How To Make Your Book Stand Out in A World Drowning In Self-Published Content
Hearken unto me, for this is one of the coolest shortcuts I’ve ever discovered. I call it “Poor Man’s Peer Review.”
While I was writing 80/20 Sales & Marketing and Evolution 2.0, I gave the manuscripts to a number of friends and asked them “Hey, would you review this?”
I fast realized I have a very small number of friends who will plow through a whole book for me.
Then I got a bright idea: “Why don’t I go to Fiverr.com and pay people to read this thing?” So I did.
First, I would find people that were offering some kind of related topic or service on Fiverr, so I knew they were, to some degree at least, the target audience for the book. Then, I would message them and say, “Hey, I wrote a book. Will you read it for 10 gigs = $50?”
I got about 30 people to say yes.
I asked them just a few questions:
- What were your two favorite chapters?
- What were your two least favorite chapters?
- Was there any place where you got lost or confused?
- Would you recommend it to a friend? Why or why not?
- Would you buy it in the bookstore for $12.95 when it comes out?
- Why or why not?
Every single reviewer pointed out a couple of places in the book where they got bogged down.
I was amazed.
Just about every single review I got resulted in some immediate change to the book. [NOTE: I hired only 2-3 at a time, then incorporated their feedback, then hired 2-3 more, rinse, repeat…] Thirty reviewers resulted in well over thirty changes. Some chapters got completely trashed (even though I was in love with them.) Minor passages expanded and got pulled up to front-and-center prominence.
Suddenly, I clearly understood what people liked about the book. And more importantly, it forced me to untangle a lot of stuff that I thought had been clear but was vague or jumbled.
You might say, “Isn’t this what an editor is for?”
Sure. But Fiverr readers [you can also use Upwork or any other gigging platform to do this] do not tell you the same things professional editors tell you. Professional editors are very useful and every writer should use one, but an extensive commentary from one “expert” is not the same as a shotgun blast from 30 “average” folks.
You get a true sense of what your average reader thinks.
Most books on the day they are published have been read by only 5-10 people, most of whom are the author’s friends. Big mistake! And yes, editors are incredibly helpful but there is no substitute for candid feedback from total strangers.
You also might be thinking, “Well, yeah, but what kind of quality are you’re going to get from people that are working for five bucks an hour?”
Better than you think.
First of all, even the ones that truly are only worth five dollars an hour are going to give a basic, lizard brain response. And that is extremely valuable, I don’t care what your topic is. Knowing in advance what the Village Idiot is going to say is never a bad thing.
Beyond that, 10 to 20% of them are really sharp. And they’re using Fiverr as a lead generator (if they’re smart), and they are really good at what they do. I found a couple of really good editors and vendors through this very Fiverr experiment that I continue to use now. I just sent one $800 last week.
Hire 2-3 readers. Get their feedback. Revise your manuscript. Then hire 2-3 more. Rinse and repeat until even people who are not really even your target market say it’s a great book.
Then and only then do you have a great book.
The few hundred dollars you invest can take your book from good to great. I have now used this method multiple times with multiple projects. I consider it non-negotiable for anything that’s mission critical. Especially because you get only one shot.
My books 80/20 Sales & Marketing and Evolution 2.0 have both sold very well in ferociously competitive categories, and neither book would be what it is without this. I consider “Poor Man’s Peer Review” (a.k.a. the Fiverr Gauntlet ) to be a mandatory step for any book. Ignore it at your peril.
P.S. You can use this on almost anything – an article or white paper, a sales page, interview or video. You can use it to just fine tune your opening chapters or a sales page, and it’ll cost less too.
Photo by Emilian Robert Vicol cc by-sa
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About the Author
Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.
He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.
7 Comments on ““Poor Man’s Peer Review” – Hack For Creating a Spectacularly Readable Book”
Very wise method. And you’re right, Fiverr is loaded with some exceptional talent if you’re willing to weed through some of the rough. Thanks for sharing.
Supposedly Gerry Robert was the guy who pioneered the idea of using a book as a marketing tool. The value is in the publicity around the book, not the book sales.
Apparently, Gerry did this for himself and now he’s created a system of doing this for other authors. He founded BlackCardBooks.com.
I knew from reading your emails that being a published author positions you as an expert in your field. I remember that you used it as a USP when you wrote your book about industrial ethernet.
So many of Gerry Robert’s marketing philosophies lined with what I have learned over the years in Planet Perry, I just assumed that you guys knew each other.
Hey Perry.
I just attended a Gerry Robert book publishing seminar. They have a lot of ducks in a row.
I’d like to combine your advice and many of his ideas to publish and promote my book.
What are your thoughts on his system?
George, not familiar with the guy. Great to hear from ya.
I’m thinking this may be a great way also to have someone review a new website and/or new product in any area. I mean I know some people do user-experience and onboarding reviews specifically and those can be worth quite a bit…but the cold email through Fiverr approach offering people in your target market money to tell you what’s right and wrong with your product is pretty cool idea.
It’s useful for ALL KINDS O’ STUFF.
Well, I had the same idea, only it’s not worked quite as well as yours has.
My own book – now two years in and 400 pages up – is sliced and diced into six (seven?) parts. My primary concern as a newbie author was to get the idea across, see if things worked – after all, if you’re writing a book, you know the plot, don’t you? So I asked some friends on Facebook to review it for me, only they hadn’t actually bought the book, so there was no incentive for them to actually read it!
I did get a few brilliant responses to the first part, one from a friend who’d studied English dialects and another who just chewed into it. Both helped me enormously, and their feedback really put some energy into the story.
My only disappointment was a lady who teaches creative writing… whose only comment was to detail the faults in my punctuation. That’s mainstream education for you – and I’ve seen it myself with kids lining up to ask the correct spelling, only when they’ve gotten back to their desks, they’ve forgotten why they needed a ‘windoe’ in the first place! If you’re writing, do as my son does, just write and forget the spellings and the grammar – for myself I’m often on a long distance train journeys so my handwriting is even worse than usual, so all the various squiggles and dots gets tidied up at home.
And yes, as things get to a point, I will be asking folk on Fiverr or Elance or whatever’s there to have a look at my book. I might get a better response!