m1tdg00@fsrcs1.fed.frb.gov (Taegan D. Goddard) (07/20/90)
Publish Your Programs!
A Hypertext Guide for the Software Entreprenneur
by Taegan D. Goddard
Have you developed a useful computer program? This guide teaches you how
to bring your program to market. Topics include:
* Finding a publisher * Shareware marketing
* Marketing strategies * Incentives for registering
* Publishing it yourself * Retail distribution
* Naming your program * Catalog distribution
* Packaging * Finding a reseller
* Market profiles * User groups and BBSs
* Market research * Magazine reviews
* Registering a copyright * Query letters
* The ISBN standard * and many other topics...
Publish Your Programs! is constantly being updated to reflect marketing
trends and new opportunities for the software entrepreneur.
Publish Your Programs! is a hypertext guide that runs on IBM PCs and
compatibles. The program comes in both stand-alone and memory resident
versions. It makes use of the mouse if one is available.
An index and table of contents make browsing the guide simple. Just
click (or press <enter>) on any topic and that page instantly pops on
screen. While reading a topic just click on a highlighted word to jump
to that new topic. Backtrack or move forward along your train of thought.
Taegan D. Goddard is an independent software developer with success in
both the traditional commercial and shareware markets. He is the author
of Liberty!, an educational software program now marketed nationwide
by Zephyr Services of Pittsburgh, PA. Several of his programs are also
offered as shareware. His disk, The Home Control Primer, has generated
over 150 registrations from home automation enthusiasts.
Publish Your Programs! is currently available directly from the author
for just $20. Please send your checks to:
Taegan D. Goddard
35 Woodside Circle
Hartford, CT 06105
Thank you for your support!shields@yunexus.YorkU.CA (Paul Shields) (07/21/90)
m1tdg00@fsrcs1.fed.frb.gov (Taegan D. Goddard) writes: > Publish Your Programs! > A Hypertext Guide for the Software Entreprenneur That looks awefully suspicious to me. The $20 fee described, with no explanation or justification for the price tag, forces me to assume that it is a commercial advertisement. --- FLAME ON! --- Usenet's purpose is to distribute FREE information. Upon examination, that message has been SEPARATELY posted to SEVERAL newsgroups, forcing my system to store it not once, but many times. Please excuse my anger, but I use this network so that I may get away from advertising. Regardless of the quality of the goods or services advertised, postings such as that do not belong here. This person has used MY money to store and distribute an advertisement. Perhaps I, and those of you who are also angry at such flagrant abuses of the network, should send the advertiser a bill for services rendered. -- Paul Shields
roelofs@amelia.nas.nasa.gov (Cave Newt) (07/21/90)
m1tdg00@fsrcs1.fed.frb.gov (Taegan D. Goddard) writes: > Publish Your Programs! > A Hypertext Guide for the Software Entreprenneur [etc.] Not only is it incredibly poor netiquette to post an advertisement to Usenet, it is doubly so to post to *three* (were there others?) groups which were created with the express charter that users post to the *single* most appropriate one of them--and recently created, at that. While your product may be of interest to the programmers in this group, it would have been more appropriate to simply post (to this group only) a concise (read: a few lines) summary and some pointers to the whereabouts of more detailed information. Kindly restrain yourself in the future. [To net.readers at large: apologies for posting this, but my mail bounced. Follow-ups via e-mail, if at all, please.]
csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) (07/23/90)
In article <12955@yunexus.YorkU.CA> shields@yunexus.YorkU.CA (Paul Shields) writes: >m1tdg00@fsrcs1.fed.frb.gov (Taegan D. Goddard) writes: >> Publish Your Programs! >> A Hypertext Guide for the Software Entreprenneur > >That looks awefully suspicious to me. The $20 fee described, with no >explanation or justification for the price tag, forces me to assume >that it is a commercial advertisement. > >--- FLAME ON! --- > >Usenet's purpose is to distribute FREE information. Really? Where does it say that? Did you have to PAY for Mr. Goddard's advertisement (any more than you had to pay for any other message your system received, that is?) Look's to me like his article was just as FREE as anything else that comes floating through here. >Upon examination, that message has been SEPARATELY posted to SEVERAL >newsgroups, forcing my system to store it not once, but many times. Ooooh. Why don't you flame him for failing to crosspost properly? >Please excuse my anger, but I use this network so that I may get away >from advertising. Maybe you should consider moving to Antarctica. I understand there's very little advertising there. > Regardless of the quality of the goods or services >advertised, postings such as that do not belong here. You're wrong, they DO belong here. Goddard's product may be very useful to those of us who don't plan to spend our retirement eating dogfood. I, for one, thank him for informing us of the existence of this product and encourage others to post similar informative articles. >This person has used MY money to store and distribute an >advertisement. WOW! You own the York University Computing Services? Jeez, I am really impressed. > Perhaps I, and those of you who are also angry at such >flagrant abuses of the network, should send the advertiser a >bill for services rendered. Perhaps you (and those like you) should take your microcephali out of your asses. -- Dave Mack Thank you for crossposting to alt.flame. Have a nice day.
