Review by Manny Hernandez:

I just finished reading Dan Zarrella’s book and I am very impressed. If you are new to the world of social media or wondering how to make it fit your marketing strategy, this book is a perfect starting point. Dan lays out all the dimensions of social media in an easy-to-understand way, outlining the do’s and don’t's for each of them. It doesn’t pretend to be a Bible of the topic: for in-depth tactics for each leg of your social media marketing strategy, you will need to pick up other titles. But it gives you a very complete feel for what lies ahead, should you want to market your brand through social media, something that you will soon realize not to be an option but a must.

Review by David J. Perdue:

In the increasingly complex world of social media, how do you begin to successfully engage in social media marketing for your business? Dan Zarrella has responded to that question with “The Social Media Marketing Book.” It’s a quick read. But the small book is packed with useful information for those itching to jump into the social media marketing fray.

The book’s organization is quite user-friendly and begins with a brief introduction to social media. The bulk of the book then focuses on presenting a concise history, definition, and description of the various types of social media: blogging, Twitter/microblogging, social networking, media sharing, social news and bookmarking, ratings and reviews, forums, and virtual worlds. I found each section both helpful and interesting, especially appreciating the author’s conciseness.

The final two chapters–one on strategy, another on measurement–are some of the most important. As I went through the strategy chapter, I was highlighting different bits of advice and enjoyed his discussion of “call to action” (CTA) in which you, the marketer, try to engage visitors on your website. The measurement chapter stresses the importance of goals and describes several tools you can use to measure return on investment and engagement as a result of your social media marketing efforts.

Overall, I found Zarrella’s guide a helpful resource on understanding and applying social media for business. Note that the book is an introductory guide, so don’t expect to find profound social media strategies if you’re already an experienced social media marketer. Nevertheless, I appreciated the nuggets of wisdom throughout this survey of social media marketing.

Review by Midwest Book Review:

In his The Complete Guide To Book Marking, marketing consultant and author David Cole offers a well organized and presented compendium of “how to” instruction in every aspect of publicity, promotion, and marketing of books designed specifically for the self-published author, small press publisher, regional and speciality house marketing staff. All facets of presenting books to the marketplace are covered including trade distribution, the libraries, direct-mail and direct sales marketing, selling books on the Internet, through non-book retailers, premium sales, and more. Of special value is the chapter devoted to subsidiary rights (serial, paperback, foreign, book clubs, audio, film, electronic formats). Cole does an especially fine survey of book publicity basics and creating an effective sales campaign, including guidelines and examples of effective PR and media kit copy. The Complete Guide To Book Marketing lives up to its title and is very highly recommended, invaluable reading for anyone seeking a commercial success in today’s highly complex and competitive marketplace for book sales.

Review by Dr. Susan F. Kepner:

This book is mainly targeted at small publishers and self publishers, but every starting-out author should read it. Writers often think that if only they could “get published,” their career would take off. But getting published is only the first step. It is no guarantee against a book fading away, ignored, before its first bloom. This book educates writers about what they can do, on their own or with their publisher, to get their work publicized, recognized, onto bookstore shelves, and into readers’ hands.

Review by M. Van Der Meulen:

I had to pick a book and write a review as part of an assignment of for may graduate marketing class. Having no marketing experience I took a shot in the dark and picked this book.

I am so glad I did. Although the authors of the original full-text versions would disagree, Mr. Murray “readers digest” summaries of the book were terrific. This book allowed me a great overview of 17 marketing books in one.

For someone new to marketing it was so quick and excellent reading to get me up to speed. You’ll have to wait for a experienced marketing major for their judgment.

I felt it should be required reading for anyone who wants to know more about marketing but don’t have the time to read all the full-text versions.

Review by Brian Martin:

I’m about 75% done with this book, and while it has some good tidbits of info, it has one major problem: It’s dated. Some of the summaries go as far back as 1980, I think there’s one even from the 70′s. If I would have known that half the summaries were so old, I definetly wouldn’t have purchased it. While you can glean some nuggets of information from some of these summaries, most are just too dated to have much bearing on todays marketing aspects.

