the speech hold your attention, consider following it up with his many published books, blog, and latest online venture Squidoo.

If J.K. Rowling is writing true to form, the final Harry Potter book should hit the shelves in a little over a year. But what if she’s suffering from a severe case of writers block? What if the words just will not come, and she’s down to a page every three weeks? Her core fan base could find themselves married with 2.4 kids before a drastically abridged 110 page novelette lands in the bookstores in 2015.

It could happen. Think of all the poor traumatized fans out there, not to mention the children who also read her work, all clinging to the belief that this year they’ll finally get their Hogwarts fix. Wouldn’t it be great if we knew how she was really doing - straight from the horses mouth?

Now, I can take or leave Harry Potter. Like many of us, I’d kind of like to see what happens at the end, but I don’t lose any sleep over it. We all know the good guys will win and the bad guys will lose. The only real question is: Which of the good guys will go out in a blaze of glory alongside Moldywarts?

Anita Blake is another story entirely. If I had a first born, I’d sacrifice the little mongrel for the next volume in the series. After all, the world is seriously over populated, and kids are two a penny. The same cannot be said for quality literature about vampires, werewolves, and necromancers. When it comes to the strange and unusual world of vampire fiction, Laurell K. Hamilton truly is Queen of the Damned.

She had a bad day yesterday, failing to produce a single page, but Wednesday and Thursday combined made up for it with a staggering output of 28 pages. She’s about 2 days away from completing her next Merry Gentry novel, and the question in all our minds is: Can she get it done by Monday? Her promotional tour for the thirteenth Anita Blake novel kicks off on Monday, so it’s all hands on deck to knock out those final pages before she hits the road.

 We know all this, because she tells us. Her blog gives almost daily progress reports on everything she’s doing. Granted, the web-site will win no awards for artistic beauty, and the many pictures of her dogs … well, they’re just pictures of dogs.Compare the slickness of J.K. Rowling’s official web-site, with the blogger next door look favoured by Laurell K. Hamilton. Rowling’s is an over engineered, impossible to navigate, directionless piece of drivel, obviously created by a web design company too caught up in the fame of their client to produce a normal, usable web-site. And do we get to see a picture of her dog? Not a chance.

Laurell K. Hamilton’s blog, for all its amatuer design, tells us all a die hard fan wants to know - how that next book is really coming along.

Fingers crossed ’till Monday. Get that book finished.

They say that if you give something away for free today, you can’t charge for it tomorrow - that you create an expectation that it will always be free. I’m not so sure of this.

About five years ago I began reading the New York Times online. After 9/11, I quickly become immersed in the opinions of Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd, and their fellow opinion makers. Love them or hate them, they seemed at the time to be the sole voices of dissent in a crazy world. When TimesSelect was introduced a few months ago, and my access to free content was free no more, I grumbled like so many others - but I took out my credit card and paid the money.

I was a junkie. I’d become dependent on ‘the reality-based community,‘ and I couldn’t give it up.

David Webber is a best selling science fiction author. His books about Honor Harrington are often described as Horatio Hornblower in space, and each new volume is an immediate best seller. I discovered him about a year ago after following a link to the Baen Free Library, from where ten of his novels are available to read or download for free.

I began by reading On Basilisk Station, the first volume in the Honor Harrington series. It was a fantastic read, and I wanted more. The problem was, of the seven or eight books in the series, only two were downloadable for free. So I turned to Amazon, and without grumbling this time, paid the money.I’d gotten hooked, and I wanted more.

Kelley Armstrong is another best selling author who treats her fans to freebies with no expectation of future revenues. After buying her first novel, I turned to her web-site to discover three prequel novels set in the same universe, about the same characters. These novels were unedited, but complete works, never published and not available to purchase.

After quickly devouring the free content, I again turned to Amazon and bought the next paperback in the series.

So what is there to learn from all this?

