Unfortunately, some of that information is incorrect.
Take for instance Penny Sansevieri’s book ‘How to sell your books by the truckload on Amazon’.
I have to admit, the titled peaked my curiosity, which a good book should.
Since the ebook was only $2 and I wanted to find out how to sell more books, I ordered it.
Unfortunately, interesting as the title was, the content failed to deliver. More so, the advice was misleading (although I didn’t realize that at the time).
Sansevieri recommended that to sell more books, the author has to make use of keywords when listing a book on Amazon. Not just any keywords though, she advised to include the names of well-known authors as keywords. That way, if someone did a search for Harry Potter, Dan Brown or Nora Roberts, your book would show up along with theirs.
It thought this slightly unethical and misleading, but if others were doing it … hey, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
But I was wrong. Yesterday, about six weeks after I had enlisted ‘Waiting for Silverbird’, ‘Voice of an Angel’, ‘Kitten Diaries’ and ‘Debbie’ in Amazon’s KDP program, mentioning well known authors in the keywords section, I received an email from Amazon asking me to kindly remove certain keywords from my books as they had nothing to do with the story. I was given five days to correct the keywords or my books would be removed from the program. So much for Sansevieri's advice.
While Sansevieri’s book has dubious content, the reviews for it raise some questions too. Some reviewers give it 1 star and call the book trash and not even worth 1 cent, others give it 5 stars and call it the best thing they ever read.
Which makes me wonder … who are these reviewers? Are the 5 star reviewers family and friends of the author? Are those who give the book 1 star actual readers?
It would seem that, not only can we not trust certain authors, we can't trust certain reviewers either.