BWFoster78
Myth Weaver
In a thread last week, I promised to review this book and post it here. My full review is up on my blog, but here's the Cliff's Notes version:
The author's main strategy is: Attract people to your book, Engage them when they reach your book's page, and Convert them from browsers to buyers. He offers some detailed tips on how to do this.
His first point, though, is contrary to most advice out there. He says that blogging and social media is absolutely pointless unless you're already established. I know a lot of you are going to disagree with this, but he makes some good points.
He also covers how to come up with a title, the importance of your cover, SEO, choosing the right category for your book, writing your book description, how to use HTML at Amazon to make your page stand out, using the "look inside" feature, pricing strategies, the importance of reviews, your author page, using your first book to sell later books, and how to determine sales numbers from Amazon rankings.
The book is well written and entertaining. It also contains a lot of good tips. Where it shines, however, is in the following categories:
SEO - I don't know a lot about Search Engine Optimization, so I don't know if the tips he's giving are commonly accessible on the web. To me, they sounded straight forward and easy (in the sense that he gives you a systematic strategy) to implement.
HTML Tags - He makes it sound like it's really hard to format your Amazon page with italics, bold, etc. and that Amazon "doesn't want you to know this information." If it's true, then most pages aren't going to have these features and you using them will make yours stand out.
Determining Sales from Ranking - This is just cool, and he gives some good uses for the information.
Be careful about a couple of things, though. In chapter 6, he advises you to link to your book in reviews of competitor's books. This is clearly against Amazon's TOS and will get your hand slapped.
I also don't know if I like the ethics of his chapter on reviews. I'm going to have to think on it.
I think that, probably, it's worth it to buy this book (it's only $5!) if you're trying to market an ebook. I'd love to see one of the authors on here try some of the techniques and let us know if they work. If not, I'll try to update people once I finally publish.
The author's main strategy is: Attract people to your book, Engage them when they reach your book's page, and Convert them from browsers to buyers. He offers some detailed tips on how to do this.
His first point, though, is contrary to most advice out there. He says that blogging and social media is absolutely pointless unless you're already established. I know a lot of you are going to disagree with this, but he makes some good points.
He also covers how to come up with a title, the importance of your cover, SEO, choosing the right category for your book, writing your book description, how to use HTML at Amazon to make your page stand out, using the "look inside" feature, pricing strategies, the importance of reviews, your author page, using your first book to sell later books, and how to determine sales numbers from Amazon rankings.
The book is well written and entertaining. It also contains a lot of good tips. Where it shines, however, is in the following categories:
SEO - I don't know a lot about Search Engine Optimization, so I don't know if the tips he's giving are commonly accessible on the web. To me, they sounded straight forward and easy (in the sense that he gives you a systematic strategy) to implement.
HTML Tags - He makes it sound like it's really hard to format your Amazon page with italics, bold, etc. and that Amazon "doesn't want you to know this information." If it's true, then most pages aren't going to have these features and you using them will make yours stand out.
Determining Sales from Ranking - This is just cool, and he gives some good uses for the information.
Be careful about a couple of things, though. In chapter 6, he advises you to link to your book in reviews of competitor's books. This is clearly against Amazon's TOS and will get your hand slapped.
I also don't know if I like the ethics of his chapter on reviews. I'm going to have to think on it.
I think that, probably, it's worth it to buy this book (it's only $5!) if you're trying to market an ebook. I'd love to see one of the authors on here try some of the techniques and let us know if they work. If not, I'll try to update people once I finally publish.