My opinion is that it comes down to how valuable non-paying subscribers or users are. If the product or service you provide is always free, with no prospect of revenue, then you gain nothing by having a thousand or a million users. Both David Weber and Kelley Armstrong however, are building a larger fan base by providing free downloads, and enhancing sales of their other books as a result.

When I released PageFour I knew there was a good chance it would not be a commercially viable product, but I wanted to write it anyway. Over the past few months, referrals from dodgy warez sites, hawking the illegal cracked version of the software have been ten times higher than all other referrals combined.

So, would it be better to have ten thousand people using PageFour for free, or five hundred fully paid and licensed users? I’m honest enough to admit that the thought of ten or a hundred thousand people using and enjoying my software is a huge ego trip, but that doesn’t pay the rent.

So yesterday I got a mention on Seth Godin’s blog, and the guy goes and spells my name wrong. How hard is it to spell Darren anyway?

I should point out that though I did bring the Technorati link to his attention, the choice of the Heidi Klum article was his not mine - an obvious attempt to shirk responsibility for dodgy content. I was reading something far more intellectually stimulating - honest.

It’s an interesting link I came across on the English language version of the Der Spiegel web-site. Pick an article and scroll to the bottom of the page. There’s a Technorati link to Blogs discussing this story, which opens the main Technorati links page, displaying every blog with a link back to the article in question.

For a major news site to link to external blogs in this way is new. Many news sites have attempted to guide discussion of articles from within their own sites, but none to my knowledge have provided such a clear path to voices and opinions beyond their control.

Now if only the New York Times, Guardian, and all the rest followed suit.

My TV remote has twenty nine buttons I’ve never used; the VCR has thirty; the DVD player twenty six. And before you ask - yes I really did count them all.

There’s a name for this kind of excess: it’s called featuritis, and it pops up in all sorts of design failures. I stumbled across an interesting article on The Featuritis Curve the other day that goes a long way to explaining why we have to endure this.

Good designs are obvious. When aesthetic and functional beauty combine, the result is not just pleasing to the eye, but a pleasure to use. This is why the iPod is so popular. Chances are it’s not the best value for money - there are probably other music players that produce a better sound, have a longer battery life, or have a whole raft of additional features - but the iPod looks like a work of art and is simple and straight forward to use.

When have you ever heard someone boast that they couldn’t program their iPod?

So who should we be designing for anyway? The 98% who use a small number of features all the time, or the 2% who use advanced features once a week? Wouldn’t it be a whole lot simpler if my TV remote had a single advanced button that opened a menu for all those quirky, unused features?

Make no mistake here - you’ve never used those mysterious buttons either, and you probably don’t know anyone who has.

Software is often designed in the same way, for the same 2% of users. Feature after feature is added, each just as prominent as the one before, with little thought given to the complexity this adds to the product as a whole.

At the nine to five over the past few weeks, we’ve been putting the finishing touches to a new product aimed at the business market. It’s the sum of eighteen months work for four programmers - plenty of time and resources to produce a first class piece of work. But it’s not first class. Dialog after dialog contains features, options, and checkboxes that no one really understands. The poor unfortunate writing the help file has to suffer every time he asks for an explanation of feature X. In some cases, even the person who designed the feature can’t explain it without re-reading his own code, and even then the explanation can be patchy.

This isn’t funny, it’s critical. Complexity like this is nothing to be proud of. But why does it happen?

You can chant ‘keep it simple‘ until you’re blue in the face, and everyone around you will nod their head in agreement. The problem is, we all have a different perception of what simple means. Programmers are geeks; they belong to the 2% who use all those weird buttons on the TV remote, and for many of them these features are absolutely essential. The sales and marketing types want to be able to say that their product is better than the competition because it can also be used to fry an egg, or do your kid’s homework. But that does not make it better.

Features are not important, it’s the product as a whole that matters. Does it do what it was designed to do, and does it do it fantastically well? Does it look good, run smoothly, and behave intuitively? If it doesn’t, then all the features in the world will not save you.