Some of the preditions, like the internet as an emerging technology and social aspects of marketing are interesting to be able to see how they came to fruition. I wouldn’t have minded a few summaries from marketing past, but over half the book is devoted to summaries from the 90′s while less than 25% is devoted to just early 2000. I think the latest article they have is from freaking 2004 – light years past when it comes to the internet and other marketing media.

I definetly would not purchase this book at it’s full retail price. As an ancillary purchase to a more recent book,at 7$ that wouldn’t be a bad deal. It’s got some interesting information on different tactics and comes from the perspective of several high profile figures who bring different things to the table. As a bargain purchase, it’s not a bad deal, but it seems like they just could have included some more recent books, especially with internet marketing being such a huge part of todays marketing.

Review by Martha Jewett:

This is one of those books that focuses on executing the fundamentals, but what is unique about it is that it is scalable to any size–from a one-person “brand called you” to a Fortune-100 corporation.

I don’t think I’ve ever used a business book with as much flexibility. You can use this book to organize your own thinking, but you can also scale it up to include as many people as are critical to your success. It will be useful to you if you are anywhere along the marketing food chain. You can also use it if you are running the show. If so, you should probably buy this book and hand it out to all your staff.

The book is organized in two parts, giving you options. You can select which Part to read depending on what you want to do. Part 1 covers logistics–how to organize and run a marketing meeting designed to produce a marketing plan in a day (the authors admit that it might take two days, but they show you lots of different ways to slice things up, depending on how much time you have). Part 2 is about the topics–the marketing issues you’ll need to address to build your marketing plan.

You might pick up this book and think it’s too simple. Big mistake. This is one of those books that delivers the simplicity on the other side of complexity. (In this aspect, it reminds me of The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande.) If everyone on the team knows, coordinates, and executes everything in your marketing plan, then they probably don’t need this book. Otherwise, chances are they can benefit from this book’s discipline and savvy.

Review by wiredweird:

One rule of thumb among independent consultants is that they should spend about half their time not just doing the job they do, but schmoozing and hustling the next job. Weber proposes something similar for writers. The craft of writing the book itself is dealt with elsewhere, at length. Weber deals with writing about your book, and about all the other hustling that it takes to get people to pick it up in the first place. He identifies two big parts to this job: selling the book, and selling the writer.

An unknown writer is in the odd position of proving he has something to say before anyone will listen. A solid third of the book, plus a pervasive atmosphere throughout the rest, talks about creating an internet presence: blogging, social networking, and generally putting yourself where your potential customers will see you. If you want their eyes on your writing, you have to put a lot of it out there, with new content all the time to keep them coming back. (The motto of the internet may be “Yeah, but what about lately?”) Building a following takes time, maybe years, and the day the book hits the streets is way too late. The ongoing effort may seem daunting. If you’re really a writer, though, you would have been writing anyway. Weber’s advice is about putting it where it will do the most good.

Then when your book is on the electronic shelves of the internet booksellers, a whole new job begins. (A new writer’s share of brick’n'mortar shelf space is just about zero – your choices are the internet or the trunk of your car.) Weber discusses dozens of techniques for directing buyers to your book, centered largely on Amazon. He discusses lists, links, tags, and especially reader reviews like this one. Positive reader reviews may be the biggest thing that sells a reader, once they’ve found your book’s page. Free review copies, like the one I’m reviewing, are one great way to get the first few reviews written.

Weber is well aware of the line between intense promotion and unethical shilling, including embarrassing cases where writers were outed as authors of glowing reviews for their own books. There are cases, though, where the line is subjective – the difference between eagerness and aggressiveness is sometimes in the eye of the beholder.

There are reams of useful tips here. One interested me in particular: writing your book so as to make the most of the internet sales venue. When I first opened this book, its dense and detailed table of contents took me by surprise – it lists two or three entries for some individual pages. That made sense after Weber pointed out that booksellers sometimes display the TOC or index on the product page. A detailed TOC or index lets the author make as much use as possible of this feature. Well, it’s a new kind of world out there. Weber offers a useful guide to navigating your book through it.

//wiredweird, reviewing a complimentary copy

Review by Patrick Shepherd:

You’ve got your novel all written, proofread, and have even found someone to read it and give a good critique of it, and his suggestions were all carefully considered and where appropriate implemented. Now what?

