The Long Game | Hacker News Reader

The Long Game

noeltock.com

29 pointshfz6 comments

My only concern is that his pricing at $5-10 will affect him in the long game by making a lower price acceptable (and expected). In other words, if I bought your first book at $10 and thought it was awesome, why should I buy your next book at $30? Is it really worth 300% more? Unless the pricing ramps up extremely slowly (2nd book is $13, 3rd book is $16, etc.) it might be a difficult sell.

Better to offer a fair price from the start, IMO. That isn't $5, nor is it $100.

What is the purpose of this post? I read these styles of submission on Hacker News often, with the jargon, and the charts, and the definitions. I usually leave them feeling that the author has tried to persuade themself something, not me. In this case it seems justification for the pricing he chose. What is worrying is how post-hoc this all is. He casually dropped the phrase "long game" and worked backwards to a fully-formed rationale. Scary.

Hehehe, we get this a lot. Customers ask us to license images (we are a photography platform). They ask us for a special price (or free!) because "it will be good publicity for us". Begging us to play the long game...

Take your publicity and stuff it, buddy! We already got enough of that! Now we need to feed our kids! :-) Our game was long and now we'll play it shorter, thank you!

eBook pricing advice aside (long story short: probably too low if that is your first product), I'd recommend everybody internalize the advice of "The current thing I am working on is not the last event in my career, and I should probably purposely work on this with the eventual goal on building upon it later."

This is true regardless of whether your main career goals are running a business, working for funded startups, or just getting a stable job at BigCo, by the way.

In my experience, this is particularly true when it comes to hiring. Whenever I'm interviewing (on either side of the table), a question in the forefront of my mind is "do I think I'll want to work with this person for the rest of my career?" I probably won't be at my current company for the rest of my career (which says nothing about my employer and a lot about me), but I do expect that I'll work with the members of the same group of people again and again, one way or another.

Not sure I agree with his definition. Did you go to college? You invested in the long game. Did you earn an advanced post-bac degree? Same. Did you spend a few months to learn a new technology? Same. Have you put some time into creating a product, hoping someone would buy it? That is the very definition of the long game.

Writing a book is playing the long game. Pricing is simply strategy. To me, it just looks like he's choosing his strategy for how to play the long game, but either way it's the same thing.

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