More features does not equal more sales. More features does not make for happier customers. More features will not make your product better than the competition.

PageFour has reached the stage where featuritis first raises its head. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been putting together a future development plan, and my focus throughout has been on identifying those mysterious buttons that so few of us ever use. Only time will tell if I’ve succeeded.

With the release of version 1.29 of PageFour, complete with one change to a single line of code, the crackers have returned.

My personal opinion of the people downloading my software from these illegal sites is that they’re one candle shy of a decent birthday cake. If I were giving the product away for free, they probably wouldn’t touch it. After all, freeware is just so common! As soon as they realise they can steal something other people pay for, and do so from a shady web-site with Mandarin text, PageFour suddenly becomes hot property.

I can just picture the emails flying to one dank bedroom after another. “Check this out. You can use it for that novel you always wanted to write about life in a twelfth century Cistercian monastery!”

Get a life guys!

Still, some of these sites have a halfway decent pagerank, so the links do perform one useful service.

Over the holiday period I had a series of meetings with my Marketing and Security specialists to discuss the way forward for PageFour. My failure to take Seth Godin’s crown as marketing man of the year, coupled with the illicit activities of a group of bored hackers with too much time of their hands, had led me to seek out professional help.

I turned to my very own dynamic duo.

Finola - a woman of thirty some years, with a pleasing disposition and a healthy appreciation for well cooked turkey - is an expert at explaining marketing to those of us all too comfortable with concepts such as: ‘the product will sell itself.‘ She has also been known to explain colour to the blind.

Playing Batman to her Robyn was Gerry, a hotshot detective from the city of Waterford. Gerry holds the criminal element at bay with the power of his chiseled chin and no nonsense attitude, earning the grudging respect of the criminal underclass along the way.

Did I mention they’re my cousins? Of course, they were still paid handsomely for their time with a pat on the back and a firm handshake.

I listened and I learned.

_______________


In deciding to attack this marketing thing head on, I began by identifying who I was trying to sell PageFour to. Before you laugh or state the obvious, I know this should have been done months ago. But like many a programmer before me I practice my own unique form of logic; a logic that makes a kind of sense only to me.

Up until recently, I thought I was selling PageFour to ‘writers.‘ Thanks to Finola, the loose term ‘writers‘ has been replaced by ten individual customer categories; each one with their own needs, their own places to hang out, and most importantly - their own wallets.

Of these ten categories of PageFour user, four have the potential for spawning spin off products. I know what you’re thinking, and you’d be wrong - the spin off concept is not unique to the CSI universe, it does have a place in the world of software development as well.

Over the next few weeks I’ve decided to concentrate on four of these ten categories:

1. Novelists and aspiring writers
2. Fan fiction writers over the age of 18 (note the level of detail in this description)
3. Diary and Journal keepers
4. Notebook users in a business context

See if you can spot the two possible spin off products in the above list. Answers on a postcard please. The first three correct answers will each receive my best wishes for the year ahead.

Most PageFour users already fall into one or more of these categories - I simply had the good fortune of attracting their attention under the much looser description of ‘writers.‘

All I have to do now is come up with a plan of action for each of these groups. Now, let me just find Finola’s phone number …

If you could choose your name, would you choose the one you were given?

I have a grey haired aunt I’ve been calling Sheila all my life. Yesterday I discovered her name is actually Julia. Now, strange as this may seem, it’s not all that unusual for the women in my mother’s family. Jenny is really Jane, Lily was born Margaret, Nancy is Anne, and Joan was once Josephine.

So what’s in a name anyway?

Sure, Josephine has that whole Napoleonic thing going for it, but does it really compare to Ingrid Bergman in a shiny suit of armour? Margaret may have the feel of a grand Faustian drama, but I’m betting Lily the drag queen has much more fun.

Why don’t more of us choose our own name? We choose our friends; we choose our lovers; we choose the clothes we wear; we pretty much choose the lives we live; but till the day we die, most of us carry the name we were given years ago.