bzs@world.std.com (Barry Shein) (07/23/90)
From: csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) >Really? Where does it say that? Did you have to PAY for Mr. Goddard's >advertisement (any more than you had to pay for any other message >your system received, that is?) Look's to me like his article was >just as FREE as anything else that comes floating through here. Dave, You're just plain wrong. Advertising on USENET is one of the very few sure ways to get a site cut off. Period. I'd be glad to set things up to filter out all postings from an offending site and refuse to pass them on. And I assure you so will most sites that do news propagation. And the sites that they're hooked to, after fair warning. There are a very few groups set aside for new product announcements but that's it. Some reasons why advertising is forbidden on USENET are: 1. You bet we paid for his ad, you wanna see my USENET phone bills? Probably more than many people here earn in a month. Now, it's not one ad, it's the spectre of every one of the thousands of commercial sites on this net flooding every group with ads. Not to mention the thousand sites that will hook up tomorrow morning JUST to post ads for their wares if they could. Do you have *any* idea what would happen if we made this network wide-open to the drooling marketroids? Like, cron programs that post ads to 40 groups every night at midnight? You think they're gonna shut up because Dave Mack decided that they were overdoing it? Have you ever watched television? Do you call the stations and suggest that perhaps you could do with a few less commercials? Well that's thousands of dollars per minute. What do you think they'd act like if it was (virtually) free to broadcast ads (i.e. the cost were completely burdened by the receivers, that is, us)? And if no one were really losing anything by driving the serious types away, the marketroids wouldn't care, hell, they wouldn't notice. They'd just blast ads until their connection was cut off. Forget cost, just imagine every PC/KLONE manufacturer in the Computer Shopper posting day and night to these groups. 2. The Internet cannot pass commercial content. That would be the govt competing with private business (e.g. other advertising channels, commercial nets.) It's called "commercial bypass", and it's illegal. A few exceptions here and there seem to be ok in the appropriate places. Anyhow, I don't want to hear people's interpretation of a fairly complicated set of rules based on what they can read into that one sentence, If you have some suggestions go get a private hearing in front of the US Congress, I'm sure they'll be interested in your legal interpretations of the laws and your ideas to improve the inherent logic of them. 3. Most companies would consider whatever they're spending on receiving and passing news (which in some cases can be easily a few thousand per month) to be totally impossible if they're actually paying to propagate advertisements from their competitors. And forget fantasies of "I'll pass yours if you'll pass mine". That's just not how business works, period. Stockholders or directors won't be interested in any tit-for-tat explanations of the company's money going to pay for competitor's advertisements. 4. Worse, many of the largest sites most critical to USENET propagation are still universities and other non-profits/no-tax orgs. There's no way in hell they can justify their budgets going to subsidize commercial activities. In fact, it's almost certainly a violation of their non-tax status. Anyhow, in sum, you could hardly be more wrong. Don't even think about championing this issue. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | {xylogics,uunet}!world!bzs | bzs@world.std.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: 617-739-0202 | Login: 617-739-WRLD
mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us (Marc Unangst) (07/24/90)
csu@alembic.acs.com (Dave Mack) writes: > You're wrong, they DO belong here. Goddard's product may be very useful > to those of us who don't plan to spend our retirement eating dogfood. > I, for one, thank him for informing us of the existence of this product > and encourage others to post similar informative articles. If you want to read ads, subscribe to the biz.* groups. The whole reason for their existence is to keep commercial stuff out of the comp.*, news.*, etc. groups. I read comp.os.msdos.programmer (for example) because I'm a MS-DOS programmer and want to read all the hints and discussions about programming under MS-DOS. If I wanted to read advertisements for hypertext marketing programs, I'd read the biz.* heirarchy. (Hint: I don't.) > WOW! You own the York University Computing Services? Jeez, I am > really impressed. Maybe he doesn't support York University Computing Services, but a lot of other people (or people acting on behalf of companies) pay for their feed. Anybody who gets news from uunet paid for the article. If my newsfeed was long-distance, I'd pay for the article, too. And the fact still remains that mudos is my home system, and it belongs to me -- which means he's using MY hard disk to store his ad. Not to mention that it's unfair to force possible competitors to pay for your advertising, which is exactly what you're doing when you post an ad to a non-biz.* group. -- Marc Unangst | "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little mju@mudos.ann-arbor.mi.us | minds." ...!umich!leebai!mudos!mju | -- Samuel Johnson