Some poor schmuck just lost $77

By Charlie on December 11th, 2007 | 11

I just passed up buying a $77 ebook. The funny thing is I really wanted it.

I still do. The sales letter made the book look very interesting and I might have learned something from it had I bought it.

But I didn’t and the reason why is because the sales letter was full of mistakes, punctuation errors, misspellings and awkward grammar.

What’s sort of interesting about this is that the “sales” part of the sales letter was great. The AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) formula was in place. All the bullet points were great. It told me a story and sucked me right in. And even though I figured it was just like the other 4,239,123 ebooks that were published today, I still wanted it.

But not enough to buy it, and that is what is known in the sales world as a complete and utter failure. The poor sod who wrote the sales letter just lost me as a customer and won’t be enjoying a $77 steak on me tonight.

This made me sort of curious, because I’m not a grammar snob. Why do I care how the damn thing was written? But when I got to thinking about it I realized I’d made all sorts of assumptions about the ebook based solely on the quality of its sales letter.

Here are those assumptions. I’ve listed them out one at a time so you may more easily see how much of a jerk I am.

In Charlie’s world a sales letter with lousy English equates to:

A 93-page book full of similar mistakes that will get awfully tiresome
Lies and/or mistakes with facts in the book
Poor design
Something nebulous that feels like lack of care for me, the reader
A half-ass return policy
Possible problems with the .pdf download
No customer service to help with the .pdf download problems
Finally downloading the .pdf which gives my computer herpes
Other random stuff that just pisses me off

It may have been the best ebook ever. It may be perfect down to every last semicolon, whatever those do. But I’ll never know because I just didn’t trust that the quality will be there. At least not enough to drop $77 on it.

I wanted to link to the sales letter here but decided against it. Maybe someone is making a living off that ebook and I’m not going to try to tip the balances against them. They don’t need to lose sales just because I’m a picky old bastard. This is merely advice to those out there who may want me to buy their ebooks in the future Another piece of advice: free dark chocolate.