Amazon Publishing

My overly optimistic book-writing plans

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A few days ago, I sent an email in which I collected 10 old emails I’d written with personal stories inside. A reader replied to that to say:

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I really loved reading the story about your mystical experience and how it translated into customer insights. Honestly it was one of the best emails I’ve gotten from you all year.

I’m super curious do you have more stuff like this coming up in your emails?

Also, where are you at with writing that Insight Marketing Bible?

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Huh? Insight Marketing Bible? I had to check the email in question to remind myself of what this could possibly be.

Turns out Insight Marketing Bible was my early title for a book I have been working on for the past 6 years, on the topic of creating insight in readers’ minds.

If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for that, don’t worry. It will come next year. I promise.

This year though, my overly optimistic plan is to write and publish a different book, The Art of Charging More. Just this morning, I sat down and restarted work on this new book by writing up v4 of outline. I really feel like this might be the one.

Point being, writing and finishing a book is a giant pain in the ass, at least if you’re someone like me and you care about doing a good job and telling people something new and valuable.

And yet I keep writing books, or trying to, and I keep justifying to myself that the long-term payoff is worth it. And no doubt that books open doors that nothing else can, plus they have a host of other knock on benefits, plus I guess some part of me enjoys the frustration.

Anyways.

Today, I would like to turn you onto a new report published by Kieran Drew, which shows you “4 steps to build your business through writing online.”

As you might know, Kieran is a former dentist turned online creator, who has built up a $500k/year business and an audience of over 250k people, and who’s done it all by writing.

Kieran boils down what he did and shows you in a straightforward way how you might do the same.

Except, just last week, I wrote an email in which I highlighted Kieran’s latest public earnings report, in which he honestly and transparently says he was actually in the red for the month of March.

(Kieran’s response to my email: “I feel assaulted by your hungover words.”)

The fact is, Kieran has been writing a book of his own and prioritizing it over other things like creating new products or promoting old ones.

That’s cost him short-term time and money, but it’s in the service of a greater business good to come.

In any case, Kieran is coming out of his book-writing cave, and he has been plans for the coming weeks and months. If you want to see what those plans are first-hand, or if you want to learn about writing online and profiting from your writing from somebody who’s done it quickly and at a very high level, then here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/4-steps

I finally get a nice review

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For the past 10 months or so, I’ve been running ads on Amazon for my new 10 Commandments book.

Over the past month or so, it seems like Amazon is finally running out of people who are passionately interested in the connections between con men and pick up artists and Hollywood screenwriters.

To wit:

My sales have gone down… my cost of sale has gone up… and for what seemed like a stretch of months, all I got were carping reviews from disgruntled readers, who I guess should not have been reading the book in the first place.

Fortunately, with the coming of spring, it seems my luck is changing.

A few days ago, I got a nice 5-star review by a hypnotist and copywriter, Manuel Herrera Carillo. Manuel’s review is long but I will reprint it in full, for one because it strokes my ego, for another because it may convince you to give my book an open-minded read. Says Manuel:

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I am a hypnotist and also copywriter. Sometimes the mind thinks that it cannot be impressed or amazed anymore, and a book like this tells you otherwise.

We live in an age of cognitive calluses. We scroll. We skim. We assume we have seen every trick. The brain folds its arms like a bored aristocrat. Then along comes John Bejakovic with a lantern and a grin, and suddenly the room rearranges itself.

This is not a book about scams.

It is a book about gravity.

The gravity of attention.

The gravity of desire.

The gravity that pulls a thought from maybe into yes.

Bejakovic gathers an unlikely council: con men, pickup artists, magicians, salesmen, propagandists, stand up comedians, Oscar winning screenwriters. On paper, they look like strangers forced to share a train compartment. In practice, they are all fluent in the same ancient language: influence.

The ten commandments are not moral instructions. They are psychological pressure points. Each chapter peels back another layer of the theater curtain and shows you the machinery. Not in a clinical tone, not with academic frost, but with stories. And stories are the original hypnosis.

