Anna David's Blog, page 4

Having 15 Amazon Reviews is Worse Than Having No Book At All

It amazes me how people—smart, dedicated people who’ve spent a significant amount of time or money or both on their book—will allow their book to sit on Amazon with 15 reviews.

They live in today’s world. They use Amazon to purchase socks and protein bars. They know that before they decided to buy their Knit Cuffed Beanie Warm Winter Hats Unisex Skull Knit Cap Fashion Ski Hat or Wall Mounted Lamp, they considered other beanies and lamps.

They give Amazon more of their time, attention and money than they know they should.

They know that as their brains calculate prices and other details on the things they buy, there’s one factor overriding their ultimate decision: how many reviews the product has.

And yet they let their beloved books sit there with 15 reviews.

Why do they do that?

There’s one reason—or two.

One: they’re focused on the wrong thing. They think the number of books they sell matters. It doesn’t. I’d rather have 100 of my ideal readers read one of my books and have their lives transformed, and hire my company, than 10,000 people whose lives won’t be impacted at all. More people get rich from Lotto tickets than from book sales and publishing a book is a lot harder than buying a Lotto ticket. So why play those odds?

The star rating, when it comes to books, matters far less than the number of reviews. It’s not a blender that either works well or it doesn’t. We all know that different humans like different books and some humans are a-holes. And having variety in the ratings, as opposed to just a succession of a few five-star ones, actually looks far more authentic. Fifteen five-star ratings screams “I just asked 15 friends to review this.”

This is a numbers game. And reviews stay on Amazon, literally, forever. (I’ve heard of people trying to get purposely sabotaging reviews removed and it’s impossible.) Yes, you’re missing the opportunity of having FREE PUBLICITY FOREVER.

There’s a frame store I go to that gives you 20% off some rather pricey frames if you’ll do a Yelp review. They don’t do it because they like giving hundreds of dollars in discounts but because reviews are crucial for every business today. Like it or not, as an author, you are a business.

Of course, we can’t give readers 20% off our books in exchange for a review. So we ask our friends or followers—sometimes several times.

Here’s what happens: our friends or followers say, “Oh yeah, I’ll do it,” and they don’t.

So we post or send out emails stressing how important reviews are to us, and maybe a few reviews trickle in.

We start to feel desperate and lame. None of us like asking for help. So we abandon the project and the book that we loved so deeply into existence sits there with 15 reviews.

But there is, as the recovery saying goes, an easier and softer way. At my company, we gather what we call Review Squads made up of the client’s friends and followers. We also have an Internal Review Squad that we put on the case. And then we nudge them. Because we know they need nudging—from someone who’s not the author.

Here’s the thing: they mean to review your book. They have every intention of doing it. But then their kid comes home crying or the chicken burns or the dishwasher breaks and logging onto Amazon to review a book they probably haven’t finished reading is the last thing on earth they want to do.

I beg you to forge ahead anyway. The first way you can do that is to tell people they don’t need to finish—or even read—your book to review. While I appear to be advocating for dishonesty and in fact I guess I am, it’s really just making it easy for someone to support you by asking them to do something that will take five minutes and not five hours. You can even tell them they don’t need to buy the book since Amazon allows people who haven’t purchased a book to review it.

While a review written by someone who hasn’t purchased the book is considered “unverified,” it still sits there. You can also price your ebook at 99 cents when you’re doing a push for reviews so that your people can both purchase the book for less than, well, anything today but a few Tootsie Rolls at the newsstand. Amazon allows you to change the cost of your book so you can just switch it back after your reviews come in.

Why? Because studies show that nothing makes people feel better than being of service. Writing a review for an author is an act of service, especially when it’s a person who doesn’t have the 10,000 reviews of someone like Tim Ferriss or Glennon Doyle.

I can’t bear your hard work being dismissed because of those 15 measly reviews.

If You're Going to Use AI for Your Book, Work With People Who Know What They're Doing

Publishing people have been rightfully up in arms about a new start up called Spines which aims to “disrupt” publishing by having AI write and produce books. The company charges between $1500 and $5000 to do “everything” professional publishers do. And clearly people think this is a good idea; the company recently raised $16 million.

My issue isn’t with AI. AI is here to stay and can be incredibly useful when used appropriately. The problem is when people who know nothing about book publishing are charging money to create completely unprofessional slop.