For most new authors, what’s next is an excruciating travail of trying to find someone interested in actually publishing it. The process can take years. But then you find a small publisher willing to take a flyer on your book, and you finally hold an actual printed copy in your hands. Your job as the author is done now, right? Surely your publisher will do everything possible to make this book sell, and sell…

Well, maybe. More likely is that their `marketing’ department will only put out a few announcements, try and set up a few speaking/book signing events for you, and have it on the shelves for a few months only. If you really want to make your book sell, you need to do something about it yourself. How?

Read this book. Follow its suggestions. Doing so is not a small amount of work, but you’ve already invested a huge amount of effort in writing your book, so a little additional effort is probably more than justified.

This book has as its main focus spreading the word about your book through various on-line sites and tools. Weber makes the telling point that the network is your friend, that one mention at one place leads to another connection at another site – and readers of these sites, seeing your book mentioned more than once, are far more likely to buy your book.

The main tool he recommends is this site. For better or worse, Amazon is the 800 lb gorilla of on-line book marketing. Weber details many, many features of this site that can help you sell your book and precisely how you can take advantage of them. Prime is garnering reviews of your book, and Weber does an excellent job of explaining which reviewers to contact and how to get those reviews without coming across as a spammer. To some degree, this review feels a little incestuous, as I’m one of the resources he lists as useful. He also explains the various `tie-in’ tools available to authors and publishers, the Amazon sales ranking system, the benefits and downsides of contracting to get your book pushed up in the Amazon rank system, linking possibilities, and what to do about reviews that appear that you might consider inappropriate or factually in error, along with many other things.

Other, more traditional methods of promoting your book, and other on-line retailers are not ignored, but they receive a much less detailed delineation, along with comments about how hard most of these methods are for an individual author to actually use.

The second main tool he recommends is the blog/web site. Once again, the main idea is to get your book noticed by those who care about your subject matter. He details where and how to set up a blog, and gives solid recommendations about what content it should contain, from press-release type material to audio/visual author interviews (and also gives some pretty good estimates of the cost factors of producing such materials). Google page-ranking, click-ads, and other such items relating to how easily searches for your book’s subject material will actually return your book’s title are also covered.

Third is something he identifies as `social networking’ on places like MySpace. Once again, he offers very specific suggestions on how to go about this without irritating those you are communicating with, a highly important point on today’s net where anything even remotely looking like spam is going to be immediately ignored.

Now the real question is, do Weber’s recommended actions actually work? The answer to this is a qualified `yes’: in general, it won’t make your book a best-seller, but can get it into the mid-list sales numbers, assuming your book is of general interest and is well written – a point Weber emphasizes, as no amount of marketing will help a bad book. Weber gives several examples of authors who have been successful in this manner, and I know from tracking a couple of authors that I like that things like a well-written blog and good reviews can do a lot to get a book noticed and bought.

Throughout this book, Weber gives specific web addresses, contact information, and setup instructions. As such things can change with lightning speed on the web, he also maintains a on-line site that has updates to such information.

About the only thing missing from this was an overall estimate of just how much effort doing all the things he recommends would take. While this is certainly not a minor number, it’s also true that few people would actually try and do everything specified here. A person planning on trying his suggestions should carefully read this once, then go back a second time and determine which particular portions of it are both applicable to his book and are something he thinks he can actually do.

In all, a very solid, practical book that should be of great value, especially to new or lesser-known writers.

— Reviewed by Patrick Shepherd (hyperpat)

Review by Matthew Laporte:

I am new to network marketing and was looking to learn strategies from an experienced and successful direct seller. I found that and much more in this book. Like most network marketers I had the motivation and excitement but after enrolling began asking myself “ok, now what?” I found the answers in this book as Christensen takes the guesswork and mystery out of direct selling. It is easy to relate to Christensen as she tells her story of how she began in this industry. If the steps are followed, the reader will not have to reinvent the wheel but rather will have a clear set of principles to follow allowing them to stay on course to financial freedom.

Christensen’s honesty is presented throughout the book as she explains that direct selling is not a “get rich quick” scheme and work and rejection go along with the territory. This can all be overcome by following the steps outlined in the book as well as the interactive activities to help you grow your business and think like a winner.