As a hypnotist, I recognized the rhythm immediately. Pattern interrupt. Authority. Framing. Tension. Release. The subtle dance between certainty and suggestion. He does not describe persuasion as manipulation in a dark alley. He describes it as choreography. If you understand timing, you can lead. If you understand expectation, you can bend it.

As a copywriter, I found something even more unsettling.

The principles are transferable.

The same mechanics that allow a magician to misdirect a crowd allow a headline to seize a wandering eye. An so and so and so on.

Combine this principles with AI and you obtain a nuclear bomb of influence.

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I don’t know how to what Manuel suggests, to combine the principles in my book with AI, in order to obtain a nuclear bomb of influence.

But maybe you can tell me, if you know more about AI than I do, and if you’ve read my book?

And if you know more about AI than me but you haven’t read my book:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

I’m now offering a $5 typo bounty

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Ever since I published my most recent book, “10 Commandments of Con Men, Pick Up Artists, Magicians, etcetera” last May, I have been running ads on Amazon to promote it.

Inevitably, whenever I start to stray far afield from the homey little village that is my email newsletter audience, and into the dark woods and wastelands of the cold traffic Internet, I find that people are not as kind as forgiving as they are back home. For example, here is a new 3-star review of my book:

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meh… Reads like advertising copy… Oh wait it is, at the end of the book he is asking you to subscribe to his email list. save your money and go to the source material. At one point he says he is using a 24-word title to stand out… to me it looks more like key-word packing.

Oh yes… there are typos, repeated lines, bad formatting, bad book layout, inconsistent spelling of peoples names… Seriously dude, proofread your work.

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I went on an emotional rollercoaster when I saw this review.

First, anything at 3 stars or below hurts my fragile ego.

But then my ego bounced back when seeing that this review really has nothing to say about the content of my book, meaning the ideas or even the writing inside. It seems to be solely focused on finding things to pick at, like typos.

As for those, I did proofread my book multiple times. I caught some typos, but not all. I then had a number of beta-testers of the book proofread the book, and they caught some more. But it’s certainly possible that some typos snuck through.

So let me take a page from Joe Sugarman’s book, and make you a deal:

If you find a typo in my new 10 Commandments book, write me to tell me about it, and I’ll PayPal you $5. ($5 will cover the cost of the book if you’re getting it on Kindle.)

The only thing is, I will only reward the first person to find a given typo, and I’ll be documenting the reported typos in ​this Google Doc​. The sooner you send me your caught typo, the more likely you are to get a typo bounty.

If you have my book already, maybe reread it and see if you can catch me?

And if you don’t have my book, maybe get it now and give it a read?

Beyond just trying to get the spelling and formatting right, I put a lot of work into the ideas in this book, and into finding interesting stories to illustrate those ideas.

To prove that, here are some more favorable reviews, many of them, though not all, from folks closer to home, meaning this email newsletter:

#1. “The information John shares is invaluable for both your personal life and your professional life…especially if that professional life involves influencing others.”

#2. “This book seriously is a must read as you will understand at a deeper level human nature.”

#3. “Full of practical advice, information and life-changing wisdom.”

#4. “It’s got new and useful ways to look at sales and influence, that I’ve been testing and enjoying.”

#5. “I see it becoming one of those books I read at least once a year. It’s that good!”

#6. “I’ve read a lot of books in this space and this is one of my favorites. He skips over the common knowledge and dives into really eye opening insights.”

#7. “If the human mind intrigues you, then read this brilliant little book by John Bejakovic.”

For more info, or if you need a copy:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Mmeh!

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I’m back to Barcelona, I slept well last night, and I just went for a bike ride along the sea, where the Sunday morning weather couldn’t be more beautiful.

That’s why I was thrilled — well, at least not very put off — by a new and glowing 2-star review of my new 10 Commandments book.

An old, experienced, and spelling-challenged reader writes on Amazon:

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Mmeh!