 

Hopefully, this is obvious to anyone who visits the Spines site. It promotes “How Easy It Is To Create A Stunning Book Cover With Just One Prompt” and then provides this as an example: 

This is nothing against Jannati or her Journey but WTF? And speaking of titles, there’s a testimonial from an author of a book called “Biological transcendence and the tao” who raves about how amazing Spines was to deal with after his book had been rejected by 17 publishers.

(Couldn’t ONE person and not 17—or at least someone at Spines—have told him that the title doesn’t make sense and also that titles should have capital letters in them?)

The Spines site takes pains to show that it is not JUST a bot farm. And it does that by telling you that you can have a “human” proofread your manuscript for a “small fee,” alongside a bunch of stock photos of “humans,” like this one:

 

(Awesome side note: when you drag that beautiful “human”’s photo to your desktop, you can see that it is titled Human-06. If Human-06 doesn’t look like your average proofreader, that’s because she’s not. A reverse image Google search reveals that she has lots of other jobs—as a travel specialist, immersive sports & education expert and more.)

Of course, Spines isn’t the only AI book publisher coming out of Silicon Valley: Microsoft has launched 8080, a new book imprint that aims to be “faster and better” than traditional publishing. And its first book, No Prize for Pessimism, by Microsoft’s deputy chief technology officer Sam Schillace, is available now. Sam Schillace appears to be a terribly accomplished individual. His LinkedIn (where he has over 11,000 followers) lists him as a CVP and Deputy CTO at Microsoft and he is credited as the “father” of Google Docs! He probably knows a lot of very intelligent people. So why on earth did no one tell him that his Amazon page looks like sh*t?? Now, No Prize for Pessimism may be an excellent book. Its title has nice alliteration. But why couldn’t one of the intelligent friends have told him that people DO judge books by their covers?

 

Also, why didn’t someone say “Sam, no one wants to slog through a book description that unwieldy! Couldn’t you break it up with some bullet points or shorter paragraphs?”

Also, couldn’t someone have said, “Sam, you created Google docs, you deserve an Amazon page, man!”

And couldn’t another someone have said “Yo Sam, author bios tend to refer to authors by their last name?"

Finally, couldn’t he have gotten at least one or two friends to review? This man gave us Google Docs, people!

Also, while being connected to Microsoft is cool, it doesn’t really make sense to list that assocation in the Publisher section. When a book is published by Ballantine, it doesn’t list it as Ballantine, an Imprint of Random House.

This is meant as no disrespect to Sam or Microsoft or Spines, just a comment that millions of dollars along with no knowledge about how to make a book look professional doesn’t get you very far.

Hire a Podcast Booking Company and Risk Getting Banned Forever

Following up on introducing NAME REDACTED as a potential guest. Her story aligns perfectly with "Fail Your Way to Success," where embracing setbacks leads to remarkable growth.

In "TITLE REDACTED,” NAME unravels the intricacies of digital creator life, mirroring your approach to understanding the success stories of business leaders. Her frank discussions on creator life and mental well-being could offer refreshing perspectives to your listeners.

NAME could undoubtedly provide substantial insights on redefining success in today's digital age. Excited about the prospect of her sharing on your platform.

Warm regards,

This is the kind of message that arrives in my box daily—sometimes three or four times a day. And this is one of the better ones! The bad ones say how inspired they were by the interview with FILL IN RANDOM GUEST WHOSE EPISODE THEY CLEARLY DIDN’T LISTEN TO, and how much it reminds them of THEIR RANDOM CLIENT.

EG: I recently listened to your conversation with Jon Small about how sharing failure can help your business. His ideas on embracing vulnerability and learning from struggles really stood out to me, and I’m excited to apply this mindset to my own work. Great episode! 

If there’s one thing I know about this person, it’s that they very much did not listen to this episode and if there’s another thing I know, it’s that they will not be applying this mindset to their own work.

They’re doing the “spray and pray”: spamming podcast hosts across God’s free world with slop. What amazes me is that they do not give up. If they’re going to email over and over and over, why not just take the time to email once but in an effective way? It’s usually by the third follow-up that I take action—not by accepting the guest but by blocking the sender.

Being pitched this way is worse than not being pitched at all. When I’m pitched someone and that publicist follows up three or four times, there’s a chance I may remember the name of the person being pitched. And if I ever met or encountered them, I’d definitely be turned off.

And yet people—lots and lots of people—are paying to have themselves pitched in this way. Why? Well, I just looked up some of the companies doing this pitching and they look super legit. Articles about them in big publications. Famous-ish clients, including New York Times bestselling authors. If I wanted to go on podcasts and saw their sites, I might think they’d be the ticket.