With Christensen’s impressive experience in direct selling as well as her amazing success anyone interested in direct selling should own this book.

Review by jackie cameron:

Mary Christensen writes with such enthusiasm and with a wide knowledge and personal experience in the world of network marketing. Everything you need to know to enable your success in this field is contained in the well constructed, substantive pages of this book. In this book you will learn how to use your skills to succeed by putting together an action plan to become the best you can ever be. It is an easy to read, easy to understand, compelling book which will help give you an opportunity to compete and succeed at the highest level. This book is the first major step for anyone looking at personal success and financial growth in this exciting field. Mary believes that success, happiness and abundance are easily and rightfully attainable by everyone. Network marketing is your way of making your mark in the world and reading Mary’s book is your first leap in the right direction.

Jackie Cameron. Editor, and Author of several books including her latest `Where there’s a will….’

Review by C. T. Wu:

Most CEOs/COOs/CFOs would agree:

1. Marketing/Sales is both an art and a black box, or even a black hole as it seems to be a continuous cash guzzler.

2. Sometimes CEOs feel they are captives to the Sales VP because even though they are not happy with their sales performance, firing and replacing them with new ones is not a sure win.

3. Marketing campaigns are like shooting in the dark. If you don’t shoot, you will not catch anything. But if you keep shooting in the dark, pretty soon the bullets will run out. Most CEOs feel their Marketing VPs are “addicted” to all those fancy marketing programs without assured ROI.

4. VP/Marketing and VP/Sales are like a divorced couple. The best way to pacify them is to keep them separate forever. But how can CEOs afford to do that?

Systems Thinking Guru Russell Ackoff once said that the System cannot detect its own problem and it must be from a high order system level. Marketing and Sales VPs cannot solve their own dilemmas and problems, it requires the CEO/COO/CFO in conjunction

with other functional VPs to work together in a systemic way.

However, among all the functional disciplines, Marketing and Sales are the two most mysterious and hard to understand arenas for the whole executive team. “Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way” is the first book ever that not only presents the real CORE of the respective Marketing and Sales function in an easy to understand system way, it also reconnects Marketing/Sales function with the rest of the business in a systemic manner. The introduction of “Customer Value Mapping” in the whole Marketing/Sales process is truly a remarkable contribution by the author, Michael Webb. I personally first saw that idea on Webb’s business website 18 months ago and applied it to the company I worked for and realized an unbelievably rewarding result.

A side benefit of reading the book is that with Webb’s superior

writing style people can easily absorb the whole idea of Six Sigma and Lean Management without going through all the terminology and jargon commonly found in other books on Six Sigma. This is a very important feature of the book as its main appeal should be for all corporate executives and Marketing/Sales managers, not just QA coaches.

Among over 100 books on Marketing or Sales that I have read since 1990 after founding my own company, this book is definitely on the top. It will also be a great companion book for MBA students to get bridged to the real challenge of the business world and get well trained with a systemic framework that has rich real world success track records, including my own company’s fantastic experience.

C.T. WU, Ph.D. in E.E.

www.sohoware.com

Santa Clara, California

Review by F. Muna:

A few books were recently published which introduced the concept of six sigma to improving sales and marketing. At first I was skeptical about applying six sigma principles to these particular business functions. I, too, suspected that it is probably the latest fashion, the latest flavor of the month, but after reading this book I believe that some of the six sigma tools can indeed be usefully applied to marketing and sales processes.

The author, a black belt practitioner, argues that both sales and marketing functions must be examined as processes desperately in need of improvement. He pleads for the two functions to end their traditional “silo” mentality and “us/them” behavior; showing that six sigma tools can bring marketing and salespeople together and enable them to collaborate as one team.

Mr. Webb urges the use of the five Six Sigma steps (DMAIC), along with tools such as process maps, process measurement charts, fishbone diagrams, SIPOC diagrams, and so on–all of which help in finding (marketing), winning (sales), and keeping (customer service) existing and new customers. According to the author’s website, process improvement techniques can also greatly alleviate some of the following typical problems facing marketing and sales:

- Developing and launching products that are not successful in the market because they fail to address real customer needs.

- Advertising and “brand awareness” campaigns that create no measurable customer response.