Not sure why I both this book. It has lots of anicdotes and examples of what magicians, marketers and sales people do to convince or con audiences but nothing really eye opening. While it may offer something unique to someone with no experience, I maybe too old and experienced for this crap.

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To this reviewer, I say Mmeh!

It’s never fun or exciting to be told how a magic trick is done.

And the same really goes for learning the magic of copywriting, or comedy, or even pickup.

Persuading other humans to have a certain experience, or to do something you want them to do, is ultimately about putting on a show, an effect, a presentation for the audience to see.

Discovering the technique that goes into that cannot compare to the excitement and emotional stimulation that you feel as an unwitting participant or audience member.

Discovering those behind-the-scenes tricks can only become fun or exciting once again in case you become so obsessed and deeply enmeshed in the craft that good technique and ways to improve it become sexy to you on their own.

My reviewer above says he is too old and experienced. I imagine that means he has dabbled a lot, constantly buying more stuff in search of something novel and stimulating, but putting little of what he’s been exposed to into practice.

It’s hard to please an audience like that, and frankly, I don’t try to do it.

On the other hand, if you are new to the topic of influencing and persuading others…

… or if you are old and experienced, in the sense of having put a lot of what you’ve learned about human psychology into practice — whether selling, or making people laugh, or making girls say yes to you — then you are likely to find something unique, fun, and even valuable in my book.

For more info, or if you’d like to both this book right now:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

If you have a book on Amazon, then advertise, liberally

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I’m taking part in a forced experiment:

My debit card was set to expire in January ’26.

My bank shipped me a new one, but due to some snafu with the address, it didn’t arrive.

I asked the bank to resend the new card. Which they did.

In the meantime, they also helpfully cancelled my current, still-valid card.

For one thing, this means I have been living for the past few days on the 200 or so euro I had in cash when my debit card got cancelled.

For another, a bunch of online accounts started notifying me that my card is no longer valid.

Among these is the Amazon ads platform.

As you might know, I have a couple books on Amazon, both conveniently titled the 10 Commandments of SOMETHING.

I’ve been running ads to promote the newer of those 10 Commandments books since I published it in May.

The book has been steadily selling ~15 copies a day thanks to its cool black cover, its provocative 23-word title, and of course the ads I’ve been running for it.

But how much is each of those elements responsible for the steady sales of the book?

That’s the forced experiment I am now involved in. Let’s look at the data.

My Amazon ads stopped running on December 12. Here are the sales of my book on Amazon for each day from December 11th (when ads were still running) until yesterday:

Dec 11: 19

Dec 12: 8

Dec 13: 8

Dec 14: 6

Dec 15: 2

… and as for today, December 16, there have been zero sales as of the time I’m writing this.

Maybe Amazon is punishing me for no longer running ads by throttling even organic sales of my book.

But I rather think it’s the opposite. My theory is that, if you pay Amazon to advertise your book, and particularly if you make a few sales via advertising, Amazon goes above and beyond in promoting your book to readers organically.

The point I’d like to suggest to you:

If you have a book on Amazon, then advertise. And be liberal.

My current ad spend philosophy on Amazon is that I just want to break even across all sales — the money I spend on ads should be roughly equivalent to the royalties I make on both paid AND organic book sales.

My future ad spend philosophy on Amazon — as soon as I get my new debit card, or soon after — will be to spend even more liberally.

My plan is to (finally) put an offer on the thank-you page of the optin that I link to at the end of the book. I’m thinking to make that offer something unique, only available on that page, and available for ~$100. Whatever money I make from these thank-you-page sales will also go towards Amazon ads. I figure even one or two sales of that a month could be a big deal for helping me sell way more books.

If you’ve already read my new 10 Commandments book, maybe you have a suggestion for an offer I could make to readers of that book, immediately after they finish the book and opt into my list? Something that would tie into the theme and topic of the book?

