It finally happened. I finally got my first 1-star Amazon review.
I wrote back in May about how I had gotten a 1-star review of my “10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters” on Goodreads, a book review platform.
That review was in Serbian, a language that I understand. The gist of the review was an attack on direct response copywriting. “Outdated!” “Cringe!” My poor book, which has the word “copywriters” in the title, apparently attracted somebody who loves to read about a topic they hate.
That’s okay. Because I wrote an email about that review and I profited from it.
But I’m not sure I can profit from my first 1-star Amazon review. Because a while back, Amazon started allowing reviews that don’t say anything, but simply just pick a number of stars.
What precise and profound comment did my reader mean to express by choosing a single star for my book?
Perhaps the reader had some genuine gripe or even a legitimate critique of the actual content.
But perhaps he or she read the book and thought it was great, and wanted to reward me for writing it: “This book is so good it reminds of my home state of Texas! Here’s a lone star fer ya.”
Or perhaps this reader thought the book was too valuable to share, and wanted to discourage others from reading it and getting good ideas from it also.
Unfortunately, we will never know.
Instead, in order to profit from this zero-content review, let me tie it up with something more substantive. And that’s a message I got last week from Kieran Drew.
As you might know, Kieran is a bit of a star in the creative entrepreneur space. He has close to 200k followers on Twitter. He also has a big and growing email newsletter, with over 25k readers.
Earlier this year, Kieran launched a course about writing, High Impact Writing. Over the course of two 5-day launches, he sold over $300,000 worth of this course to his audience.
But back to the message Kieran sent me last week.
It simply said, “hope you’re well mate, continuing to spread the good word.”
Beneath that was a screenshot of a tweet that Kieran wrote earlier that day:
===
Copywriting is the most important skill for any creator.
My 5 favorite books (if you’re a beginner, read in this order):
1. Adweek Copywriting Handbook
2. Great Leads
3. Cashvertising
4. 10 Commandments of A-list Copywriters
5. Breakthrough Advertising
===
I’ve never read Cashvertising. But the others I have read, and multiple times each. It kind of tickles me to be included on a top-5 copywriting list along with Joe Sugarman and Mark Ford John Forde and Gene Schwartz.
I’ve been pushing my 10 Commandments book pretty hard over the past few days.
Today is last day will be pushing it for a while.
Of course, you can choose to buy it today or you can choose not to. There’s no urgency, beyond the fact that people who care about writing and know about online business success think that what’s inside this book is valuable.
It might be so for you too. If you’d like to stake $5 on it to find out: