Want a free sample of my new book? No? Oh. Well. Uh. Right. My BookFunnel Campaign disaster.

Do you know what people want?

It’s helpful to have an inkling.

I finally set up my first mailing list sign-up page with a sample of my upcoming book “Every Single Day.” It was a lot more work than I thought and the feedback I got was very helpful … to the point where I need to change quite a bit of how I did things.

Want to see it live? Here’s the actual sign-up page: Every Single Day Book Launch Team!

First off, as was clearly stated by the defense at the hearing of the case of “Charbonneau v. Those Who Are Prepared,” I was not prepared. I was just winging it. I wanted to “see what happens.” I think I’ll start a new company called “Let’s See What Happens.” Yes, that’s exactly what I need: a new company.

But that’s OK. I sent the email to a handful of trusted advisors to do exactly that: see what happens.

The feedback I got basically said, “It’s a good thing you didn’t send this to everyone you know.”

But this is why I do things. This is even a perfect example of an Every Single Day strategy: do, fix, improve, do again. It’s an old Silicon Valley technique: iterate. Just do it and make it better on the next round.

See below for some of the feedback I got and then some screenshots of the process. If you’d like to try this on your own, you can do it here. Enjoy!

Here’s a sampling of feedback on my BookFunnel / MailerLite campaign:

• What do you mean with you get back to me about the pre-order of the book and leaving a review? Aha, lack of clarity as to what, exactly, I’d like people to do and when.
• This looks great and all the links work correctly! Clearly a seasoned book reading pro!
• I tried to download the teaser. I guess it works (I asked for a mobi because there’s not PDF available. And I received an email with the mobi, can’t open it though.) So you don’t have a PDF version? Is it crystal clear? This reader even has a Kindle (that’s why he’s asking for a mobi file) and still couldn’t figure it out. It needs to be simple, simple, simple. Oh, and easy.
• I’m still not sure about asking for help and not giving the ebook for free, but I’m sure you know what you’re doing. I love that he assumes I know what I’m doing. What he’s getting at is why I’m not offering the entire book for free and just a sample. He has a good point. My thinking was to give people something that they could easily and quickly get through to just get an idea of what the book was about.
• This is unclear to me. Yeah, well that’s not good.

Another one I happened to be talking to on the phone and I desperately tried to get the BookFunnel file onto his phone and we just couldn’t do it. He didn’t have the Kindle app, he couldn’t figure out what to do with an Epub file and he gave up. This was someone who really, really wanted to read my book and he couldn’t make it happen.

This is along the lines of the guy who wanted the PDF. I’m not sure why Vellum doesn’t make a PDF, maybe it’s truly for uploading to the publishing houses, I don’t know.

Onward and upward!