If you have an idea, write in and let me know. If I end up creating that offer, I will give you a free copy of whatever it is that you helped me create, along with an acknowledgment in the same.

And if you haven’t read my new 10 Commandments book yet, why not?

The book talks about SOMETHING, specifically the common strategies and techniques used by con men, pickup artists, magicians, door-to-door salesmen, hypnotists, copywriters, negotiators, political propagandists, stand up comedians, and Oscar-winning screenwriters.

If that sounds intriguing to you, or if you simply want to help me goose sales of my book while it’s not being advertised, here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

I couldn’t give this new reviewer one star

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Last week, I wrote an email about an Amazon customer who wrote the first 4-star review of my new 10 Commandments book (all the other reviews were 5-star up to then).

The review was to the effect of, “the book is really 5 stars, but nothing’s perfect.”

I took a joking tone and gave that reviewer a “4-star review” in an email I sent to my whole list.

Well, the universe must have liked that because it’s now thrown a similar though entirely flipped opportunity in my path.

Here’s my most recent, 2-star review from Amazon customer LouisXIV, who didn’t even want to give my book those two stars:

“I couldn’t give it one star…had to give it two because it at compelled me to buy. This book is a magic trick from a (former?) pick up artist. It’s a bunch of stories loosely strung together. To be fair, I was familiar with a lot of these concepts already so someone may get more out of their introduction. Throwing it the garbage but kudos to the author for getting me to buy! 🤣”

I cannot give this new reviewer five stars, because nobody’s perfect. But I certainly cannot give him one star either. Not only is he helping me write this email and make some sales, but everything he says is true. Namely:

“This book is a magic trick…”

Why thank you.

“… from a (former?) pick up artist.”

… you’re making me blush but ok…

“It’s a bunch of stories loosely strung together.”

Yes, and it took a lot of work to get it so. The whole concept of the book is 10 commonalities among 10 seemingly unconnected disciplines:

“10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Professional Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters”

It took a few years of research and a lot of fiddling to string together the stories that illustrate 10 common techniques used in these fields, as well as the underlying psychology and neurology common to all human beings, which you can then apply to your own life, even if you’re not, say, a pickup artist or a magician.

As for the techniques and principles themselves, they might not all be new to you, but you won’t find any of them in Cialdini’s Influence. Again, that’s by intention and design. For example, take Commandment VI:

“The best way to respond when someone accuses, mocks, or criticizes you. A trick used by pickup artists, which works on men as well as women. (Politicians obey this commandment too, too, from Andrew Jackson in 1828, to Ross Perot in 1990, all the way to Donald Trump in 2016.)”

If you’re as knowledgeable as LouisXIV seems to be, you might already know what this is. You might even have spotted me using it, right in this very email.

But if you’re not 100% sure, or you simply want to hear me go into this in more detail, via several stories that I’ve managed to string together in the most delicate and loose way, you can find it all in my book.

Maybe you’ll even give me kudos for getting you to buy it. In case you’re curious:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Amazon ad apocalypse

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Trouble in Bejako land:

My Amazon ad campaigns, which have been buoying up sales of my new 10 Commandments book, have cratered.

The background:

Since publishing my new 10 Commandments book back in May, I have reliably been selling 15-20 copies of the book per day.

A part of how I have been doing this is by running several Amazon ad campaigns in the background.

These campaigns have been working consistently for me. Until, of course, last week, when something shifted.

My campaign ad spend was no longer being spent, or even close to it. Ad cost per sale went way up. Most importantly, fewer books started being sold, just 5-10 per day, both via ads and organically.

I asked the universe why it’s doing this to me, and the universe came back with an answer.

“Amazon has changed its ad algorithm,” the universe told me.

It seems Amazon is now favoring “auto” ad campaigns (which I only had a small discovery budget for) and punishing “exact” campaigns (which was the bulk of my ad spend, because it got better results for cheaper).

I’m not sure what my point is, except maybe the old advice from sports marketer Jon Spoelstra:

“In almost any industry, the best role model is the high tech business. They can’t sit back and stop innovating. If they did, in three to six months they would be woefully behind.”