Of course, the sad truth, for the pitchers, is that most podcasts want to feature guests who don’t have to be pitched.

I have, on rare occasions, accepted guests who were pitched to me. A few times it’s worked out okay. One time, it worked out excellently. (More on that in a second.) Two times it resulted in such obnoxious male guests that one I cut off a few minutes in when I realized I couldn’t tolerate the experience any longer (something I posted about, still shaking from the experience) and the second time, I wish I had. (Instead I finished the interview and just never posted the episode.)

(The time it worked out excellently was when the person pitched himself, in the most thoughtful way that showed how closely he’d listened to the show. His name is Alex Strathdee and he’s become a friend and one of my favorite people to follow when it comes to book publishing; listen to the podcast he hosts here.)

I’ve learned a lot from Alex but one of the things is that you can get on a podcast if you approach it correctly. It was through the pitch he sent me that we developed the Legacy Launch Pad “can’t miss” podcast pitch template we use to get our clients booked on podcasts.

It’s not hard. It just takes actually knowing who you’re pitching, listening to the show and approaching the pitch from a point of view of how you can serve that host’s audience and not how that host can serve you.

As we amp up marketing and PR services at LLP, we’ve been exploring working with various companies. One of them is billed as the greatest software for getting booked on podcasts. My team and I did a Zoom with them and they showed the “most amazing” part of the software: that it will pick a random episode the show has released, build a pitch around it and then follow up three or four times. The guy showing us the software thought this was amazing while I realized that it was this feature that had caused me to block so many senders.

So what’s an aspiring podcast guest to do? Podmatch is my suggestion. I interviewed the founder Alex Sanfillippo and really like him but more importantly, we’ve used Podmatch for our clients and booked them on shows. Joe Rogan and Tim Ferriss certainly aren’t seeking out guests there but if you want to dip your toe in the podcast world and haven’t been on any shows before, it’s the perfect way to enter the world. Either that or work with professionals who aren’t going to make you look bad.

So please avoid the podcast booking companies and software that allows you to follow up and follow up until you’ve driven the host or producer batty.

Taylor Swift Doesn't Care About the NYT Bestseller List (And Neither Should You)

As a New York Times bestselling author, I can 100% tell you that it does not guarantee fame and riches.

When I had a book hit the list, I was so broke I couldn’t afford cab fare to the party.

I have a friend whose book sat at the #1 spot on the list for weeks on end—who watched that book be made into a hit movie, who sat on Oprah’s couch and all the things—who has been broke for years.

And I know authors who have sold several hundred copies of their book, having it hit no list whatsoever, who have been set for life as a result of that book.

So what does that have to do with Taylor Swift?

Well, her long-awaited book—The Eras Tour Book—was on sale exclusively at Target.

In some ways, you could say: who cares? It’s a photo book, hardly a tell-all about how her feelings for Travis are so much deeper than her ones for Harry and what she really thinks about Karlie Kloss.

On the other hand, celebrity memoirs see publishing houses through seasons and seasons of failures. While not all of them succeed (hello, JT and Billie), when they do, they realllllly do.

Most celebrities—and when I say most, I mean everyone but Taylor—do the standard thing: have their agent let a publishing house know they’re ready and accept, sometimes, up to $20 million. Taylor is not, as we all well know, most celebrities. She famously got her songs back from evil producers, re-recorded them to even greater success and released her concert documentary exclusively through AMC (who needs a movie studio?)

In some ways, this was annoying. My friend and I saw The Eras Tour twice in the theater and the second time, she paid for tickets online that somehow didn’t show up on her phone. When she complained, the ticket person at the theater said there was nothing she could do as it was all controlled directly through Taylor Swift’s production company and not AMC. We ended up just buying another pair of tickets.

In some ways—if you’re a Swiftie—it was cool. Popcorn, for that show only, was $19.89, and came in a special Taylor Swift popcorn holder.

When Swift decided to release her first book, she went to no agents or publishing houses. Who needs them when you don’t even need to talk to the New York Times Sunday Magazine for their cover feature?

She and her team instead made a deal directly with Target. That means that she is cutting out the Big Five publishers and making a deal with one company: Target. Which brings me to my point: Every time someone tells me they want to sell their book to a big publisher rather than pay to have it published, I try to explain that if you do manage to succeed at selling your book—which isn’t easy—you will pay. And pay. And pay. You’ll pay in terms of your time…waiting years for the book to come out. You’ll pay in terms of your soul—being forced to go along with titles and covers and words you don’t like. You’ll pay in terms of your energy, when you see that your publisher isn’t doing anything for you because you’re not, like, Taylor Swift (or someone else who doesn’t need the help). Now that Taylor gets this, maybe other people will, too?!

