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Copywriting for Geeks

scribd.com

10 pointssr3d9 comments

Wow! OK. I'm the author of this book and I have no idea how it ended up there.

Here's the full product: http://copywritingforgeeks.com/

I don't mind that much if ppl just share the pdf, but asking 10$/month for MY product? WTH is that ...

Thanks for responding, and providing the link to your work.

Okay, so it seems you want $99 for your book, which is fine, that's the price you set. It seems that someone uploaded it, presumably without your permission to scribd.

Scribd is now letting people download it with some form of monthly plan, or it turns out, for free if you upload a new file to them.

I uploaded a new file to them, it consists of the words, "I think your business plan is bogus" repeated many times.

So Scribd let me download your book, as a pdf, for free. (Opening the pdf, I see the 37 page presentation that the link of this thread points to.)

I don't know what's up with scribd, but I think they trash authors and misrepresent them when they host materials they didn't have permission for and on top of that try to trap people into monthly subscriptions and encourage people to upload random crap to them in order to get other stuff downloaded.

This is a business? A business that gets respect?

Seems crazy to me.

I agree with you, and I would appreciate seeing less scribd links posted on HN. Surely people can find other places to post PDFs...

I wonder if you can send them a takedown request?

Googling "Copywriting for geeks" shows scribd link as third result - it is quite likely to have a significant negative effect on your sales.

I visited the page, but wanted to read it as a PDF in my preferred reader.

It asked me to login, so I tried to login through Facebook. It's a pdf, so I am not too worried about what it might post.

It asked for permissions to post to access my news, and I was a bit surprised, why would scribd need to access my news? There was no explanation.

So I denied it that access.

At some point it demanded that I sign up for a paid plan that it assured me was just a $10 per month and easy to cancel. There seemed to be no other way to access that file unless I joined their paid plan. If there is such a way, it seems very non-obvious how to do it.

This all so I could download a pdf that it had offered to me in the beginning.

Now maybe it's because I am something of a Facebook newbie, or maybe their facebook app was having problems, or maybe my combination of Chrome settings and extensions broke their app somehow.

Regardless, it seems terrible that scribd demands access to post on my timeline, to read my news, and that I pay to login.

I have flagged this link as spam (sorry sr3d) and though I understand that scribd is a YCombinator alum, I hope more than ever it fails and fails hard. Scribd was and always has been an abomination.

Go to scribd.com and click the sign up link. You can create a free account there.

On the download link, under the place that asks you to login with Facebook, there is a small link to login with your scribd account instead. Click that and login, and you can complete the download. No money is involved.

Hmm, actually tried that later, and scribd still tried to make me pay to read this pdf. A pdf that according to the author he is selling and that scribd has no permission to be distributing and is not sharing their profits with him.

It turns out I was able to download it for free, and this was before I knew that scribd did not have permission to distribute it, and that was by taking advantage of their "offer" to upload a document to get the document I wanted.

All of that is crap.

This is fantastic. I studied rhetoric and persuasion in university for a couple years. I think copywriters should too! There are so many old theories that are relevant online. Some of them were covered here.

Thanks for sharing.

I highly recommend the book this is based on, Cialdini's Influence. It's gobsmackingly readable and memorable. And once you've read it you can just use the principles yourself.

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