Q&A Call May 19th 2025

So if anyone wants to start it off with a specific question, we can just kind of dive into some, some chats here.

Yeah, I've got a question if you don't mind, Ken.

Sure.

So at the very early stages I'm still, I'm doing some research and I've been at it now for a week, couple of hours at a time. So yeah, still early stages, but getting to stage where you mentioned going down rabbit holes and I get that you tend to find your way winding down things, but can you talk to me a little bit more about finding yourself down a rabbit hole to find things that maybe other people aren't looking for? What is the method to do that? Not specifically, but how do we get to those rabbit holes? Where do you go? Are you looking through one? And then promoted books through that and something leads to another thing. Is there any way you can expand on that a little?

Yeah, probably. The two places you find rabbit holes is to go into categories that no one thinks about things like history and different things like that. You'd be surprised what you can find in those categories because really everyone is going into health, fitness and dieting, business, self help and that's kind of it. And they're staying on like the surface level categories. And so the two places I would recommend is categories that no one would think of. Test preparation, just ones that are totally off the cusp. And then of course clicking into books. So click into a book, click into another book and, and continue to go down that rabbit hole for like a long time. Like only do a lot of research just clicking on books that you're recommended and see what you can find that way. And when you see a totally new topic, even if you're not really interested in it, just click it anyway to see what else comes up. And so do it more or less just to see how far deep you can go. Um, definitely hard to explain, but that's kind of the two ways is categories that people don't really go to. No very often. And then the. The books themselves on product pages. And the other side of the coin is I know I say to do that because you can find really hidden stuff. However, it's also good to keep an open mind where sometimes the best topics are just the generic cookbooks, fitness topics that have good demand, but for some reason people just don't publish in them because they think that they're bad. And that was like that. I'm not sure if you watched my video where more recent one where I outlined that one book that did super well, in the last five months or so, that does still super well right now. My kind of goal with that book was I specifically picked the topic that everybody knows. It's a very common topic, but it had high demand and just kind of wanted to prove that as long as there is demand, you just make a better book than everybody else and you launch it better and it sells well. And I definitely did that. And you've definitely seen this topic before. It's in a fitness category. It's super common. So that's the other side of the coin. Just go down there, Go down as deep as you can, see what you can find. But then also, you know, don't just brush over the things you see all the time. And if there is strong demand, you know, just make a better book than everybody else. And I think the biggest thing too is just a lot of people get scared away from books that have 200 reviews. But I kind of, you know, as long as the books don't have thousands of reviews, you can still compete in that topic. Of course, you know, you can do the preparation so you can get 150 reviews within the first 90 days type of thing. But yeah, as long as the, the books are just crazy competitive, you can still compete with them.

So this thing about the reviews, you say you can't compete with the book that has 2,000 reviews. Is that based on buyers habits? So if I'm a buyer and I am looking for a book.

Personally, I would look at the reviews as a bit of interest and think, oh, that's nice. But it wouldn't be a complete clincher for me. I wouldn't say, oh, that book's got 2,900 reviews. I'll buy it over the other book beside it at 200 reviews. I wouldn't, I don't think I'd make that purchasing decision. But is that how you understand buyer behavior?

Yeah, on Amazon it's definitely, it's definitely a review game. Now I will say the difference between 100 reviews and 400 is not massive. It is there, but a better cover and title and 100 reviewed book will sell close to the 400 review book. But Amazon is very much the more reviews, the more it sells. And so if your book has in a high demand topic with over a thousand reviews, even a crappy book will sell well. And a good example of that is the book called the Chatgpt Millionaire I've talked about before. It's a horrible cover. It has four stars, it's not even at the five stars, but it still sells super well and that's only because it has thousands of reviews. So Amazon. Yes, it does make a difference. However, if it's under 500, all those books are kind of competing, but I've noticed it's when they jump over 500, I guess that that book gets solidified. You can still take a lot of the sales, but it's going to be hard to directly compete. So we have to make sure that not all the books are at 500 plus reviews, more or less. Okay, that's interesting, but that's on the high end. Don't be afraid of books. Yeah, like I said, that have between 200 and 500. If there's lots of demand, you can easily make some sales. But once they run away and it's really competitive, it's very difficult.

So I've been finding sometimes there's some books that have quite a high search volume, but low competition, low search results. But then the figures just don't bear out at all. There's a lot of dead books. It just doesn't work. There's high authority things not selling. Should that be somewhere where you completely back out where you are or do you go further into that? Is it an indicator in any way that there's perhaps potential in something related to that because of the search volume? Should it give you a clue, do you think? Because I've been backing out thinking, oh, hasn't met the figures, move on.

