Sell Your Book On Amazon

This Book Will Waste Your Time & Money!

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.

Brandon Simpson

1 out of 1 people found this review helpful.

Comparing "Aiming at Amazon" and "Sell Your Book on Amazon"

I'd like to review "Aiming at Amazon" (ISBN-10: 093849743X, ISBN-13: 978-0938497431) by Aaron Shepard and "Sell Your Book on Amazon" (ISBN-10: 1432701967, ISBN-13: 9781432701963) by Brent Sampson together. There are people who love "Aiming at Amazon" but hate "Sell Your Book on Amazon," and vice versa.

First of all, I'd like to say both books are extremely well-written, you should buy both of them, but they are not for exactly the same market:

Brent's book is more for an author who want to focus on writing and marketing his own book and let someone else deal with cover design, typesetting, and Lighting Source, etc. Aaron's book is more for people who not only want to writing and marketing his own book, but also want to become a publisher himself, i.e., deal with the wholesaler, Lighting Source, and also do his own typesetting and design his own book cover, etc. You'll learn from Aaron's book that it is NOT very hard to become a POD publisher yourself, as long as you want to invest the time. I personally do NOT have the time to learn and become a POD publisher myself, at least for now, because I barely have enough time to finish writing the books that I am working on.

Overall, Brent's book is stronger in coaching you how to do marketing, it energizes you and makes you want to take action; Aaron's book is very strong on the technical aspect of all the nuts and bolts that you need to know about Amazon, it is more relax and cool in style. You definitely need to use you own judgment, and adapt what you learn from both books to you specific situation. The methods in both books work. Just do not overdo and abuse them.

I first read "Sell Your Book on Amazon" in 2007. It was very helpful to me, it tells you the tools that are already available on Amazon but you may not know how to use. It increases my book sales substantially.

Brent Sampson is the CEO of my publishing company, Outskirts Press (OP), and I like the service that they provide. I used to have a book deal with a big publisher, but they wanted me to do a lot of revisions. If I were to make the changes that the big publisher requested, I'd rather not publish my book. I eventually cancelled the contract with the big publisher and selected Outskirts Press. It turned out to be a very good decision for me. Since its release, the sale for my book, Planting Design Illustrated has been constantly ranking as either #1 or #2 on Amazon on this subject. I have published 2 more books with OP, "LEED AP Exam Guide" and "LEED GA Exam Guide." I have 3 more titles that are in the final stage of publication with OP ("LEED BD&C Exam Guide," "Architecture Practice Simplified," etc., See LEEDSeries.com) and they can come out in the next several weeks.

Some people said that you need to spend 10% of your effort to write your book, 30% editing it, and 60% selling it. There is some truth to this. This is the advice of Brent Sampson also. It is helpful to me...

A Real "How to" Blueprint to Sell on Amazon

I was hesitant on purchasing Brent Sampson's book, "Sell Your Book on Amazon", partly due to the fact that I wasn't sure if I really needed to purchase a book for my current listing on Amazon. Everything is already there for you on Amazon, right? It should be easy, right? Wrong. If you don't know exactly what you need to do, it's very difficult to find, update, or even know what's the best way to make your book stand out.

This book answered most of my questions and exceeded my expectations. I would suggest for anyone who purchases this book to read the entire book once through and then go back through the areas that pertain to you and really study it. The reason why I suggest this is because you want to make a "game plan" on how you want to proceed. Mr. Sampson gives you the information and suggestions on what you should do, but "you" have to write and organize your marketing strategies.

I found of particular interest were the areas of AmazonConnect, Author Photo & Caption, Tags, Listmania, Amazon Blog, and the Book Detail Page to be particularly helpful. There is no wrong way to approach this, but there is definitely a more effective way to approach it. This book won't help you much if you don't already have a good product to begin with, and that means you really have to take a good objective look at your work. With that being said, it's important to come up with a strategy for your product and act accordingly. This will help with any unnecessary revisions in the future costing you more time.

I've already begun to incorporate the main important strategies of the book and I'm beginning to see results. I know that I wouldn't have been able to get this far if I hadn't read this book. It's still a work in progress, but I'm very pleased with the results. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to promote a book. Thanks Brent Sampson!

-Jennifer Chase, author of thriller Compulsion

Valuable tips for authors and publishers

Sell Your Book on Amazon is essential reading for anyone who¿s serious about selling books on Amazon.com. This book is filled with detailed information on using the many promotional tools that Amazon provides to promote your book, including author profile pages, book detail pages, Listmania and So You¿d Like To Guides, blogs and plogs, reviews, tags and wikis, the Search Inside program, and paid promotional opportunities such as Buy X, Get Y. With so many promotional tools to choose from, the author¿s ranking of each technique, based on the potential return and effort required, is very helpful. The book also includes discussions of discounting options and the mysteries of the Amazon sales rank. Sampson, who is the president of subsidy POD publisher Outskirts Press, discusses the disadvantages of the Amazon Advantage program and the option of working with a subsidy POD publisher, but he doesn¿t mention another way to get ¿in-stock¿ distribution through Amazon: self-publishing with POD printing through Lightning Source. Dana Lynn Smith, Texana Publishing