Review: To sell more ebooks, write about how to sell more ebooks
Rating: 1 out of 5
Date: 03 13, 2014
...and to increase your blog traffic: blog about how to increase blog traffic. Also, blog about how to sell ebooks, and write ebooks on how to increase blog traffic. This is the actual formula that Steve Scott uses to extract money from uninformed Amazon customers, but he tells you to do something else in his ebooks. If you wish to make money in epublishing and are not averse to duping your customers, then don't follow Steve Scott's advice: instead do what he does (as described above). To save you the time and effort of reading this lengthy review, the following are 4 additional take-home messages:a) Never pay in advance for the advice on how to make money online or how to start a business (including advice on how to make money in epublishing). Instead, buy such an ebook, read it within 7 days, and return it for a 100% refund. If the advice works (which you will know several months or a few years later), then you can pay for the ebook after the fact, using a different Amazon account.b) If you are comfortable with deception, then the following magical rule can make a lot of money for you (as it does for countless scam artists): To make money online, you need to sell advice on how to make money online (and how to increase web traffic). But your advice should be different from what you yourself are doing.c) Give away some of your ebooks or documents for free in exchange for an e-mail address of the readers/visitors. Subscribe them to your newsletter and invite them to your blog where you show them your growing income and web traffic.d) To get your online scam off the ground, generate lots of fake reviews for your ebooks on Amazon.com by swapping reviews with other authors.That's it, you can skip the rest of this review.To make as much money online as Steve Scott does, you need to write and sell *only* ebooks about various ways of making money online (and maintain a blog on this topic too). According to his recent blog post (April 2014) he made about $18,000 in January 2014: over 99% of that money came from Amazon book sales (Audible + Kindle ebooks). If you look up his ebooks on Amazon.com, all of them are about making money online (most of them are about ebook marketing and increasing blog traffic). To give you some idea what kind of fraud we are talking about here: his income from an actual online business (affiliate marketing) is approximately $160 a month (January 2014). This means that over 99% of his income is generated by selling ebooks on how to make money online (~$18,000 a month), and less than 1% of his income derives from an actual online business ($160 a month, which is not enough to make a living). Of course, there is no way you can verify his real income, but this is what he is posting on his website.The gist of the nonfiction that this author sells can be summed up as follows: "Give me $3 dollars (buy my ebook) and I will give you $3000 (show you how to sell ebooks)!" As mentioned above, it's all smoke and mirrors, he doesn't have any real business; most of the income comes from selling advice on how to start or improve some kind of business (in this case, ebooks and blogging). He can't sell ebooks either, he successfully sells only ebooks on how to market ebooks and how to make money online. This is a well-thought-out Ponzi scheme where the income of the seller grows because he claims that he knows how to sell ebooks (initially with some doctored evidence), and you eventually start to believe the claims because he shows you (truthfully) that his ebook income is growing exponentially. What Steve Scott doesn't explain to you is that over 99% of his income comes from sales of ebooks about making money online (about 80% of income from ebooks on ebook marketing and blogging success). Therefore, there is no evidence that his advice works for generic "nonfiction," and you are fooled into paying for useless information.A similar Ponzi scheme works for his blogging advice: to increase his web traffic he blogs about how to increase web traffic (it is assumed that you will devote your blog to some other topics). He is also giving away free ebooks on how to increase blog traffic; these ebooks contain links to his blog.It bears repeating that the advice that he sells is likely to work only if you write ebooks on this topic: how to make money online (ebook marketing, how to write bestselling ebooks, blogging success, and how to make money on YouTube). All his marketing data and income that he is showing you on his blog come from these areas, not from some vague "nonfiction." Steve Scott's advice is very likely to fail if you try to use it for ebooks dealing with some other subject areas. Similarly, Steve Scott's advice about blogging will work only if you create a blog that deals with "how to" of blogging success and ebook success.To sum up, this type of scam works because the deception is fourfold:{1} To learn how to successfully write and market ebooks you need to *buy ebooks* from Steve Scott; to learn how to increase your blog traffic, you need to *visit Steve Scott's blog* over and over. The ultimate result of these activities is increased blog traffic and growing ebook income for Steve Scott, not for you.{2} Initially, this type of author has to lie about his ebook achievements in order to jumpstart the sales of his ebooks about writing bestselling ebooks. As the Ponzi scheme gains traction, he will be showing you his real income and growing web traffic. Likewise, initially, most of such authors generate lots of fake reviews for their books; but later, as the scheme gains traction, there will be many natural reviews, and the author will even be telling you NOT to generate fake reviews for your own ebooks (more on that later).