I mean, I wouldn't say move on from the category completely. I've very much seen it topics where they're directly beside each other. One sells super well, one doesn't. And so I definitely think that don't go into that exact topic, but continue to look in that area because oftentimes there's just things right beside it that do do very well. In many cases I've seen this and of course when you're being very specific, so it's for, so excuse me, one problem for one person, it can just change so much as the person you're targeting. And then that new keyword, say it's women over 50 for a random example, sells super well, but then the generic one doesn't or for seniors doesn't sell, but just a different person does. So I would definitely look as much as you can around that area, not just rule out the topic completely.

And I suppose there's the same go for if you find.

50,000 search results and a search volume of like 500 or something like that, does that give you a clue? Does that give you a clue to Go into that or is that a barrier to stop?

Yeah, I think the important thing is the search results. When there's higher search results, it's two reasons. One is it's super saturated. Two, it's too broad. So you have to answer those questions is like for example, keto diet is an insanely saturated keyword or if you type in the word relationships it might just be because it's broad. And once you start to go to like communication and relationships, the search results go down. And so I take the search results with a grain of salt. They're just there. Same with the search volume. But when it is paired together with you know, lots of books that are selling well, that's the sweet spot. But yeah, if it's too much, it's either oversaturated or yeah, whatever else I said.

Cool. Thank you.

Hey, a question about getting reviews and sort of this earlier this year and I sort of adopted that method you suggested where I like launched my book do the free promo get reviews on Pubby. And so I've done that like twice for one of my books. I've done it once, once for one of my books, like that kind of thing. But the, the speed at which I get reviews is still like pretty slow. Like my book that I launched in January, I'm up to 67 reviews, right. So like at that velocity it's going to take me like a long time, right to get to 100 reviews or 200 reviews or something like what do you recommend to get reviews faster more.

So what I do is I think of it more of as a longer game. However Pubby, I would say I would recommend to stop using Puppy. It's, it's been very bad lately. People just aren't getting reviews. I'm currently in the middle of using book bounty for a review push and I'm easily on my free promo got like 50 reviews within three, four days. And so basically in terms of how you get those reviews is I'm in a good flow of like basically pick a book and then do that relaunch every 90 days. And in between the 90 days you're building up your currency and, and so ideally you should have at least 50,000 currency in a three month span. That's more than enough to get. And then every 90 days you have that, then you just get all the reviews there. So you should ideally be able to get 40, 50 reviews every three months. And so let's say over a year you get your book to 300 plus reviews. And so that's kind of how I look at it. And so I guess when I'm launching, the initial boost is putting it to between 50 and 100, which. Which may take a bit more preparation, but it's possible. And then after that, I'm just doing it every 90 days.

You're cycling it.

For example, my. One of my more recent books that I launched back in August, right now, I'm not doing review push. I think the push will get it to 250 reviews and launch it back in August. And so I Basically, the first three, four months, it had, like, between 70 and 100. By January, I think I got it to, like, 120 to 150 or even a little less. And then I think I've had two review pushes since then, and that's about 50 reviews per time, roughly. And so now it's gonna push to 250.

And you're recommending Book Bounty?

I'm recommending Book down, yeah. For a few reasons. One, the reviews are very quick, especially on your free promo. Like I said, I think I had 50,000 snaps. It's been four days of my free promo. Tomorrow's the last day, and I've already basically gotten all of them. Now they're just waiting for the reviews to get them. The second thing is the owner's very nice. I talk to him constantly, and he's all about just making it the best platform, the most legitimate platform. And I do, like, kind of his approach. Probably it seems like whoever owns it just kind of checked out.

Yeah.

And for. And it's just. It's just only getting better. And so I would recommend that they're very compliant. They try their best to be compliant. The owner's very nice. And, yeah, it's just a great platform. You can get reviews for it easily.

Maybe I'll try it next time.

I would try it for the next one. And fizzle away from hubby if you can, because it's just having nothing but issues.

Okay, I'll share with you one of the issues I've had with Puppy. All right. And maybe it's like a good warning for other folks in this call. I mean, unfortunately, like, there's a lot of people doing what we're doing, and they've all been told to use Puppy and they're all using Pubby. And so I, like, I see it kind of talked about in forums. Like, people say, like, they think maybe another. A competitor in the same keyword reviewed their book and, like, hit them with an intentionally low review. I don't know how often that Happens, you know, but just a heads up on that. I mean there's a lot of people using Pubby.

Yeah. I find the quality of reviews is lower on Pubby. It does still happen, but I would say I've, I've never had it happen where it's been so much where it affects the book. My book will still always be for 4.6 plus.

