Money Freeware from Another Company Chapter 5 Making Money With Programming If you can write programs in Basic, Pascal, C, Clipper, anything at all, even if you can only write text with a word processor, you can make money! You won't have to work in an office doing programming for someone else. You can write exactly the kind of programs you want to write, and make money at home! The 'secret' is shareware. Does it work? You bet! You can easily have a small success, making some extra spending money each month, or with some practice, you can have a wild success, and make a fine living! There are some millionaires who make their ever-growing fortune entirely through shareware. Here's what you do: Write a program, preferably something that many people will find unique and useful. Make your program as easy to use and understand as possible. Many shareware buyers have trouble operating any program more complex than an automated bank teller machine. Make it as artistic as possible. Put boxes around menus, use lots of icons in graphics-based programs. If you can write pull-down menus, help screens and offer control of on-screen colors to your users, that's even better. Make a few copies of your program and give it to friends for testing. No doubt, they will find problems that you couldn't have imagined while you were writing it. Then make changes in your program to fix all the holes your friends fell through. When the program is perfect, make it into shareware. This means you have to put something into it to make people want to send you money. If you are a prolific writer, put in ads for other programs you have written. Or send additional features in trade for 'registration' (payment). Whatever you do, don't cripple your program. In other words, if your program is called "Automated Lawn-Mowing Program," don't leave out the lawn mower. People must be able to use the program without first sending money. But you can leave out the grass bagger attachment. Tell people how wonderful it would be to use your lawn-mowing program along with the bagger, and "for only $19.95 they can have the bagger." Here's something that has not yet been written (to my knowledge) but would bring some easy money for the author: BEGINNING GUITAR LESSONS on DISK What you would do is to give the first volume away as shareware or freeware ('freeware' requires no registration). People would get your lesson program and would learn some basics. Included in your program or text would be an ad for INTERMEDIATE GUITAR LESSONS on DISK and ADVANCED GUITAR LESSONS on DISK. For these, you can bet people would send you money. How many people? Well no one knows for sure, but there are 72 million IBM-compatbile users in America, and of those, 10 percent will know about your GUITAR LESSONS. Those who are interested may only be 2 percent, but 2% of 10% of 72 million is still a lot of people. In fact, its 144,000 people. Now, perhaps only one out of 100 of these folks will send you $19.95 for the Intermediate lessons, but that is still a profit of over 28,000.00! And, of course it doesn't end there, you can sell the Advanced Lessons, the Very Advanced Lessons, Blues Guitar Lessons, possibly even Bass Guitar Lessons. And this is a small example, dealing with a specialized group! What next? Send a copy of your program to every shareware distributor you can manage. Don't worry, unless your program is badly written, they won't reject it. In fact, they all want shareware submissions! Just send them a disk along with a simple cover letter. The cover letter would authorize a distributor to distribute your program, and would list any specific equipment required by the program. For instance, by telling the distributor that your program requires CGA graphics and 512k of RAM would prevent sales to people who are not equipped to run it. Most important, the cover letter should contain a brief discription of your program for their catalog. Without this, they may write their own catalog description, one which you might not like. The more distributors you can have selling your program, the better, because you will quickly gain exposure to your millions of users. Do not expect overnight success. It takes about 8 months to a year for money to start coming in. This is because there is a delay between when your disks arrive and when the distributors issue a new catalog with a listing for your program. There is another delay between the new catalogs and when customers place orders and get their disks. And finally, it takes awhile for customers to digest your program and then decide to send you money. For those of you who are interested in this unique and wonderful home business we have a special disk for you: SUCCESS WITH PROGRAMMING! ANOTHER COMPANY shows you everything. Besides our own shareware successes, including ALMANAC 1991, BICYCLE TUNE-UP AND REPAIR, and MONEY, we have researched the shareware market, we have interviewed other shareware authors and have learned about all sides of the rapidly expanding shareware business. We show you how to write programs that capture the public's interest, how to make sure your customers 'register', and how to get money by other means through your shareware. We show you more. We show you frequency charts indicating which types of programs sell best, we offer suggestions for programs as yet unwritten, we talk about your on-disk instruction manuals, we even show you how to write user-friendlieness into your programs. Can you succeed without SUCCESS WITH PROGRAMMING? Yes! But why do it the hard way? We have learned all the super-professional approaches, the pitfalls and the shortcuts. We'll tell you all about it, and then instead of stumbling around for the first couple of years, you'll be able to start like an old pro! Price: $19.95 (not available as shareware)