{3} The seller of advice is making a broad claim (how to write and sell nonfiction ebooks), but he doesn't tell you that this advice is applicable only to a narrow subject area (i.e., writing ebooks about marketing of ebooks: what he does himself).{4} The seller is showing you his growing income and tells you that it comes from selling "nonfiction" books, but in actuality, he receives over 99% of his income from selling ebooks about making money online (he is not explaining the whole truth).Writing and marketing of ebooks and development of a blog take many months and years. You will realize that Steve Scott's advice doesn't work for your particular subject area long after you paid $2.99 for his ebooks, and there is no way you can get a refund. (You can get a full refund on Amazon-purchased ebooks within seven days.) Besides, you will probably be blaming yourself, not Steve Scott, for the failure, thinking that you missed some small but crucial detail. Thus, Steve Scott's readers will likely continue buying his ebooks and visiting his blog, despite the lack of success. Some of these misled customers probably write 5-star reviews for his ebooks, saying that the advice is very detailed and helpful (but failing to mention that the advice did not help to generate any real income from ebooks).Please note that not a single positive review for the ebook in question, "61 Ways to Sell More Nonfiction Kindle Books," describes how much the reviewer's sales increased after following the advice. If some claims are made about ebook sales, then the reviewer is not showing his/her real name; thus, there is no way you can verify the claims. The majority of reviewers are thanking Steve Scott for telling them what they want to hear, namely, that the dream of ebook success is alive. But the harsh reality is that among non-fraudulent self-pubbed ebooks, only about one ebook in ten thousand will become successful, mostly as a result of promotion by Amazon's editors (because they liked it and decided to select it as "Editors' picks"). Amazon's editors select more than one in ten thousand ebooks for temporary promotion (probably one in several hundred), but only a small minority of these ebooks actually takes off, and nobody knows why. This is pure luck and the chances of success are the same or worse than in the traditional publishing.There is another way to make money in ebooks and it involves selling money-making advice, like "61 Ways to Sell More Nonfiction Kindle Books" or "How to Discover Best-Selling Nonfiction eBook Ideas." In more detail, this type of business model works as follows: Start selling ebooks on how to market ebooks and how to write bestselling ebooks (lying through your teeth about your own achievements, of course). Your advice should be general, basic, and different from what you yourself are doing. It doesn't matter that your own ebook sales are close to zero: be patient. You have to fake it till you make it. Don't forget to procure dozens of fake 5-star reviews by swapping reviews with other authors. There are large threads devoted to review exchange among authors on the CreateSpace Community webpage and in the General forum of the KDP Community website. Or you can just contact random indie authors and ask them to exchange reviews (don't have to actually read the books). Then, when you start making a thousand or maybe a couple of grand per month, you can honestly claim that you "know" how to sell ebooks.Now flood Amazon with dozens of ebooks on how to make money in some other areas (blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, eBay, Fiverr, Craigslist, affiliate marketing, MLM, e-mail marketing, etc.). You don't have to know anything about these topics to publish ebooks in those fields, just read a couple of articles on the Internet and make up some stories about your success in whatever online business. So that the success stories look credible create some screenshots in your graphics editor and present them as proof. Again, continue to tirelessly generate dozens of fake 5-star reviews for each new release. It doesn't matter that you can't make money in any of those areas yourself: people will be buying your ebooks because there is always huge demand for information on how to start a business (polls show that the majority of people would gladly quit the day job and start their own business if they could). There is no limit on how small or poorly written your ebooks can be. You can slap together several trashy ebooks a day, if need be. Take a look at the "masterpiece" by the author in question: "Make Money Online - 55 Ways to Make Extra Money Fast Using Your Computer." The number of your visitors and buyers on Amazon.com will be increasing. Suck the new customers in with freebies (in exchange for an e-mail address), sign them up for a newsletter, and invite them to visit your blog, where you brag about your ebook income and traffic statistics, all the while pitching them your ebooks about ebook success and how to make money online.Voila! Now you are making a good living by selling advice on how to start various kinds of businesses WITHOUT running any actual business yourself. You are selling the idea of starting a successful business to the nave, that's your whole business. I have a friend who sells artificial decorative stone and block molds for production (molding) of artificial decorative stone. He sells the block molds as a "prepackaged small business," i.e., when you buy the molds, *supposedly* you will be able to