Yeah.

So if it does happen, it might be a one off. Yeah. But I have noticed Puppy is worse for that for some reason. Puppy is just, it's just low quality, low quality reviews and people are just, it's totally different now. And yeah, I definitely would steer away from that.

Okay.

I have another question and it's something you mentioned, but I've been thinking about this a lot and as I'm like kind of thinking about my next keyword for my next book and it's like you mentioned this, like, your book should solve one problem for one customer and I think I really want to make sure my next book can do that. Like when you're looking through keywords or looking for books, like how are you, like how are you imagining that in your mind? Like, okay, this, this will solve one problem for one customer. How do you, how do you do that? Or how do you know that?

I guess it's just like exactly how it sounds. The problem is someone wants to learn how to grow a garden, organic garden, and it's a beginner learning it. And organic vegetable gardening for beginners. That's kind of how I look at it, I think more. The more important thing is when I do say that is it needs to correlate with the search term itself. And so you're, you're not typing in relationships and then making a book that solves one problem for one person. It doesn't really solve your problem because you can't actually validate your customers there. And so it's about finding the search terms that are something like, you know, you know, fitness for seniors over 60 or specifically something organic. Vegetable garden for beginners, greenhouse gardening, you know, so as long as it's specific to a topic itself, off grid survival or a topic and a person. But most importantly, the search term is that, that topic. It correlates with the books that are there and those books are selling well. And so it's easy to pinpoint that someone's typing an off grid survival. Off grid survival books. Those off grid survival books are selling. And so now I'm not going to make an off grid survival for children because I don't really know that that customer is there. So it's important the correlation. But the search term itself can't just be something broad. It has to be solving a specific problem or solving a problem for one person. So I guess it extends to a core concept because like I said, if it is off grid survival, it might not be off grid survival for beginners. That's fine. It's still a specific topic. But it has to have correlation and the books have to be proven that it's selling and don't steer away from what's working. Okay.

And then when you pick your book title like you mentioned, like, yeah, some kind of Exercise for women over 50 or something, that keyword is your title or, or not necessarily.

So. Yeah, this is a tough one because it depends in, in topics like fitness topics and cookbooks. Yes. You don't want to, you don't want to have some clever title. People just want to see that it's a, you know, it's a keto diet cookbook for beginners. That's what they're looking for. Looking for a keto diet book. They're looking for a well place for women. Um, if you're in business, let's say your, your book is on sales. Yes. You can be a bit more creative with the wording of, of your title. You know, sell first, talk last or something. Something creative. Um, but in terms of the more generic topics, I do like to have the main keyword as the, the main focal point. However, I will do a spin on it and regarding the fitness topics, I'm going to do something like the Complete guide to, you know, Wall applies for women over 50 or wall applies for women over 50 in 21 days, like something different. So it's still that core idea, but it's just different than the competitors. But the important thing is we don't want to get too creative because people are still looking for that specific book. So they'd be careful with that. And then in the subtitle, I'm just going to do what the desirable attributes are. So I'm going to see what the main things people are looking for. Okay. They want 40 plus exercises, they want images. What are those things? And just kind of lay those up very clearly. And so when somebody reads my title, it, it's the complete guide to whatever they're looking for. It has this many exercises. It helps you lose weight, helps you with toning, whatever it may be. And so they read it and it just kind of covers everything that they're looking for. Right. And so this does apply to almost every book title. Um, but yeah, it. I would say that the more generic topics. Look at all the competitors. All the competitors are very much the top the title of the topic. Then be careful how creative you get. Cause maybe that's why it's what's working. But then if you are in more business savvy topics, you can get more creative with the targeting and how you're kind of speaking to the customer because they'll still know the book, what the book is about.

Definitely a dance. It's hard. It's not one, it's not one size fits all sort of thing.

But yeah, the important thing is that the, the customer you're targeting knows the book is for them and it has the attributes they're looking for. As long as you hit those things.

Okay.

Hey, just another. Just quickly go back to the review sites. There's Book Blaze and there's Book Bounty. Have you, have you used them both and you recommend Book Bounty?

I recommend Book Bounty. Book Blaze was the second newest one. Like it came out I think about last year and it was like after Pub, he was like the first big thing from Pubby. It was like the next thing that got that is clo. That's better but it's still closer to Pubby so you can use that too. However, it's a newer one so it's very saturated and I've had. I've seen issues where like it's just impossible to get reviews and it's. And then you can't get review and then you can get too many reviews. Like it goes back and forth and there's been a couple emails from the owner where they have an influx and they're just trying to sort it out. So it's been a lot, very much like this. So I'd say that it's still better than Pubby but I personally have just have been having a good experience with Book Bounty. Very good experience.

