Week 4 progress

This week, I've published a more detailed version of the book's outline: https://dev-concepts.dev/table-of-contents/

That took me two evenings, but I think it's worth the effort, given that it provides much more information about what the book will include (it's actually much more than that, but it was too long already :p). I've tried to convey the essence of the book and made sure that the page is working fine for different devices.

I was tempted to create a Google doc to HTML outline renderer, but I managed to resist the urge. Still, I've published a blog article about how to create a table of contents using HTML/CSS (https://medium.com/javascript-in-plain-english/creating-a-table-of-contents-with-html-and-css-7443b185d544) ;-)

I've also estimated the page count for all chapters, which made me realize that I plan to write > 1K pages for this book, which is H-U-G-E. But since I already wrote and published an 800+ pages book, I tend to think that I'll handle it ;-)

This forced me to adapt the anticipated release date from March 2021 to December 2021 (yes, ouch!), because I have to stay realistic. It'll take time and a lot of effort.

I've also improved the product page on Gumroad (https://gumroad.com/l/DevConcepts) to include a FAQ, links to the complete outline, and, more importantly, a revamped pricing. Since the page count is much higher than anticipated, I've split the product into multiple variants for specific reader profiles that I've imagined.

Now I have:

• A full edition will all parts
• A basics edition for aspiring developers
• An advanced edition for those who already acquired the basics (going towards back-end, front-end, secure coding, etc)
• A back-end edition for aspiring back-end developers
• A front-end edition for aspiring front-end developers
• An architect edition for those who prefer to stay in their ivory towers ;-)

I didn't want to have too many options and I think that I found the right balance between "1 product for each part + 1 for the whole" and "everything or nothing at all".

Estimating the price for the different parts was a tad difficult, but here's what I did:

• I looked at the price per page of many similar books (retail & self-published) to find a reasonable mean and settled on 0.10€/page
• I calculated the raw price for each part based on its estimated page count
• I rounded up/down those prices to get something more meaningful
• I summed up the prices per edition of the book
• I've set an early-bird price reduction of 30% (gotta start somewhere!)

To finish up, I've rounded the prices again and reduced them to the .99th percentile (because it's a classic "trick" I guess :p)

Finally, I've published a new edition of my newsletter to share some news about the project (and other news): https://mailchi.mp/dfa8976880d4/developassions-newsletter-13

Now, I can focus on writing for a while :)

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