start your own business selling artificial decorative stone. He tells me that 99% of his income comes from the block molds (selling the idea of starting a business), whereas the decorative stone itself sells poorly. When we were drinking at a sauna a few weeks ago, he also told me, "Most of my customers are fools, as are most people in general." He became a millionaire last year.The business model described above probably still works if someone wants to start from scratch, although it's a dishonest method suitable for sleazy "entrepreneurs." There are still very few competitors, I can count only 4 or 5 people on Amazon.com. Don't pay a single dollar to authors like Steve Scott because the startup techniques they are selling are old and tired and are mass marketed to death by the authors like Steve Scott. A business idea known to tens of thousands of people is useless because you have tens of thousands of competitors. If you are willing to pay $2.99 for such useless information (and make someone else richer in the process), you must be a very irrational person who hasn't got an ounce of common sense.You should never believe success stories that people like Steve Scott are offering as "proof." First, it is easy to doctor all supporting evidence such as screenshots, sample web pages, and the like. Second, even if a success story is true, it is only a small part of the truth because the proposed method may work only for one person in a thousand (i.e., it may require enormous luck). To present credible proof, the promoter of a method should present statistics and verifiable evidence (names, phone numbers, addresses) about ALL users of the proposed business idea (without omissions). For example, the promoter of a method should say something like, "Of 9,795 people that have tried this technique as of March 1, 2014, 6,705 people on average made $500 or less in 6 months and 3,551 people made less than $100 in 6 months." Third, the success of the seller of a business idea works against buyers of the idea. As explained above, the more people know about some startup technique, the more competitors there are, and the less profitable this activity is. For this reason, once you start selling information on how to start your kind of business when you still have a real business, you will lose the real business and will have to continue selling false information for the rest of your life. You can't go back because you've made this particular type of business unprofitable by creating tens of thousands of competitors. In actuality, the 99-cent "business consultants" like the author in question rarely start their career by creating a real business. Most likely they start making up success stories and selling false information from the get-go. If a person is indeed running a successful internet business, it would be dumb and self-destructive for him/her to try to honestly explain to everyone in the world how to start this kind of business.The obvious conclusion is that it makes no sense to pay anyone for information on how to start an online biz or how to create a bestselling ebook (even if the fee is only $2.99) because there is no honest reason for anyone to sell you truthful information on this topic. Fortunately for Amazon customers (and unfortunately for authors), you can buy an ebook such as this one, read it or browse within seven days and return it for a full refund. I don't mean that you should read Steve Scott's books for free and spend your time testing his ideas: he throws out a lot of untested ideas unsupported by trustworthy evidence and statistics. The burden of proof is on the person making fantastic claims, such as "bulletproof strategies" for creating bestselling ebooks. Think about it: the situation when everyone, or let's say 30% of the population, are bestselling authors is mathematically impossible because there won't be enough time and people to read all these books. In the real world, only an infinitesimal minority of books can be bestsellers.P.S. It was pointed out to me that Steve Scott uses another author profile on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/S.J.-Scott/e/B00D60KTC0 and that most of his income is actually derived from popular psychology books. Looking at his sales there, I agree with the latter statement. Still, I am not going to delete the above review for several reasons. Steve Scott or S.J. Scott is selling snake oil under both author profiles. His pop psychology ebooks have no credibility because 1) he has no training in either psychology or psychiatry; 2) the books offer no credible evidence that the advice works (how about clinical trials or volunteer studies published in a scientific journal?); 3) the proposed techniques are not based on the existing scientific knowledge; both psychology and psychiatry are enormous fields, and there is a world of published scientific studies on procrastination, self-control, impulsivity, ADHD, etc. The proposed techniques will not work for example for ADHD patients because the problem is not organization of habits but malfunction of the brain. 4) Related point: Steve Scott is trying to reinvent a tiny part of the wheel called cognitive-behavioral therapy, which is known to be effective against some psychiatric and psychological problems and has been validated scientifically. Nowadays, cognitive-behavioral therapy is available in the form of software (no need for the presence of a licensed professional). To Steve's credit, the disclaimer in the front matter of his pop psychology books says that the books are for entertainment purposes only, and that he does not claim to be an expert on the subject matter in question.