The Eras Tour book will be on sale exclusively at Target on Black Friday—and nowhere else. No Amazon. No Barnes & Noble. No indie stores. Yes, that sucks for the indie stores but is it Taylor Swift’s job to keep indie bookstores in business? Isn’t the girl shouldering enough responsibility?

The most interesting part of this to me is that because Swift is distributing solely through Target, her book cannot hit the New York Times bestseller list.

AKA the most coveted cap feather, AKA, the list I hear people want daily.

I seriously cannot count the number of people who tell me that’s what they want for their book. At least every day I encounter a new one and when I tell them how broke I was when I hit the list, how broke my friend who was on the list for a year remains, how little it means when who reads your book matters so much more than how many, their eyes glaze over. They have stopped listening. Perhaps they’re even planning to have a “New York Times bestseller” tattooed on them as an act of manifestation. (Someone told me about this and said it’s online somehere; I can’t find it. If you do, tell me!)

Here’s the thing about the list: it’s sort of like the way meditation teachers talk about achieving happiness. Meaning: you can’t fixate on it in order to achieve it. It’s based on book sales, yes, but also on the editorial taste of the NYT editors. If that seems wrong—that a bestseller list should be based on number of copies sold and not whether or not an editor likes your book—you can take it up with the courts, as Exorcist writer William Blatty did.

Once upon a time, the list could be gamed. You could pay a company around $200,000 to have people go to the bookstores that report to the NYT list and purchase the exact right amount to make you hit the list. Then a guy from American Pie helped royally screw that up and everyone caught on.

People tend to believe that hitting the NYT list means you’ve sold the most books. But it doesn’t; it means that you’ve sold more books than other authors in a given week (and that the editors deem your boook NYT-worthy). The Bible has never been on the NYT list. And yet it has a few more sales than, say, Handbook for Mortals.

Point is: you’re much better off forgetting about the New York Times list and focusing on something you can control: like writing the best possible book you can for your audience.

And, of course, grabbing a copy of The Eras Tour book at Target while they still last.

Why There's Nothing Wrong with Paying for Media Attention

You can pay for any media attention you want today.

You can pay to go on a podcast.

You can pay this guy to come on your podcast.

You can pay to be in every publication from Rolling Stone to USA Today to the Village Voice to Paper magazine. You can pay to be on the cover of magazines like Harper’s Bazaar and GQ (but it will be in some other country).

I know people who can make all of those happen.

But should you do it?

That depends. It depends on your goal and how you do it.

A lot of entrepreneurs I know have the same contact at LA Weekly that I do. They know how to pay to get an article in there. So they write a totally self-serving article and then use Canva to create an image that makes them look like they were on the cover of LA Weekly, which they then post on their Instagram.

Why is this not a good idea?

1) A self-serving article is going to sound self-promotional. Good promotion doesn’t sound self-promotional. If you’re going to write an article about yourself, showcase your knowledge, not your awesomeness. I don’t know this person but here’s an example of the kind of thing I’m talking about; no one has ever read an article like this and believed it was legit.

And that brings us to…

2) No one actually believes that an entrepreneur that’s not well-known is on the cover of a magazine. Even if they do, what if they go to look for the publication and realize that you doctored it? You kind of seem like a kid at the fair who got their photo taken to be put on a fake cover of a magazine. (Did they only do that at fairs in California? I have a distinct memory of doing this.)

Also, many of these publications mark these articles, LOUDLY, as “Sponsored Content”—AKA “This person paid to be here.” Obvious point but you don’t want that. You need to know which publications make it obvious and which don’t.

Now any journalism professors would be horrified by all of this. Thankfully they would never subscribe to this. But legit journalists would also be horrified.

Thankfully, during my years as a journalist, I was never all that legit. Or you could put it another way and say that I always saw it as a money play. When I worked at People, Us Weekly and Premiere, it became clear to me that the people who weren’t incredibly famous but were still getting featured were the ones who had the best (that is, most expensive) publicists.

When I became an author, that got even clearer. If you could afford to shell out $15k a month for a publicist, you could get in top tier publications. This doesn’t seem all that different—just more honest and efficient.

In the end, my advice is this: if you have the budget, go ahead and do this. Just please don’t be cheesy about it. Have it professionally written. Don’t do it if it screams I PAID FOR THIS. Don’t make the article into a fake cover. Don’t do it if it’s a site that will bury the post so no one can find it.

