MacVoices #25208: Joe Kissell Introduces Take Control Premium

Aug 5, 2025 | MacVoices Live!

Joe Kissell introduces Take Control Premium, a new membership program offering 50% discounts on all Take Control books for a year. He explains the challenges of online sales, taxes, and the reasoning behind replacing traditional sales with this model. The discussion covers pricing, customer psychology, and the value of quality tech information in a world of quick but often unreliable online answers.

Today’s edition of MacVoices is supported by MacVoices Live!, our weekly live panel discussion of what is going in the Apple space as well as the larger tech world, and how it is impacting you. Join us live at YouTube.com/MacVoicesTV at 8 PM Eastern 5 PM Pacific, or whatever time that is wherever you are, and participate in the chat, or catch the edited and segmented versions of the show on the regular MacVoices channels and feeds.

Show Notes:

Chapters:

00:00 – Introduction and Welcome
01:21 – What Is Take Control Premium?
04:27 – Why a Membership Model? (Amazon Prime Inspiration)
07:00 – Tax Complexities and Why They Use Paddle
10:30 – Workarounds for Selling the Membership
13:06 – How to Buy and Apply the Discount
16:22 – Discount Tradeoffs and Removed Features
22:20 – Sales Psychology and Customer Behavior
26:18 – Not a Subscription: Why That Matters
30:14 – Future Member Perks and Community Value
36:41 – Can This Business Model Survive?
42:32 – Ebook Pricing Pressures and Perceptions
44:14 – Where to Learn More and Final Thoughts

Links:

Take Control Premium

Guests:

Joe Kissell is the publisher of Take Control ebooks, as well as the author of over 60 books on a wide variety of tech topics. Keep up with him if you can on his personal site, JoeKissell.com, and on Twitter.

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