Learning by doing- Jumped into it with 1,000 book order

[TrillAmbition]

This week I ordered 1,000 copies of my children's book "Bitcoin saves the world".

I set up a landing page on

Bitcoin Saves The World

Illustrated children's book to help them learn how, when and why Bitcoin was created in an easy to follow storybook, full of colorful illustrations that bring this revolutionary technology to life.

bitcoinsavestheworldbook.com

Currently I'm serving the kindle version while I wait for the printed version to land. In the mean time I am setting up a store front for accepting crypto payments for physical and digital copies of the book. (The quality along with direct crypto payments is a skew in a market saturated with low quality politically charged books)

I jump straight into the publishing of the book as I have ambitions of being able to push more content out thought direct sales in finance / crypto space. Biggest way to learn is by doing with money on the line. This forced me outside my comfort zone and to re think some limiting beliefs i have about digital marketing.

I learned a lot in regards to printing and struggling at the moment with learning a lot of the digital ads front. I signed up for a fulfilment venter as I have a couple of other digital widgets that I have prototypes getting made (I'll post on those later)

I am posting here to keep myself accountable and provide my lessons as I learn them through updates.

UPDATE 11/6/2020​

Printing needed a couple of changes to the cover as my trim was the wrong size than I originally uploaded. This is due to me having exported the files from a different application than indesign. Lessons learned and won't make that mistake in the future.

I ran into some issues with facebook ads. My account was frozen and I need to provide government ID to be able to unfreeze it or I become ineligible for ads on the platform indefinitely. I have not used the platform in years so no clue how much it has changed in the time being.

Twitter ads seem to be pretty straightforward. I am running a $100 ad campaign to try a couple of different strategies and see if any of the clicks convert to sales.

I am going to run a really small kdp ads budget to get a feel for the platform but I don't believe it will be a good ROI.

Once the merchant store I am putting together is up I can also reach out to bigger stores who deal in the niche space and work out whoelesale/affiliate opportunities for the. I have a list of influencers within the space that might be a good fit for affiliate marketing to get the initial traffic in.


Challenges I am facing right now:
I have been in the space for a long time but do to the nature of the space most of the work happens in different handles and identities so being able to use past reputations is not there. So starting from 0 on all the accounts. This should change once I have an established presence and some sales coming in.

 

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[FierceRacoon]

Nice. Kudos for breaking down a complex topic.

Though I am not a fan of "how central banks cause prices of things to go up by creating money..."
Do you really want to raise children thinking that banks are evil? And isn't there also some inflation in the Bitcoin land? It's at 60K now. And deflation can also be bad for the economy. Oh, and how about proof-of-stake being bad for the climate change?

Maybe next tune write a book describing how email works? So people finally learn to stop emailing sensitive stuff.

 

[FierceRacoon]

Upd: actually bought and read the book. In fact you aren't breaking down the topic at all.

When I was 9, I was reading books that actually explained how to raise the imaginary unit to various powers, what a recursive program is, why the grass is wet in the morning and so on. I remember to this day the explanation of the number "e" (2.718...), also from being a 9-year old. Children are much smarter than you seem to be giving them credit for.

This stuff is just an awful piece of propaganda. Sorry, but I wish nobody else reads it.
("New laws were created... which makes it harder... to buy toys." or "the price would go up over time... so wealth would be elevated" - did you not just argue against inflation? And whose wealth would be elevated?)

 

[TrillAmbition]

Thank you for the feedback, It is brutally honest which is hard to get from people.

Nice. Kudos for breaking down a complex topic.

Though I am not a fan of "how central banks cause prices of things to go up by creating money..."
Do you really want to raise children thinking that banks are evil? And isn't there also some inflation in the Bitcoin land? It's at 60K now. And deflation can also be bad for the economy. Oh, and how about proof-of-stake being bad for the climate change?

Maybe next tune write a book describing how email works? So people finally learn to stop emailing sensitive stuff.

For some context there is for sure an economic bias towards laissez faire economics in a large portion of the history of bitcoin and a lot of the early developments in it. This translates even today to a lot of bitcoiners who view central banking as a non necessary evil. So there is a bias there for sure which I tried to capture in some way that wasn't overly heavy and maybe I missed the mark.

So inflation gets a bit complicated and I am going by the old school definition which is supply side inflation. Which is an increase in the money supply. Bitcoin was coded to only have 21 million coins ever be able to exist. So it has a set supply increase (inflation) schedule until an asymptote develops nearing but never over 21 million. The price in relative dollar terms goes up and down but the supply side of bitcoin is set algorithmically.

