I’m writ­ing this post using a Mac applic­a­tion called MarsEdit. The guy who makes it is Daniel Jalkut. Last week, he gues­ted on Marco Arment’s Build and Analyze pod­cast, which is aimed at soft­ware developers but often con­tains insights that inde­pend­ent authors can learn from. Daniel’s a nice bloke. I know this because we had an email exchange a few months back about a fea­ture I’d like to see in MarsEdit.

In the pod­cast, Daniel said some­thing about incre­ment­al­ity that seemed appos­ite. When he took over the cod­ing of MarsEdit (from Brent Simmons of NetNewsWire fame), he thought about the unit sales of the soft­ware. It sold on aver­age three per day. This led to what New Worlders call ‘a fair chunk of change’, but it was some­what less than the fig­ure that Daniel could live on.

He thought back to the old soft­ware adage that, if one hun­dred people view your soft­ware, and three buy it, you’ve got your­self a decent con­ver­sion rate. Daniel thought about the product in terms of increas­ing that con­ver­sion rate. How well designed was the ini­tial set-up? How did the soft­ware work for novice users? He tweaked the applic­a­tion and increased sales.

I’m not one who shies away from money-related talk when it comes to writ­ing. If you don’t talk about it, there are plenty who will — par­tic­u­larly these days, when more and more writers are tak­ing home non-trivial monthly roy­al­ties thanks to the suc­cess of e-publishing.

Bullshit Bingo aside, incre­ment­ing your con­ver­sion means look­ing at the product — a book, per­haps — and work­ing to get that extra one-percent of read­ers to buy your book. If you see a typo, kill it, upload the new ver­sion. If it takes a reader too long to get to the first page of the story because you’ve front-loaded the book with review quotes, shorten it, upload it. What does the reader see when they land on your Amazon page? A bio that’s out of date? Get bib­lical on the arse of the text.

You see where I’m going. It’s an obvi­ous point, per­haps, but chan­ging your atti­tude from ‘I’ll fix it later’ to ‘I’ll fix it now’ won’t only improve your story. Readers notice these things. Just take a look at a few reviews for self-published books on Amazon: present­a­tion is a theme.

As I say, it’s an inter­est­ing pod­cast, and well worth a listen.