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214 of 227 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
This Book Will Waste Your Time & Money!, July 28, 2007
This review is from: Sell Your Book on Amazon: The Book Marketing COACH Reveals Top-Secret "How-to" Tips Guaranteed to Increase Sales for Print-on-Demand and Self-Publishing Writers (Paperback)
This book about Amazon marketing does not live up to its hype. It will waste your time and money. It is full of tactics that will teach you unethical practices, marginal techniques, and ways of spamming Amazon in violation of its guidelines. The book suggests you to do the following tactics, which are not helpful at all.
1. Don't write a 5 -star review of your own book. This is unethical and a violation of Amazon's guidelines. Customer reviews should be written by customers, not the authors who wrote the book. These reviews will be overlooked by potential buyers, who will not find the review helpful and ignore it.
2. Don't ask anybody for 5-star reviews. In his book, he tells the reader to give his book a 5-star review if they liked it. When I give a copy of my book to a reviewer, I don't say anything that may suggest I want a glowing review. Besides, 5-star reviews are usually generated by hype. Most browsers usually don't read the 5-star reviews or the 1-star reviews. The 2, 3, & 4-star reviews are usually read more.
3. Don't end every review with the title of your book. This could be seen as blatant self-promotion. Others may see is as a way of stealing sales. This is also a violation of Amazon's guidelines. It's also problematic because you may write more books. If you have 50 reviews that mention your older book, you would have to revise all fifty of them and mention your new one. There's an easier way to do this. Use your Amazon Signature. It can be changed at any time, and you can say something like "John Doe, `Author of Whatever Book." If you write a second book, you can change it to "Author of Whatever Book #2." Believe me, revising all of your reviews is very frustrating.
4. There is no "magical" way to remove a 1-star review. If the review is fair and balanced, it will stay. A review can be removed if:
-the reviewer clearly hasn't read the book
-is attacking the author
-and more!!!
5. The book suggests you to also write a bunch of Listmania lists and So You'd Like to Guides. I did all this for several weeks with no results. It was a waste of my time. Some people may even view this as a form of spam. I decided to delete most of my guides and lists.
The author suggests you to publish your book with a self-publishing company. There's nothing wrong with having your book published by a self-publishing company, but you can actually keep more of the profit by publishing it yourself. The book explains that there are two ways of having your book listed on Amazon: 1. Publish your book with a self-publishing company that can offer a 20% trade discount or 2. Publish your book yourself and sign up for Amazon Advantage, in which case you'd have to supply your own book to Amazon who'd also buy it at a 55% trade discount. But this begs the question, "If a self-publishing company can offer a %20 trade discount, why can't I?" This question led me to research the web to find the answer, and I ended up at "Aiming At Amazon." This book tells you how to do what the self-publishing companies charge you to do. You can save hudreds of dollars by taking the advice in "Aiming At Amazon." So it appears that "Sell Your Book On Amazon" is an advertisement (albeit a very subtle one) to self-publishing companies, and I also felt deceived that the author didn't include this piece of information.
One thing that really bothered me about this book is that the tips are *guaranteed* to increase sales. It's not a good idea to guarantee anything, especially on the internet. From my experience, nothing is guaranteed. I did everything this book recommended, and so far the results have left me very disappointed. In fact, I remember one month when my sales were much LOWER than they were the previous month. Not exactly something I expected from tactics that were *guaranteed* to increase sales.
Another important thing that this book doesn't address is that Amazon marketing only works if you write a GREAT book. Word of mouth spreads quickly online. So internet buzz will help a great book, but will damage a mediocre one. I finally accepted the fact that my first two attempts at publishing were failures. But I didn't like how this book filled me up with false hope, making me think that these tactics would increase sales. My third at attempt at publishing has much better results, but I'm using tactics from "Aiming At Amazon" and "Plug Your Book." I only made about $40 in the first month of my first book's publication, and I was using advice from "Sell Your Book On Amazon." By employing the advice in "Aiming At Amazon," I've already made $300 in just two months.
There are those who love this book. I, however, am not one of them. I suggest you to skip this book and seek out other books on internet publicity. This book will only disappoint and frustrate you. And since I did everything this book said, I've got a big mess on Amazon that I need to clean up.
