I recently read John T Reed’s How to Write, Publish, and Sell Your Own How-To Book.

His website is not pretty, but his writing is great. I suspect he can only get away with such a non-pretty looking site design because he was well established long before the web, & he does not use words like non-pretty. He would just say disgustingly ugly or something like that.

Onto the book review:

• He says to sell a book you need market for the idea (although it is hard to test the absolute demand) and a desire or interest in the topic. You also need enough credibility or experience with the topic to write a book on it, and an anger toward the books on the market in said topic…either they are dated, biased, or incomplete.

• Many people are bad writers because they water down their voice.
• John says you do not need much skill to write how to books, so long as you can write like you would talk.
• He talks about writing making you a member of the press and talking to people as member of press…don’t be afraid to try to contact the right people.
• He goes in exceptional depth about why it is best to sell books direct via your own website (sell a branded product instead of competing against yourself as a commodity in an unneeded arbitrary long supply chain).
• He goes into great depth about customer service and why he stopped accommodating problem customers. One area I do not fully agree with him on is that he says higher prices lead to more complaints, which seems to be an inverse of my experience thusfar.

His book is only 128 pages, but is fairly information dense. He whinges on about a few things, but most of it is great useful information from many years of experience. Well worth it's cost of about $35 after shipping.

Criticisms:

• Presents an overly simplistic view of how search engines work based on his own experience. He had about 20 years writing experience building up his personal brand before he took to the web. He also has many shady guru review / hate articles on his site which act as great link bait to improve the overall authority of his website. His site is well established, as is his reader base, so his experiences probably are not going to match Joe average publisher if they are new to the publishing process. He would do well to also research or also mention [cough] books on SEO.

• He states search is his primary means of driving new sales, and openly admits that he has little understanding of how search engines work (a claim which may have something to do with an associated lawsuit for him outranking someone for their name in Google). While normally rather in depth information he states rather lacking stuff in this area.
• He fails to mention pay per click marketing at all, which is huge for how to book publishing, and may even prove useful to find the right topics to write on or how much demand there is for a topic BEFORE you even write the first word. If he is recommending that search drives the bulk of your sales surely he should mention how to research market volume?
• He does not mention the social aspects of the web, and probably does not realize that link popularity from his review articles helps pull up his site rankings for other terms as well. Those review articles also drive sales as well. I only found out about his name because his Rich Dad Poor Dad review was mentioned in a WebmasterWorld thread. I like John's writings well though, and I bet he would sell 2 or 3 times as many books as he does if he also ran an associated whingeblog. He has the perfect writing style to pull it off.
• While his blunt this-is-me language probably helps convey his message well and is the voice of his writing you can’t help but be offended by at least one thing if you read through a whole book of his. He makes fun of the Spanish language, the French, and presumes guilt on the part of all people in jail, which is either a strong display of ignorance or arrogance. I suppose I can’t fault him for his voice, but I think sometimes he goes over the top with it to get his point across. His points are in many cases valid though. For example, he is not a fan of special consideration customers. I have grown that way too, as most of the people who ask me to special accomidate them are the people who never pay, bounce checks, or reverse charge. There is no reason to give people better customer service for being bad customers.
• He also has a rather plain website, which can work. He also mentions that some people may need more graphics, but I think most people could not pull off a site as "non pretty" as his unless their writing is of an exceptional caliber. Put another way, I think I would only have about 5 to 10% of my current income if I created my website around his design and structure

In spite of the negatives I just mentioned I still think his book is a great book. If you add his book to a web savvy person with a deep interest in a topic you should be able to do really well.

In Rich Dad Poor Dad Robert T Kiyosaki talks about the differences between those who are wealthy and those who are not, stating that society is sorely lacking in financial intelligence.

Many people in the middle class get stuck in debt because they buy liabilities which prevent them from saving for assets. Expensive mortgages from a bigger house, higher car costs from larger and more expensive cars, having kids, and other similar incremental expenses that come with age perpetually keep people fighting just to get by, even as they receive pay raise after pay raise. If people slow consumption to pay off debt and allow their income to help build assets compounding interest can help them.

Robert also talks about paying yourself first, a concept where you make yourself save money and stash it away before you pay off all your bills. The need to pay the bills can be a force to help you create additional income, although sometimes I think the added stress may not be a good thing for some.

