Reddit mentions of The Zombie Shooting Guide: Survival Training for the Worst-Case Scenario

Spent a year a half on the "informational product quest" by writing the definitive, balls to the wall guide on firearms training for the zombie apocalypse:

www.amazon.com/The-Zombie-Shooting-Guide-Worst-Case/dp/0989594505/

After about $7,000 sunk into making the book the very best that it could be (pro photos, layout design, cover art, edited 100 times) the books has maybe sold 150 copies. The people who did buy it genuinely liked it, but there were far, far, too few of them to recoup even a fraction of my time and investment.

Lessons:

1: Info products/ books seem like a great, no money upfront product. However, this fails to take into account the massive amount of time spent on research, writing, and worst of all, editing. Your time really is worth money and making the mistake of not valuing lead me to pursue this way too hard.

2. Making the mistake of working in secrecy. I foolishly thought that I had to keep the project a secret until it launched. Massive mistake. What I should have done was write one chapter with pictures, and then post it onto the numerous zombie and gun forums I belong to to get feedback from my peers. Since this was my chief target audience, I squandered a huge opportunity to find out if anyone actually wanted a OCD guide to making headshots.

3. Relying on Kicktarter for funding. The book was funded by kickstarter in addition to my own out of pocket expenses. A huge mistake I made was greatly overerestimating the amount of traffic/exposure Kickstarter would provide. The fact is that there are a never ending deluge of products going onto kickstarter, and after the first few days, The ZSG was buried an was not being funded. I basically had to hit up every single person I knew on facebook to fund my project, which was extremely humbling.

4. Not having a marketing plan. The actual content of the book was so good that I was certain that it would sell. Oy, such hubris! Not having a marketing plan for once the book was launched was the final nail in the coffin for the project. By the time I got my act together and got it on a few blogs, the Z themed trend was in a steep decline.

These were all lessons that I applied to my next business, which thankfully is doing much better. I hope this can help someone from repeating my mistakes.

Oh, lastly, physical products are much easier to sell than informational products. The slight increase in upfront costs needed to create a physical product is well worth it compared to the amount of time needed to generate and promote an info product. There are exceptions to this rule, but when you look at the vast majority of successful companies out there, they sell physical goods.