- Marketing campaigns and trade shows that generate large numbers of “leads” that do not get followed up by salespeople, and are not qualified prospects in any case.

- Salespeople chasing “anything that moves” in their territory, thus spending time selling to the wrong prospects.

- Proposal-generating activities that do not get customers to buy.

- Servicing repetitive customer complaints that could be eliminated if the product were improved, yet that information never makes its way into the requirements for new products. (Source: [...]).

There are two minor criticisms of the book: First, it tends to be too lengthy and repetitive, in fact it probably will not lose any of its main themes or messages if it is condensed to around 200 pages.

Second, most of the case studies cited in the book come from smaller companies. Although the cover of the book mentions that the author worked with large international companies such as American Express, 3M, and Marriott, the only six sigma case study from an international organization came from HSBC USA, whose managing director (a former GE executive) led the six sigma efforts at this bank.

Review by Brandon Simpson:

This book about Amazon marketing does not live up to its hype. It will waste your time and money. It is full of tactics that will teach you unethical practices, marginal techniques, and ways of spamming Amazon in violation of its guidelines. The book suggests you to do the following tactics, which are not helpful at all.

1. Don’t write a 5 -star review of your own book. This is unethical and a violation of Amazon’s guidelines. Customer reviews should be written by customers, not the authors who wrote the book. These reviews will be overlooked by potential buyers, who will not find the review helpful and ignore it.

2. Don’t ask anybody for 5-star reviews. In his book, he tells the reader to give his book a 5-star review if they liked it. When I give a copy of my book to a reviewer, I don’t say anything that may suggest I want a glowing review. Besides, 5-star reviews are usually generated by hype. Most browsers usually don’t read the 5-star reviews or the 1-star reviews. The 2, 3, & 4-star reviews are usually read more.

3. Don’t end every review with the title of your book. This could be seen as blatant self-promotion. Others may see is as a way of stealing sales. This is also a violation of Amazon’s guidelines. It’s also problematic because you may write more books. If you have 50 reviews that mention your older book, you would have to revise all fifty of them and mention your new one. There’s an easier way to do this. Use your Amazon Signature. It can be changed at any time, and you can say something like “John Doe, `Author of Whatever Book.” If you write a second book, you can change it to “Author of Whatever Book #2.” Believe me, revising all of your reviews is very frustrating.

4. There is no “magical” way to remove a 1-star review. If the review is fair and balanced, it will stay. A review can be removed if:

-the reviewer clearly hasn’t read the book

-is attacking the author

-and more!!!

5. The book suggests you to also write a bunch of Listmania lists and So You’d Like to Guides. I did all this for several weeks with no results. It was a waste of my time. Some people may even view this as a form of spam. I decided to delete most of my guides and lists.

The author suggests you to publish your book with a self-publishing company. There’s nothing wrong with having your book published by a self-publishing company, but you can actually keep more of the profit by publishing it yourself. The book explains that there are two ways of having your book listed on Amazon: 1. Publish your book with a self-publishing company that can offer a 20% trade discount or 2. Publish your book yourself and sign up for Amazon Advantage, in which case you’d have to supply your own book to Amazon who’d also buy it at a 55% trade discount. But this begs the question, “If a self-publishing company can offer a %20 trade discount, why can’t I?” This question led me to research the web to find the answer, and I ended up at “Aiming At Amazon.” This book tells you how to do what the self-publishing companies charge you to do. You can save hudreds of dollars by taking the advice in “Aiming At Amazon.” So it appears that “Sell Your Book On Amazon” is an advertisement (albeit a very subtle one) to self-publishing companies, and I also felt deceived that the author didn’t include this piece of information.

One thing that really bothered me about this book is that the tips are *guaranteed* to increase sales. It’s not a good idea to guarantee anything, especially on the internet. From my experience, nothing is guaranteed. I did everything this book recommended, and so far the results have left me very disappointed. In fact, I remember one month when my sales were much LOWER than they were the previous month. Not exactly something I expected from tactics that were *guaranteed* to increase sales.