So you can try them both out. But yeah, I mean I. There's no reason why I wouldn't recommend Book Bounty because it works very well. I know the kind of owner's vision and I can see that it's going to only get better.

Okay.

Ken, hey, it's John Kerr here.

Hey John, how's it going?

Hey, good, good, good. Sorry man. I'm in an office building here so I've got to get.

A little. With no face here. But question I had was on, you know, and been listening about the conversation about Pubby and Book Bounty. I've had a lot of the same issues everybody's talking about with, with, with. Pubby published my second book in early March and actually I couldn't keep up with it. I hadn't built up enough. I hadn't built up enough currency to keep up with the demand at the time. And now it's gone completely like crickets. Like, I mean, so. And I've been stuck at about, you know, 50 reviews and it's been. It's been a challenge to kind of get over, you know, get over that number. So having another alternative, I think I'm going to keep both just to have, you know, have that in case Pubby does have its. Its ups and downs and maybe it'll be in a good cycle next time I publish my next book. Beth, I want to ask you about was. I know you addressed this in the program about using a pen name or using real name.

So the second book I'm publishing in about three weeks will be in the same niche, kind of personal development, self help sort of niche, and use my real name the first time. And so I'm just sort of wondering the second time I'm looking at it as more of an experiment because the first time I did all this marketing in the book with the QR codes and with a website and say, oh, by the way, just to build up the email list.

And there's been some improvement there, but not a ton. Meaning I'm not like, I've got, like, I've got this massive influx of. Of email followers. So I thought I would do it again with the second book, go with a pen name. Just experiment, just to see if it matters having a pen name or having a real name in terms of book sales. I know at the end of the day it really matters what your cover is and you have to have the right keyword in the right niche. I get all that. But I want to ask you if you could just maybe go over again, sort of best practices when determining whether to use. And this is nonfiction, right. So whether to use a pen name or go with.

Your real name.

Yeah. So I guess to answer that question is that I would say that the pen name and your name technically is the same thing because it's a difference in your mind. But somebody who's just a customer, your name and a pen name, they're both pen names. They're both names. Right. And so in terms of the actually selling books, it really doesn't make a difference because of that factor is to a customer, they have no idea. And so I guess what matters is.

If you're publishing under your name. If you have other books under that name, is the brand correlated in some way? You don't necessarily want to be publishing a fitness book and then a cookbook and then this, which is. People do that. But I would say it's more or less kind of what the long term is. And if that, you know, if the brand you're building or just the books you're creating makes sense to your initial ones you publish with, then you can use that name. But I would say yeah, it depends on your publishing business and what you're doing and how you're publishing. So if you're publishing a bunch of topics in one, you can try different pen names. But I would say yeah, if you want to try a pen name, then that's fine. I definitely would go for it. The only reason why it matters is if you start to publish multiple books in the same topic and then you might as well have them all linked with one author so that people can find your other books. But if you're not doing that, if you go into a different topic, if you're trying some things out, by all means just try different pen names. And then if you want, you can make an author profile for that new pen name after. If it is a brand that you're going to keep building. No thanks.

Good points. Yeah, no, no, good points. And one and one follow up. Is there, is there specific niches where you feel like being an authority figure matters more? I mean certainly, you know, if you're a child psychiat interest, right. And you're writing a book about behaviors or parenting, well, you know, that might matter, right? Or you know, if you're, or if you're buying a book on fitness, maybe you want to purchase it from somebody who's a coach of some kind, right. Who has some licensing. But are there certain issues, especially in that kind of self help personal development space where.

If you're just some random person writing a book on this topic, somebody may think, well, geez, I'm not sure I want to take advice on this person.

I would say it only matters if you can have some sort of tag like Maryland psychologist, PhD. If you don't have that, it doesn't matter. The authority figure is the most reviews and I've actually published in topics where my direct competitor was an actual psychologist and it said that in their biological. And then I got more reviews and I outsold them and ranked better than them. And so the only time that this matters is when you can put some like MD or PhD and like a cognitive behavioral therapy topic. Okay. People are going to trust that person more. But anything else, the only credibility that matters is reviews. Because like I've said before, they're called the best selling authors, not the best authors. The best authors you've never heard of. Because I don't know how to sell books, even experts, I would actually make the argument that what we're doing, we can actually make better books than experts. Because somebody who's done something their entire life, how are they supposed to know what a beginner needs to learn? They're going to ramble on about theory, they're going to make the book too big. And if you go and read reviews of some of some good selling books that have are that are written by like a psychologist or something like that, you'll very much find the reviews are like, yeah, this is way over my head. This is not what I was looking for at all. They basically just talk about things forever, but don't actually give you any actionable steps. And so that's. There's an argument to that too where being an expert doesn't make you better. Understanding how to package the right information for the right person and sell that information is what matters. And so yeah, like I said, unless you're in a topic where you can have like a, your MD logo or a PhD, it doesn't matter. The important thing is reviews and then actually creating a book that people want.