But also know that the media attention is not the thing; it’s what you do with it that’s the thing. You need to share it, draw attention to it, tell people that it’s there. Apparently, 402.74 million terabytes of data are created every day and while I have no idea what that means, I understand that there’s a lot of noise to break through and you can’t just pay someone, write a self-aggrandizing press release and wait for everyone to ask for your autograph.

Here’s what you can do today:

Ask yourself if you feel weird paying for media attention. If you do, forget this. If you don’t, move onto…

Research which publications (or podcasts) you can pay to be in or on. Check your budget and…

Time it right. If you’re working on a book, peg it to your book launch or at least until after your book is done.

Figure out what you’ll do with that attention when you have it. Yes, you’ll post it on whatever social media platform you use but can you have friends with bigger followings post it? Can you send it out to your newsletter list? Can you use it in an ad or to draw more people to your offer? Don’t let something you paid a lot for (because these opportunities do tend to be ) just sit there languishing.

Oh and don’t run this by a journalism professor because they’ll be horrified. Run it by a realist instead.

 

 

Remaining Behind-the-Scenes with 16-Time NYT Bestselling Author Hilary Lifton

 

Hilary Lifton is not one to boast, and I write that with more understatement than you can imagine.

I was introduced to her recently at a party by someone who said she was a big ghostwriter. When I asked her about her career, she mentioned working on a self-help book.

It was only when I Googled her later that I learned she has written 16 New York Times bestsellers and is one of the most sought-after ghostwriters alive. (While she chooses not to name her bold-faced clients, you can find out who some of them are by going to her site.)

I've never had such an interesting conversation about ghostwriting and I challenge you that you've probably not heard one. I know that's setting expectations quite high but I'm ready to meet them!

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How a Book is the Gift That Keeps on Giving with Dr. Doug Brackmann

 

Dr. Douglas Brackmann isn't like anyone else you meet. He's far more intense and brilliant—the kind of person you find yourself telling your deepest and darkest secrets to when you had just planned to ask him about the weather.

The author of Driven: Understanding and Harnessing the Genetic Gifts Shared by Entrepreneurs, Navy SEALs, Pro Athletes, and Maybe YOU, Brackmann is revered among top entrepreneurs. And while he admits that he already had "disciples" before publishing Driven, the book still radically transformed his practice, career and life.

Although the tips he provides about building authority with a book are priceless, I was even more intrigued. by how much credibility he says the book has given him (even though he already has two PhDs!) Listen and get inspired. And if you relate to what he says about being a driven person...A) I feel your pain and B) there are many ways to work with Brackmann on that. Find out what they are by going here.

(BTW: I was on his podcast a few months ago. You can hear that here.)

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Why the Ex-CEO of a $550 Million Company Did a Book Now with Erika Badan Ayers

Erika Ayers Badan calls herself a “token CEO”, the rare female employee in the highest rank of a bro-roar sports and new media culture—specifically, at Barstool Sports, which she took from a rough-and-tumble sports and betting brand and turned it into a $550 million juggernaut with more than 5 billion monthly video views and 225 million followers. 

In her book, Nobody Cares About Your Career: Why Failure Is Good, The Great Ones Play Hurt, and Other Hard Truths, she talks about all that and more. And in this podcast episode, she discusses why she decided to do a book at this point in her career, how it serves as a “receipt” for what she’s done and how she truly doesn’t give an f what other people think.

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Why People Lose Steam on Their Books with Jill Ishkanian

 

It’s truly a crime that there’s no TV series about Jill Ishkanian.

The lone female tabloid reporter in a sea of men, Ishkanian has been raided by the FBI, exonerated Meghan Markle and been late to a lunch date with me because she thought she saw Kevin Costner driving. And those are just three of dozens of fascinating facts! Yet, despite the fact that she’s been technically employed as a writer for decades and knows she has a hell of a story to tell, she’s been stalled on writing her book.

Why is that? And how can we—yes, the collective we—help her? It’s all in this episode.

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How Book Publishing Is Evolving with Agent Mark Gottlieb

 

While Mark Gottlieb has agenting in his blood—he’s a second generation lit agent—he’s not your typical agent. He doesn’t specialize in any particular genre but bounces between fiction and nonfiction, with some children's books and graphic novels in between. And though he works with the Big Five publishers, he’s open-minded when it comes to self-publishing and the new wave of publishing.

In this episode we talked about how being a writer requires audacity, how tough it is to make a living as an author without a side profession and how most people don’t even know what a lit agent is, among many other topics.

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