The proof of work (which bitcoin uses) vs proof of stake environmental impacts are thrown around by parties that I believe have a vested interest in having a vested interest in proof of stake coins since capaital buys you a larger share which then gives you "dividend" (staking rewards) in form of supply inflation vs proof of work which requires capital to purchase physical hardware and do work in a competitive free market to get a reward.
There is a lot of clean energy use in the bitcoin mining community since you can get cheaper electricity in things like rivers and damns or even volcanoes for geothermal that have no other industrial uses that are profitable.

As it is right now proof of work seems to be the most fair way to distribute new coins while providing security into the market that is harder to co-opt with large amounts of fiat currency. I think there is some risk in there for mining pool centralization being a political target and has some history of issues during the scaling wars of 2016-2017

 

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[TrillAmbition]

Upd: actually bought and read the book. In fact you aren't breaking down the topic at all.

When I was 9, I was reading books that actually explained how to raise the imaginary unit to various powers, what a recursive program is, why the grass is wet in the morning and so on. I remember to this day the explanation of the number "e" (2.718...), also from being a 9-year old. Children are much smarter than you seem to be giving them credit for.

This stuff is just an awful piece of propaganda. Sorry, but I wish nobody else reads it.
("New laws were created... which makes it harder... to buy toys." or "the price would go up over time... so wealth would be elevated" - did you not just argue against inflation? And whose wealth would be elevated?)

You brought up such a good point that I struggled so hard with. How to target the age. I actually originally though this was a way younger reading target age but I did a ton of research and went into a ton of bookstores and really questioned my initial assumption. I tried to view similar offerings in the space and they had similar ages and didn't delve as much into any specifics just used it for the story.


"Children are much smarter than you seem to be giving them credit for."

I agree I just did not see the market agreeing with me. I could be dead wrong and was looking to see if it did better in certain age ranges.

"This stuff is just an awful piece of propaganda. Sorry, but I wish nobody else reads it."

Tough to hear but I get it.

I want to add on the propaganda portion that I went into the children's book section of every store I went to in person the last 6 months. I noticed at target for example that all but 2 or 3 of the books had very politically charged messages. They were all one sided and I don't know if there is an opportunity for content which at least appeals to the other side.

Do you think the book was that heavy with propaganda?
Do you think it could be used to skew my offering to those who are on the other end of not having their views met on products?
My target market tends to be more liberterian and very weary of banking system. A lot of the bitcoiners are very idealistic. I really tried to water it down for kids.

Thank you so much for your feedback, I really appreciate it

 

[Antifragile]

I am a huge fan of Bitcoin and the implications for amazing future technology in blockchain.

Looking at your book, I can't imagine giving it to my kid. You took on this huge topic of "The Economy", with inflation, monetary policy, fiat money, credit creation and tried to distill it to a child. Claiming that Bitcoin is saving the world. You are being naive.

Hopefully you have a backup plan for your business, as I am not sure you'll be happy with your earnings from this project.

Regardless of my opinion, kudos for taking action.

 

[Ing]

Regardless of my opinion, kudos for taking action.

That! Don’t stop here!

 

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[TrillAmbition]

I am a huge fan of Bitcoin and the implications for amazing future technology in blockchain.

Looking at your book, I can't imagine giving it to my kid. You took on this huge topic of "The Economy", with inflation, monetary policy, fiat money, credit creation and tried to distill it to a child. Claiming that Bitcoin is saving the world. You are being naive.

Hopefully you have a backup plan for your business, as I am not sure you'll be happy with your earnings from this project.

Regardless of my opinion, kudos for taking action.

Thank you for your feedback. I have been in the space since 2015 and was trying to capture a lot of the ethos of bitcoin ideologies while watering it down. I know it is a risk but when I thought it out I saw it as an opportunity to be polarizing to a target market that might want that sort of information presented to their kids.

Yeah I know it might flop but I already committed to the print run and seeing it through to the end as I would rather have the experience and failure as a badge than just another action faking idea.

That! Don’t stop here!

I am working on the marketing for ads right now and getting the site set up to accept payments in bitcoin along with lightening network. I don't plan on amazon being my bread and butter and looking at being able to find my target market a little better.

This is going through to the end even if it flips or flops

 

[TrillAmbition]

added update to main post

 

[Hai]

You need reading samples otherwise it's just buying a surprise egg. I'm seeing it on Amazon now, but they are missing on your website.

 

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