Getting Reviews on Amazon (Part 2)

by Rintu Basu author of “Persuasion Skills Black Book”

Generating a Market for Your Book

When I started this project I had not realised that I was writing a book. My only focus was generating subscriptions for my website. I had got very excited because I was getting quite a few sign ups and they were responding to the first couple of lessons. This was a great result for several reasons.

Firstly it was great motivation to write the next few lessons. Secondly through the comments I was getting it gave me the opportunity to tweak the content to fit what people were asking for. Thirdly it gave me the opportunity to add a lot of social proof (testimonials) on my blog / website. It also gave me lots of “how others are using the lesson” type material to add into the programme.

The great thing for me in all of this was that it boosted my confidence and my motivation in writing. Having a couple of hundred people, as it was then, hanging on to read your next lesson was enough to keep me going at it.

Now that I have been through the experience there are some things I would do differently. For example I would invite more comment from readers and find a way of allowing them to comment directly on the pages for each lesson. This would build huge social proof and discussions amongst the readers. I think I would also have two pages per week. The first would be the lesson the second would be a reader led case study, example or discussion. This is what seemed to have happened anyway but the reader led content appeared on my blog and was not very well integrated into the ten week course.

Rave Reviews and Self Fulfilling Prophesies

Anyway the big point and what worked really well was I suddenly have hundreds of people starting to look at my material and write to me about it. I posted some of it up on my blog, particularly where it added something to the lessons. I started adding things to the lessons either tweaking them based on comments or adding examples and illustrations from people that had written in.

All of a sudden the project went from me in my office to some sort of collaboration with people all over the world. Many of the later lessons were starting to write themselves. My original overview was rewritten several times over based on tweaks and modifications that I could never have thought of for myself. My blog was bursting with field reports, testimonials and examples of the lessons that were drawing even more people into signing up.

Creating the Book

Eventually, a year later, I suddenly realised I had a great marketable product in these lessons and the blog posts. Please take this the right way 99% of the book was there at the end of the ten weeks it just took me a year to realise that I had written a book.

Once I had come to the conclusion it was less than a week to put it together. I got various people to proof read and edit whilst I worked on a sales page for the website. Again the sales page was easy to write…I knew my target market well because they had been writing to me for over a year. I had testimonials, I had case studies and I had benefit statements collected even before the book had been completed.

Accidently Getting into Print

I had been selling The Persuasion Skills Black Book as an eBook for less than an month when I found Debbie and Joe at Lean Marketing Press. They were looking for new authors and I had a book.

Here is a key point that is worth stating. I am new to the world of book publishing but I have always considered it hard for new authors to establish themselves with publishers. But consider how easy it can be by following this sort of process.

Essentially when I pitched to Lean Marketing Press I had a proven market, existing customers and testimonials as well as a marketing list. This was in addition to a book that already had a following.

I have never negotiated with a publishers to print a book so I cannot say this from experience. But I suspect that giving them the sort of evidence that I gave Debs and Joe would make the negotiations go much more easily.

Finally, about those five star reviews

I guess most of you might have already worked out that these reviews on Amazon have come from people that have read the eBook or have been through the free lessons. You would be right for some of them, but the question is how you get them to write them for you. That will be the subject of the next post.

The final post is coming soon…

Related posts:

1. Getting Reviews on Amazon (1 of 3) Getting Reviews on Amazon (Part 1) by Rintu Basu author...
2. Getting Reviews on Amazon (3 of 3) Getting Reviews on Amazon (Part 3) by Rintu Basu author...