Promoting Your Book - A No BS Guide For Authors and Small Publishers

OK …. I think I am done with this exercise. My efforts to get anything out of the amazon.com top reviewers has been a bust.

I have gone through the Top 100, sent out approximately 30 emails (+ or -) and have thus far received exactly 1 reply (mentioned in another post on this subject).

Several possible reasons for this that you may want to consider if you are going to try it.

1. A good portion of the reviewers are just not appropriate for a personal growth/self-help non-fiction book. Easily 50-60% are either music, DVD or fiction only reviewers.
2. Of the remaining NF reviewers, many of them specialize: cookbooks, Jewish affairs, economics, tech, etc.
3. They are just not interested in my book. I dont think this is personal or specific to my book (It’s a good book … but of course I think that!). I think I saw maybe 3 or 4 similar books reviewed in all of th browsing that I did through the completed reviews. Not an exhaustive search but a few pages deep for anyone that was promising.

If you do this, search for reviewers that have done reviews for similar books, make sure and include your email address if you use the Invite to be an Amazon Friend method (mentioned in pt. 1) and let them know where they can find more info on your book to decide if they want you to send a copy.

This idea is going nowhere fast.

First of all, fully half of the amazon.com top reviewers I have looked at review either only DVD/movies (most often) or CD/audio reviews. No audio books that I have spotted thus far.

I have probably sent out 15 messages, either through emails when they offer that up on their profile page or through the “Invite as an amazon Friend” option which is the backdoor approach that Steve Weber mentioned in his book Plug Your Book! Some of the Top Reviewers even have this turned off.

I am up through reviewer 50 with the 15 message sent out (all the other reviewers were specific to movies, audio, fiction, cookbooks, etc that were not even close to appropriate for The Wealth Manifesto).

I have received thus far exactly ONE (yes, that’s 1) reply. A very nice email from Joanna Daneman who told me my book sounded great but that since she was in the asset management business (i.e, financial advisor type), she may not be able to review my book as it had some element of making money and investing.

The SEC is pretty nasty about their regs with these people. I sent it to her anyway … since she was the only one who asked.

I might try to skip down to rank 160 or so … maybe these people will be a little more real.

Ciao for now

The other thing I have just started up is a blog on my amazon.com page where my book(s) appears. You have to join Amazon Connect to do this but I have heard from 2 people that their books sales increase whenever they do a new blog entry.

One of those making this suggestion was someone that responded to my questions about whether RTIR was worth it or not. Great feedback on that little exercise.

We’ll see - as you may have noticed, actual RESULTS about what is working will take a little while.

PS - You will need a third party to verify that you are who you say you are to sign up for an Amazon Connect account

I first noticed this strategy in Steve Weber’s Plug Your Book.

Send copies of your book to the top reviewers on amazon.com. You can find the list here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/top-reviewers.html

The first thing I noticed is that you need to look at what kind of things the reviewers review. The first person on the list, Harriet Klausner with 16379 reviews (yes, that’s right) only does novels and most of them are the romance, mass market variety. The second person on the list only reviews DVD.

And so on.

So, I will work my way down the list and see who handles non-fiction, personal growth, self help, entrepreneurship type books such as The Wealth Manifesto. And I will let them know they were selected for a reason. Everyone likes to feel special - it’s human nature. And in my best interests.

I’m going to go through the list and shoot for 10 requests per day until I get to through the top 100. I’ll include their names here as things evolve and will let you know how it turns out.