Another important thing that this book doesn’t address is that Amazon marketing only works if you write a GREAT book. Word of mouth spreads quickly online. So internet buzz will help a great book, but will damage a mediocre one. I finally accepted the fact that my first two attempts at publishing were failures. But I didn’t like how this book filled me up with false hope, making me think that these tactics would increase sales. My third at attempt at publishing has much better results, but I’m using tactics from “Aiming At Amazon” and “Plug Your Book.” I only made about in the first month of my first book’s publication, and I was using advice from “Sell Your Book On Amazon.” By employing the advice in “Aiming At Amazon,” I’ve already made 0 in just two months.

There are those who love this book. I, however, am not one of them. I suggest you to skip this book and seek out other books on internet publicity. This book will only disappoint and frustrate you. And since I did everything this book said, I’ve got a big mess on Amazon that I need to clean up.

Brandon Simpson

Review by Jeff Lippincott:

I enjoyed reading this book. It does a pretty good job of explaining how to make the most of Amazon if you are interested in using it as a marketing tool for your book. The author spends a lot of time telling us how to set up our “Profile Page” in Amazon. Interestingly he calls it an “author” profile page. I have one of those myself as an Amazon user, but I’m not a published author … yet.

Much of what the author talks about in this book is what I have been doing to build my presence on the Amazon site since January, 2006. I have been writing book reviews, creating Listmania lists, and Amazon Guides. I have also studied the profile page options and experimented with how my profile page will be viewed by the masses.

Based on the Profile Pages of many authors I have examined over the past year and a half, I think there is a definite need for the instant book. Very few, and I mean VERY few, authors are taking advantage of the things explained in this book. I highly recommend that authors who are not taking advantage of Amazon’s offerings get a copy.

I was a little disappointed after reading this book when I turned to the author’s Profile Page at Amazon. He did not seem to be practicing what he preaches. He only has 19 book reviews, 10 Listmania lists, and zero Amazon Guides. And the Listmania lists were not packed to the brim with books. As a result, the author lost some credibility in my eyes. But then again, I am an educated consumer when it comes to the content included in this book.

I prefer to name the biographical section on a Profile Page as “In my own words.” And I disagree with the author that this section should be written so all of its content will be neatly included on the Profile Page. I recommend writing a blurb about yourself as long as you like. And Amazon will let you write quite a bit here.

I would have liked the book better if the content related to Listmania lists had been more accurate and more complete. For me, the Listmania lists are critical to establishing a presence at Amazon. And it is a presence that you want to establish if you want to sell books! To build my lists I pick a subject I want the list to be about. Then I find two or three highly popular books on the subject. “Highly popular” means a high star rating coupled with a sizeable vote count. I write the book’s vital stats on a small stickem: title, author, pub date, ISBN, star count, vote count, and whether it has a table of contents. Then I check the information Amazon provides on that book regarding related books and books customers buy who buy that book. If those books are rated high, then I prepare a stickem for them, too. I keep repeating the process for the books I create stickems until I have a stack of stickems 25 to 40 high. By the way, Listmania lists now allow for 40 books (not just 25 as the author suggests). Then I rearrange the stack of stickems in order of publication date so the newest book will be at the top of my list and the oldest book will be at the bottom. Then I build my list on Amazon.

After I post my Listmania list I then examine the Listamania lists and Amazon Guides that Amazon attaches to the right side of my list. I scan through those lists to look for some neat books that I might not have included in MY list. I then add those neat books I uncovered. Hopefully that will get my book count in my list up to 40.

As the author says in his book, Listmania lists are pretty easy to build. But building one is no guarantee that it will be popular. And you want popular ones in order to get known on Amazon. Keep building lists until you get a nucleus of popular lists. You may consider deleting the unpopular ones. The popular ones are the ones that are going to help you get known on Amazon. Also, those are the ones you will want to take the time to create an Amazon Guide for. Theoretically you shouldn’t create an Amazon Guide unless the books included in it are from a popular Listmania list.

I don’t like the use of Author Blogs on Amazon. It’s not that I don’t like blogs, but I think they should be a part of an author’s Web site that is referenced just above the biographical section on the Profile Page. I don’t like blogs on the Profile Page because they mess up the layout of that page and become the Profile Page. I don’t like having to scroll down the Profile Page to see things other than the blog.

All in all, this is a pretty good book for anyone who wants to market themselves, their business, or THEIR BOOK on Amazon. 4 stars!