Robert also suggests that money spent on learning / investing in your brain is the single best investment you can possibly make.

As a warning, some of his specific investing examples may require strapping on the wading boots, as noted by John T. Reed. Some statements, such as lose big when you lose, might not be too well in tune with reality for good investment advice for most people. Also Robert T Kiyosaki was not well known until he got together with a group of multi level marketers, which makes some people question whether or not he only got wealthy by / after telling others how to do so.

If you focus completely on the money some of his advice is exceptionally shallow, but some of the general ideas are good stuff.

Biggest, Baddest, ETC:

• Yahoo! says 20 billion items in their index

• At SES DaveN predicted heavy spam problems for them (read as Dave making bank from stuffing spam in their index).
• Interesting to see how little coverage Yahoo! has got compared to Google's similar size matters mentions in the past.
• While Jeremy defends the index size traditional media sources like the New York Times looks to Google co founder Sergey Brin as a credible source to discount the story, and Danny is sick of the size comparisons.
• Google also slightly increased their number (from 8,058,044,651 to 8,168,684,336), which may be an attempt to further refute / undermine Yahoo!'s claim. Gary says Google gave them the new number before Yahoo! did, which makes me wonder if Google has a few people who know the pulse on Yahoo!
• Google always used index size as free marketing it's whole way up, and now that someone is ahead they simply said the figure is useless and everyone agrees. Amazing PR.

Recently NickW started testing IntelliTXT. I dislike those ads. The perfect example of why I think they suck is when the people from Vibrant Media posted "feel free to email us directly" and the word email became one of their green ad links.

The problem with those little green ads is that they are more noise, which goes counter to the less noise more signal tagline on the site.

The audience of ThreadWatch has some serious cash, but what they are most interested in that which is shared freely amongst friends.
The people you make money off are not necissarily going to be the same people who help build up the network though, but you still can leverage that market position and those friendships to help sell a related idea.

I think if Nick created a guide to community building and blogging it would get far more support than my ebook does.

One of Nick's friends said that he wouldn't want to let a guide to cloning ThreadWatch to get out there, but:

• if they were smart enough to clone it they probably wouldn't need a guide

• few people are going to want to work as hard as Nick has building up that site
• few people have as many friends as Nick does
• eventually the fakeness or cloneness comes out in the writing if people try to clone it
• without a highly profitable business model few people will likely want to clone it
• adding more and a wider variety of advertisements to that site goes counter to why it became successful
• as you add noise you lose mindshare, and that is the only thing that will make it possible for others to duplicate ThreadWatch...if it becomes more noise less signal

The first version of my ebook was free and sucked, but over time it got better. If Nick threw something out there and was open to feedback then the people there would help make sure he was offering something they would want to recommend, plus they would be more invested into helping it become successful if they offered suggestions and feedback and his site saved them a bunch of time.

Even if Nick starts off as only a 10 or 20 page guide it can get reshaped and improved as time passes. The key is to just pick an idea and start writing about it. Some people who in the past sent me hate mail now point unrequested link into my sites in part because I accepted their feedback.

As search algorithms advance guides which help people do well with community interaction will have far more value than guides about algorithms and engines, because ultimately the algorithms and engines are just trying to emulate people. For many people it will be far easier to create something others want than to push something they don't.

Recently HitWise jumped into the keyword research market by offering their Keyword Intelligence tool starting at $89 a month. Trellian's Keyword Discovery just joined the competitive analysis market.

It is cool to see another competitive analysis tool available for those of us who can't afford to splash out the $20,000 or so for HitWise. Trellian's new tool costs $65 per month per URL.

A few things I do not like with Trellian's package are:

• limited data reach (most of these types of tools do not have much data when you compare them to the likes of Google or Yahoo!, but none of the big portals have decided to sell this type of data yet, probably for fear of a privacy backlash & bad press).

• they don't have a package deal. you have to keep ordering one domain at a time, which could probably lead to confusing credit card bills and the like.
• When they tell you the number of domains that they have tracked traffic from they don't group the subdomains with the main domains, so that can throw the numbers off.

Before you subscribe they tell you how many keywords and websites they have listed for that domain. They state that they have stats for the top 100,000 domains.

I bought one domain, and did not see any gems from it, but I suppose if you find one or two good spots to market from it then it would be a good buy and $65 is not much risk.

I will post some stuff on the conference soon. Off to the Google Dance.