Amazon is innovating, and I fortunately am forced to innovate alongside them.

The fact is, email lists as a marketing tool provide a certain moat.

An email list is a free way to regularly communicate with dedicated, trusting readers and past customers, many of whom are ready and even eager to buy from you rather than others.

But an email list is only so much of a moat, and lulling yourself (like I often do) into thinking that an email list is a forever source of income, while sitting back and not innovating, will lead to woe.

In any case, I am adapting my Amazon ads strategy, and maybe I will get my book sales back up.

But also I want to get back to more active promotion of my new 10 Commandments book.

My initial idea for promoting this sucker was to get on podcasts. I put that on hold because 1) Amazon ads were working reliably until now and 2) finding podcasts to guest on is a pain.

But now it’s time to innovate. So can you do me a favor?

Do you listen to a podcast — about con men, or pickup, or magic, or sales, or hypnosis, or copywriting, or negotiation, or political propaganda, or comedy, or screenwriting — that you enjoy, and you think might enjoy having me as a guest to talk about the ideas inside my new 10 Commandments book?

If you do, hit reply and let me know. You’ll be doing me a favor.

And if you haven’t yet read my new 10 Commandments book, it deals with all those fields in a coherent and even interesting way. A few headlines from Amazon reviews:

#1. “This is going into my yearly reads collection”

#2. “A new favorite”

#3. “Sophisticated strategies behind the playful tone”

#4. “Instant Classic That’s Highly Entertaining”

#5. “This One’s Staying on My Desk!

#6. “More compelling than Cialdini with sprinkles of Houdini”

#7. “Superb lessons to be aware of”

Your own copy of my new 10 Commandment book is waiting patiently for you right now. If you’d like to claim it:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Amazon or your own funnel for selling your book?

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A reader named Dan (not sure he wants me to share his last name) asks:

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Hi John

I bought both your books on my wife Hilary’s Amazon account and rated them 5 stars! Really enjoyed them.

I have just finished writing my second marketing book but avoid Amazon as I want to sell them through my funnel. Do you find there’s enough organic sales through Amazon to build your list?

Very best wishes

Dan (in London)

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I’ve only been selling my books via Amazon and it’s been doing all right for me, 10-15 sales a day on average. But only a fraction of those, maybe one or two a day, turn into subscribers to this newsletter, in part because I hide the optin at the end of the book.

Ideally, I’d be selling my books both via Amazon and via my own funnels. I haven’t done this because of the work involved in building out and managing a funnel that would make selling off Amazon, say via Facebook ads, feasible.

But… maybe we can split the work?

Specifically, I had the following idea:

I could sell my book via ads and my own funnel. And then, as an upsell, to break even with ad costs, I could sell a bundle of other related books from other authors. After all, a book buyer is a book buyer, and a book buyer who bought, say, a book about persuasion or self improvement will buy more such books.

I’m telling you this for two reasons:

1. I am honestly hoping that you will go and create this funnel instead of me, and put your own book (about say, marketing) as the front-end offer, and collect all the email addresses of buyers who come in.

I will gladly contribute either of my 10 Commandments books to be sold in the upsell bundle, and expect no royalties in turn, or even the email addresses you collect.

I will just be happy to get my book into more hands, and hopefully to get some of the owners of those hands to sign up to my list via the optin I have at the back of the book.

2. If you have your own book on a marketing or persuasion topic, but you refuse to do me the kindness of creating a cold traffic funnel and including my book in your upsell flow, then let me know, and maybe I will do the work that you cold heartedly refuse to do.

In other words, maybe I will get that cold traffic funnel created, and put my book as the front-end offer, and sell your book in a bundle as an upsell.

No guarantees. But if you have an interesting and well-written book, and you’re intrigued by the proposition, hit reply, and let’s talk.