Yeah.

I mean most, the most successful guy I think in personal at least in that I think he wrote the book Atomic Habit.

Right.

I think his name is James Clear. He was just some guy, you know, who was like a fitness coach or something. He just started writing, writing a newsletter or something like that. And he was smart with SEO back when that mattered. It's hard to do that now with some of the Google changes. Some of the Google updates now with SEO was very good on social media in terms of Twitter and you know, leveraging those things and now he's like this foremost author and speaker in that space. So yeah, to your point, certainly can be done.

Yep. I mean if you are writing from your own name now and that's what you want to do and you have credibility. Yeah. I mean by all means use it to your advantage. But I would say, you know, don't get scared away from other people because they have credibility or don't worry about it. As long as you create a book packaged the right way for the right person that has enough reviews and launched correctly, that's the important thing.

Yeah.

That psychiatrist, did you ever get an email from him or her saying, dude, like what you're doing? Who are you? You're, you're, you're kind of killing me here.

No, I didn't. But it's, it was a good case study. It's a, it's a good thing to kind of see is that most of the time, even in complex topics, somebody who's a beginner, they don't need the whole topic, they need 5% of it. The amount of information you have to, you have to learn to teach somebody a complex topic is very minimal. It's very, very minimal. And then if you want to expand into more books, you can. But most of the time the bare minimum is what people want and it's just about packaging the right information. Too much information does not help you.

Okay, good stuff. Thanks.

Ken. I was just wondering about the change in the whole self publishers sphere where the royalties change came in recently, obviously. How do you see that impacting what self publishers are doing? Do you see more people trying to get into high content books because of that perhaps, or do you see anything change in the next little while?

I mean, a couple of things I see is I think more people will get into high content books. I think people who publish low content books though just want to publish low content books. And so I definitely see the market changing. Like now the price of low content books is not $7.99, it's $11.99. And so I think that everyone's going to raise their price and everything's going to go up and it might just be business as usual, everything's just more expensive now. That's kind of what I see. But yeah, I do think some people will go to high content, but the people who do publish low content will just raise their price basically. And that's probably what's gonna happen. And there I might. I also think it's gonna discourage people. A lot of people, I mean even in my comments are just like Amazon's so greedy, blah, blah, I'm not doing this anymore, I quit. So we'll discourage a lot of people, which is good for us. I'm happy about that. If you think a company's greedy that literally we sit at home, publish a book and make money, like, you know, I'm okay with their cut they take compared to actual publishing houses, which literally take 99%. But yeah, those are the two things I'm seeing. The market's just going to change and then there will be a small portion that go into High content. But if I do think that low content publishers and high content publishers are just different people and if you like one or the other, you just won't do the other one.

Okay, cool.

But yeah, I mean, time will tell because I am unsure, but that's kind of what I see happening. But it is interesting to see these changes happen. And I definitely think it's Amazon's way of just getting rid of the low quality, low content books because low content's gotten bad, like really bad, where people are just pumping out AI books and there's so many of them and they all are horrible. And it's almost like it's ruining Amazon's reputation away because they're selling these horrible books. And so they're doing everything they can to stop this. And that's why you see it doesn't happen as much with high content because they have, it's not super saturated. So they have a good, you know, quality control with the books. They can manage it. Low content, they can't manage it. There's too many. And so I think that they're just trying their best to limit that.

If anybody else has any questions, let me know.

Yeah, Ken John here. Again, just generally, what are you seeing in.

You know, trends in regards to, you know, the, the, the niches, I guess are typically the, the most popular ones. Right. You know, the, you mentioned, you know, you know, weight and, and, and fitness or you know, self help or, you know, psychiatry. And I say trends, I mean, just in regards to.

Is it, you know, covers, in regards to.

Timeliness. I mean, again, I mentioned the, the Atomic Habits, a book by, you know, James Clear, which, which published, I think it was 2018, 2019, and there was like a ton of like just of these habits books that kind of came out.

I was in the bookstore this weekend and just kind of was looking at different cover ideas and just saw like tiny habits, mini habits, minuscule habits. Basically it's like all.