Brandon Simpson
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126 of 137 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A pretty good book for anyone who wants to market themselves, their business, or THEIR BOOK on Amazon., May 9, 2007
This review is from: Sell Your Book on Amazon: The Book Marketing COACH Reveals Top-Secret "How-to" Tips Guaranteed to Increase Sales for Print-on-Demand and Self-Publishing Writers (Paperback)
I enjoyed reading this book. It does a pretty good job of explaining how to make the most of Amazon if you are interested in using it as a marketing tool for your book. The author spends a lot of time telling us how to set up our "Profile Page" in Amazon. Interestingly he calls it an "author" profile page. I have one of those myself as an Amazon user, but I'm not a published author ... yet.
Much of what the author talks about in this book is what I have been doing to build my presence on the Amazon site since January, 2006. I have been writing book reviews, creating Listmania lists, and Amazon Guides. I have also studied the profile page options and experimented with how my profile page will be viewed by the masses.
Based on the Profile Pages of many authors I have examined over the past year and a half, I think there is a definite need for the instant book. Very few, and I mean VERY few, authors are taking advantage of the things explained in this book. I highly recommend that authors who are not taking advantage of Amazon's offerings get a copy.
I was a little disappointed after reading this book when I turned to the author's Profile Page at Amazon. He did not seem to be practicing what he preaches. He only has 19 book reviews, 10 Listmania lists, and zero Amazon Guides. And the Listmania lists were not packed to the brim with books. As a result, the author lost some credibility in my eyes. But then again, I am an educated consumer when it comes to the content included in this book.
I prefer to name the biographical section on a Profile Page as "In my own words." And I disagree with the author that this section should be written so all of its content will be neatly included on the Profile Page. I recommend writing a blurb about yourself as long as you like. And Amazon will let you write quite a bit here.
I would have liked the book better if the content related to Listmania lists had been more accurate and more complete. For me, the Listmania lists are critical to establishing a presence at Amazon. And it is a presence that you want to establish if you want to sell books! To build my lists I pick a subject I want the list to be about. Then I find two or three highly popular books on the subject. "Highly popular" means a high star rating coupled with a sizeable vote count. I write the book's vital stats on a small stickem: title, author, pub date, ISBN, star count, vote count, and whether it has a table of contents. Then I check the information Amazon provides on that book regarding related books and books customers buy who buy that book. If those books are rated high, then I prepare a stickem for them, too. I keep repeating the process for the books I create stickems until I have a stack of stickems 25 to 40 high. By the way, Listmania lists now allow for 40 books (not just 25 as the author suggests). Then I rearrange the stack of stickems in order of publication date so the newest book will be at the top of my list and the oldest book will be at the bottom. Then I build my list on Amazon.
After I post my Listmania list I then examine the Listamania lists and Amazon Guides that Amazon attaches to the right side of my list. I scan through those lists to look for some neat books that I might not have included in MY list. I then add those neat books I uncovered. Hopefully that will get my book count in my list up to 40.
As the author says in his book, Listmania lists are pretty easy to build. But building one is no guarantee that it will be popular. And you want popular ones in order to get known on Amazon. Keep building lists until you get a nucleus of popular lists. You may consider deleting the unpopular ones. The popular ones are the ones that are going to help you get known on Amazon. Also, those are the ones you will want to take the time to create an Amazon Guide for. Theoretically you shouldn't create an Amazon Guide unless the books included in it are from a popular Listmania list.
I don't like the use of Author Blogs on Amazon. It's not that I don't like blogs, but I think they should be a part of an author's Web site that is referenced just above the biographical section on the Profile Page. I don't like blogs on the Profile Page because they mess up the layout of that page and become the Profile Page. I don't like having to scroll down the Profile Page to see things other than the blog.
All in all, this is a pretty good book for anyone who wants to market themselves, their business, or THEIR BOOK on Amazon. 4 stars!
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
AN IMPORTANT RESOURCES FOR ALL AUTHORS, May 5, 2007
This review is from: Sell Your Book on Amazon: The Book Marketing COACH Reveals Top-Secret "How-to" Tips Guaranteed to Increase Sales for Print-on-Demand and Self-Publishing Writers (Paperback)
Amazon is here to stay, and authors need to know how to maximize their use of Amazon to sell more books. Reading this book, will do just that for you.
Brent offers a simplified explanation of how to utilize the very dynamic web resource that Amazon has become. Brent takes us step by step through the marketing options available to authors/publishers on Amazon and ranks them according to their importance. And then explains how to get the most out of them.
The point for an author is sell books, and Brent takes you by the hand and leads you through the process, in a way that makes it easy. I thought I "knew" Amazon really well, but I have learned a lot since reading this book
If you have a book or books to sell, I'd highly recommend reading this book.
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