And if you haven’t yet read my new 10 Commandments book, about con men and stage magicians and pickup artists and (gulp) copywriters, then you can find that charmer here:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Mechanical process for writing a sales letter, book, or New Yorker article

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A traumatic new development in my life:

I’ve lost my Kindle.

I forgot it on the bus at the end of the 12-hour bus ride I wrote about yesterday.

It feels a little like a part of my brain has been cut out. I ordered a new Kindle and will get that part of my brain put back in within a few days.

But until that happens, and on my subsequent bus ride yesterday, I found myself with nothing to read.

So I went into the RSS reader app on my phone (I still use RSS), where I follow a bunch of blogs I don’t remember subscribing to over the past 15 years.

Yesterday, somewhere in the wooded heart of Croatia, halfway from Zagreb to the Adriatic coast, I read an article from one such blog, titled the McPhee method, about the writing process of John McPhee.

I’ve known John McPhee as a Pulitzer-winning nature writer, but I didn’t realize he has also been a long-time contributor to the only magazine I read and have read for years, the New Yorker.

In fact, the article I read about McPhee was written by a guy, James Somers, who also writes for the New Yorker, and who follows the McPhee method himself.

I found the McPhee Method very curious reading because it pretty much describes the process I’ve stumbled upon instinctively when writing sales copy and more recently when writing my new 10 Commandments book.

It’s McPhee’s (and my) fix for the misery of long-form, nonfiction writing. The idea is to replace writing (hard) with the joy of research (fun) and the mule work of organization (mechanical but easy).

If you’re interested in writing something longer and less solipsistic than a daily email, then how John McPhee done it, described in the article below, is worth a read:

https://jsomers.net/blog/the-mcphee-method

The catch behind my “me write book for you, for free” offer

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Yesterday, I wrote an email with the following offer:

“What if I write, publish, and even run ads to a book for you and your business… for free?”

… to which I got a bunch of confused responses, asking me what exactly I’m offering. A sampling:

#1: “Sounds too good to be true.”

#2: “I guess I don’t understand yet how the full offer works. So you provide a free service, and what’s in it for you?”

#3: “How long, what’s involved, and how much?”

Maybe there’s a copywriting lesson here. In the words of the man with the French castle, David Ogilvy, “The customer is not a moron. She’s your wife.”

I’ve never been married, and inshallah, I never will be. But I can imagine that, if over breakfast on a beautiful Sunday morning, I were to grin at my fairy-wife and say, “Honey, how about we go spend the day with your mother?” she would cross her arms and say, “What gives? What are you up to? What’s the catch?”

So let me be 100% clear about my offer, what’s involved, and what the catch is. My offer is this:

I write, publish, and even run ads to a book for you and your business… for free. Just like I said yesterday.

As for what’s involved, I have to admit I don’t know.

I’ve written and self-published a lot of books for myself. I’ve never written or published a book for somebody else, and I have no idea how long that might take.

I do know I am only willing to do this if you already have a good deal of content (emails, podcast episodes, videos, etc) that I could repurpose into a book… or if you have a good deal of expertise that I could pull out of you fairly quickly, over a few hours on Zoom.

And now the catch:

The end-goal of this book would be to drive impressed and eager readers to an existing, scalable, high-ticket offer of yours, which is already proven and selling.

We’d split the profits on those sales in some way we agree on. I would only get paid once this new money is sitting in your bank account.

In other words, I’m willing to do all the work and take on all the risk, including paying for ads.

If this process works out as planned, you’ve just come across a new way to make extra sales of your high-ticket offer, ideally every month, without having to do anything, either now or in the future.

If it doesn’t work, you’ve got a book on Amazon that you can point people to with pride.

So now that you know the full details, how about we go spend the day with your mother?

If this fully transparent proposal sounds like it could benefit you, then hit reply, and let’s talk in more detail.

And if you know somebody else who might be a fit — say, somebody with a podcast that’s been running for a while, with a $1k+ course or membership or group coaching, but no book — then forward them my email, and maybe do them a favor.