PMDG 777 Tutorial (Paid) Who'd be Interested?

[craig_read 43]

Hi,

I've written rather an extensive tutorial about how to fly the PMDG 777 from EGLL to KSFO.  It takes the simmer through all the stages of planning, fuel, weight, weather, alternate selections (ETOPS, on route), step climbs.. etc..... Setting up of the aircraft from a typical "Gate State", taxi.. takeoff.. climb.. cruise..

It's rather long, and I've obtained permission to include the images of the appropriate charts for the flight from Navigraph, and weather files from AS2016.  It's written for P3DV4, but the tutorial is really about the plane, rather than the simulation platform.. so could be read across to other platforms that have the PMDG 777.

I'm trying to gather interest for this, I wrote a tutorial many years ago for the PMDG 747 back in 2007 or so.. (can't remember when exactly).. from EGLL to KLAX, you should probably find it on AVSIM or knocking around the internet.. just search for "PMDG 747 Craig Read EGLL KLAX" and you should pick it up.. The 777 tutorial is a level of detail above this however..

I'm trying to gather interest for this, but this time I'd like to charge a modest fee for it.  At the moment I'm thinking £5.99 per software copy.  I'm really coming here to see if the community would be interested in this?

Regards

Craig Read

[Robinson67 5]

Hi Crag, good to hear this great news, can´t wait to get a copy of your T7 version, just now that I´m about to buy this acft.

Thanks.

 

Robson Sousa

[Chock 17,769]

Without wishing to sound officious - just trying to be realistically helpful here - if you started selling it and making it a product which is connected with your Avsim account, that would potentially make you a commercial member of Avsim, so you might want to PM Avsim's Jim Young (who is the Avsim person that knows most about that stuff) and see about whether you want that commercial member tag or not and what that entails (it can have both advantages and disadvantages to do so). I know you're only sounding people out at the moment, so there's clearly no need to worry about a thread such as this one.

None of the moderators on Avsim are ever too bothered about someone announcing a new product as you know, so long as it is more in the nature of a heads up, and Avsim will even host support forums for commercial developers too as you also know, but Avsim does make the money necessary to keep going from two very visible sources, these being member donations and advertising revenue; this being the case, is unlikely to let anyone place numerous mentions of their new product out there on the regular Avsim forums, effectively advertising it for free and bypassing the need to pay for advertising. In other words, you'd need to think carefully about how you were going to market such a tutorial and not assume that you'd be able to make your product anything other than initially known via an Avsim mention, so you would want to consider how you market it down the line if you were hoping to sell it, although again, you could talk to Avsim about that, costs, benefits etc.

And of course you'd need to think about how to distribute it, either yourself via a dedicated website, or through a third party store. The easiest way to do that of course is to make it an e-book and sell it through Amazon, which you can do for free and their system can convert a PDF into a scrolling EPUB format file for you if you don't have the software with which to do that, although be careful about which store you go with, i.e. if you are in the UK, make sure you do it through amazon.co.uk and not through amazon.com, since the .com store is the US one and if you set such an e-book up through the US one then you have to set things up for US internal revenue for sales income tax since it then assumes you are a US citizen (made that mistake myself, and it becomes a PITA lol). If you do it through the UK store, it propagates to the US one anyway.

You'll need to proof your product a bit better than your original 747 tutorial too, that one has a typo right in the second paragraph of the first page, which is only a minor one admittedly, but if that were an Amazon e-book, that'd be one of the pages it'd preview, and first impressions last. For example, here's one of my e-books:

(https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dealing-maintenance-Hollister-Book-1-ebook/dp/B00IHN0GEW/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1508761253&sr=8-1&keywords=dealing+with+maintenance

As you can see, you can preview most e-books until about eighteen pages in. If people spot a typo on a preview, it'll often put them off, and they will be less inclined to buy it. Oh, and stick a suitable picture cover on it too, it will help to make it more of a professional-looking affair.

Alternatively you could simply sell a PDF version through somewhere like simmarket, which is another pretty hassle-free way of doing it, but again you would need to think about how people would know it was there and not simply rely on people chancing across it. If it is in a format other than PDF or EPUB, for example a self-contained software tutorial application, you'd need to beta test that too on various Macs PCs and mobile devices, and you should probably also do that anyway even if it is EPUB or PDF, just to be certain there are no stuff ups, for example, it is possible to embed animations into a PDF document, but it requires specific plug ins to have them play properly, which you'd either need to provide documentation links to, or seek permission to distribute them with your product. Another alternative is to make it a print on demand product, via somewhere such as Lulu, I'm pretty sure Captain Chris Brady at the 737.org.uk site uses Lulu's P.O.D. system for his Boeing 737 Technical Manual, and the print quality and binding of those books is very good indeed..

Based on the 747 tutorial you did, which is over a couple of hundred pages I believe, I would say £5.99 is a pretty good price for a tutorial which is offering something others do not, although you'd probably need to get clearance from PMDG if you were going to use screenshots of their aeroplane in a commercial product, and I'd run it by them anyway even if you weren't using any screenshots, just to be above board. I wouldn't mind betting they'd wanna see it before approving it, particularly when you bear in mind what PMDG stands for, although you never know, that might lead to some kind of interesting arrangement in marketing terms if they like what they see.

None of this is intended to put you off, after all, PMDG got started writing manuals before they even made any software simulated add-ons, and good old Captain Mike Ray has built quite a decent cottage industry out of doing that kind of thing too, so good luck with it.

 

[craig_read 43]

Thanks for the reply Alan, a lot of really useful information there.. Agreed the first one has some major faults with it, this one is much more thorough and more time has been spent proof reading.  I've obtained permission from all relevant parties now so I'm good to go, will be looking at Amazon as a potential medium, then might speak to Avsim directly about what I can do with them and how that works.

Thank you!

Regards

[Jim Young 2,356]

I gave you a Commercial Member tag.  It's all you need from AVSIM.  Just remember, you cannot advertise on AVSIM (unless you purchase banner space).  See AVSIM Terms of Service.

EDIT: You can put a sale item in the Bargain's Hunter Shack though.