Review: Perhaps most useful for those who never made a dime online
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 05 15, 2012
The title of this book is "The Beginner's Guide to Creating, Marketing, and Publishing on The Amazon Kindle"  and I assumed that the word "beginner" here refers simply to a virgin kindle author - however, it turns out that this book is written for people who don't know anything about creating a blog or a website, who know nothing about internet marketing, who never wrote anything and perhaps for those who don't even know how to write.  And if you are in that category, you may find all kinds of pointers in this book, but to develop the required skills you may need much more than this ebook.The main ideas presented in this book are:1.  Before you start writing your book, do some research to find out whether the topic you want to write about solves problems that sufficient number of people desire to solve and what is your competition.  In other words, determine whether it's viable to invest your time and energy based on what are the chances that enough people will want to buy your ebook.  In essence, your topic may meet with the greatest success if it falls in one of the three main areas: relationships, money, or health.2.  If you are an expert on the topic you want to write about, and you've written your book, and merely want to know how to format it for kindle and to publish it, the author offers minimal information, and suggests you look for more information in Smashwords Style Guide, available as a free ebook on amazon, together with a free Smashwords Marketing Guide.3.  Tips for writing a book are create a mind-map to organize your ideas, create an outline, write down whatever information flows from you, and then revise your masterpiece. The author reminds you that the secret of a well-written book is in revising it (he uses the term "re-writing" it), rather than in writing it, and while that's true, if you need to learn how to write and edit your ebook, you should get other respective books.  Revising will do you no good if you don't know what do you need to do to improve it.4.  In the section on marketing, the author says that he believe is he more qualified to teach you than the "expert" that sold a million eBook in five months.  Why?  He says, "because that expert is so far removed from your resources and experience that his advice is worthless."  So again, if you are an expert in your field and you are already successful in your field online, then you may want to skip this book.5.  And while the author suggests you skip many ideas presented in Smashwords Marketing Guide, at least if you are a newbie, he shares a variety of "white, grey and black hat" techniques to increase your popularity online.  Some of those techniques are more useful than others.  Some may have legal repercussions, so use them at your own risk.  Some links in this ebook take you to websites with black hat techniques that google says are possible web threat, and it's up to you if you want to explore what may seem like get rich or popular quick schemes that may land you in some murky waters.