I scratched my head for days trying to come up with a name for PageFour.

Naming a child is easy - there are a finite number of names to choose from. Unless you’re a rock star or a football player, in which case naming your poor unfortunate after a New York suburb is quite acceptable. But how do you pick a name for a piece of software?

You could name it for what it does. But the software world is riddled with products of suspect quality called Word, Journal something or other, and Novel whatever. You could name it Fred, but that’s even stranger than naming your child Brooklyn.

Or maybe not. Fred does have a certain gritty charm; and let’s face it, we all know someone called Fred. I could make a killing every Christmas. ‘Fred - Novel Writing Software‘ could become the new pair of socks for aspiring writers the world over whose parents called them Fred.

I chose a practical name that sounded neat. PageOne was already taken by cheap bookshops on every high street in the country. PageTwo sounded just a little like settling for second best. PageThree? Well, like many an Irish person, I often have trouble with those ‘th’s,’ so that was never going to work. PageFour was the one for me.

Four is a strong, respectable number - clearly much better than three, but at the same time not as pretentious as five. I can live with PageFour.

Now, time to turn my attention to Darren.

There was a very interesting article on Hard Work on sfgate.com way back in July. I have a habit of copying any slightly alternative pieces I stumble across on my browsing journeys, and re-visiting them later.

Anyway, the gist of the article was that this belief that hard work is all there is - that working flat out at your nine to five is what you should be doing with your life - is no more than a crazy myth born out of the American Puritan work ethos.

Now I’m not American - I’m an Irishman living in London. But even on this side of the Atlantic, working hard for 40 years for company after company is seen as the rational, responsible, expected course.

Why would anyone want to live like this?

My corporate journey began just over 6 years ago, and it took only four of those years for me to begin pulling my hair out.

Sit still for a moment, and think ahead twenty years. Yes, there will be flying cars, and yes, you will probably be able to download your brain into a computer and live forever; but where will you really be? Will you be in a position to look back on the previous twenty years and say: “Wow, what a life!”

Why should we work all those years for some nameless faceless corporation? Why is it important to abandon our dreams so that we can afford the larger mortgage and the second car? Because make no mistake - that is what so many of us are doing. We’re giving up our dreams for a second car.

I read a piece on a stranger’s blog the other day, where she described how after losing her boring temp job, she went out and fulfilled a dream by busking on the New York subway. Now there’s something you can look back on in twenty years and say: “What a life!”

So that’s what I’m doing - not busking, simply saying that the nine to five is no longer good enough, and that I really don’t want a second car. Or a first car for that matter - anyone like to buy an eight year old Ford Fiesta? Never failed an MOT!

I want to design my own things, and build my own things. And I’ve already started.

I want to look back in twenty years and say …

Paul Graham, in his book Hackers and Painters, wrote:

To make something good, you have to be thinking, “wow, this is really great,” not “what a piece of shit; these fools will love it.”

Many years ago, my day job consisted of working on a piece of software for the business market that I considered to be a piece of shit. Now, this is not the best opinion to have of the product you spend forty hours a week working on, and it would be true to say that holding that view did not help me add anything really great to the design of the product.

To design well, you must passionately believe that what you are working on is really great, and that even if it never sells a million copies, or even a single one, it is still really great.

Four months ago I went part time at my current nine to five to work on my own ideas. PageFour began life as a personal project, born out of my own frustrations with MS Word. I wanted to design a word processor that placed the emphasis on words; a word processor that made life easier for creative writers; a word processor without a single piece of business oriented functionality. I wanted to design a word processor for the way I worked.

I’m writing this in PageFour now, and I think it’s really great.

Since I began working in earnest on something I felt passionate about, my working day has gotten easier, my designs are better, and the new ideas that have been absent for the past year have started to flow again. I have a list of projects I can’t wait to start work on next year, and every one of them has the makings of a great project.