Transcription
I am a member of Driven Publishers Elite, one of the most advanced KDP communities out there, and we are talking about a very specific new strategy, and we call it the zero review strategy. Normally, content from DP or in general knowledge that we share inside DP as a close community doesn't really get outside the group. But this video, this topic about reviews, is so essential for all self-publishers that I decided that this needs to be publicly available, because Amazon is switching, because how we get reviews is switching. Amazon starts to block books with fake reviews, use reviews from these review sites which are not really fake reviews, but still not real reviews. So, it's somewhere in between. It's a gray area. Nobody knows where to stand on that front. Um, I advise to not use these sites for, I think, over two years now, but a lot of people still use them. But in this video, we will look at the topic in detail about reviews, and I will share what we share internally inside DPE on that very specific review topic.
But first of all, who am I? My name is Andre Bernhard. I started Amazon KDP two years ago. I earned over $700,000 in lifetime royalties. That's actually, um, an update. So I think I achieved that a few days ago. So we can make a little party in the comment section. Um, in the two years I published over 50 books. I think it's around 60 now, actually. And I'm the co-founder of Publish AI, an AI writing software that helps you to find your niche, find a positioning, write the entire book, proofread it, fact check it, and so on. And at the end, you have a really, really good book that you can publish.
So for this video, I've divided it into three sections so you get the most out of it. The first section is the general idea behind the strategy. How is it actually possible to get book sales, to make a successful book on Amazon KDP without any reviews, with really zero reviews? Because a lot of people tell you, and I myself thought for a long time, that you need at least 10, 20, 30 reviews before you even start promoting your book. But that mindset shifted entirely, and the first point of this video, the first section of this video, will talk about that in detail. What changed, why it actually works to run ads to a book or to promote a book with zero reviews and make sales even though you have no reviews.
Then the second section is how to execute this strategy as a beginner, because all of the tips I will share are really advanced inside this video. So I thought that the second section should be dedicated for beginners, so they can also take something away, something out of this video, and use this right away for their first, second, third, or 10th book. But if you feel you are still not an advanced publisher, or in between beginner and advanced, I think the second section will be ideal for you. Also for the advanced people, just to listen to it. I think it's, it's in general an interesting section. I see the beginner topic and how I would get started with KDP again if I would start from scratch without my knowledge. And then the third section is how to execute this for advanced people. So we first talk about the strategy in the first section, and then about the execution for both beginners and advanced people. So let's dive into that. Before that, actually, I have a fourth section, a bonus section, with a small bonus strategy that I will show you at the end of this video.
So the first point, the general idea behind this, and it can be summarized into one sentence, and that's just: don't care about reviews during the launch phase. And I know this sounds crazy, but it works if you do anything else, right? And I will explain what anything else actually is in a second. But let's look at the quote. "A great product will sell itself without any promotion, without anything else. A great product will sell itself." The quote is from some random dude that has no idea about sales and marketing. I actually don't know whose quote that is, but I guess if you are on the internet, you've heard this quote. And I think it's wrong. Unfortunately, it's wrong. Else we could just create great books and they would sell. But great books don't sell themselves automatically. But reviews are only one reason why people buy a book. There are multiple other reasons why people on Amazon buy books, and that's where the "anything else" I was talking about comes into play.
So the anything else is, first of all, niche and positioning, a topic I always talk about and emphasize, because for me, the main reason my books are so successful, and also the first of my books were so successful, or not the first, but like my fifth and sixth book were the first books that really took off, um, two years ago, or two and a half years ago now. Um, and the reason was mainly niche research and positioning. So I first of all selected the right niche. More importantly than that, I created the right positioning for my niche, because the niche I went in for my first really successful brand is a very competitive niche. But I still attacked this niche and got successful inside this niche because I really focused on the positioning. And positioning means how you frame your book, the concept of your book, and how you present it to the audience. And if that's different, if that's special compared to how any other publisher does it, then you have a new angle that people want to buy. If you understand the audience and, of course, create an angle that's actually interesting for them. But that's why you need to spend time here to investigate, to make research, to speak with the audience, or maybe you're part of the audience. I, for example, was and am still part of the audience of my first books. So I knew the audience. I know how they think. I know what things they want to buy and what would actually solve their problem when they are looking for a book, and that's why I could solve the problem with my book in a very special way that most other books on Amazon couldn't offer, and that's why my books were special. That's why my book sold. And if you have a book that's really unique, it's only your book that fulfills that unique purpose. Then people will buy that book even if it has zero reviews, because it's the only book that fulfills that special unique thing. I will make it clearer later with special examples, of course, but that's the strategy part, the basic idea behind it.
The next thing is the cover. Obviously, a lot of people want to tell you that people don't buy books because of the cover, but the cover is actually one, if not the single most important thing. But the cover is dependent on the niche and positioning, because the positioning of the book, meaning the concept. For example, 30 strategies or 30 challenges or a 30-day challenge for chair yoga for seniors. So, the 30-day challenge is the positioning, is the angle. In addition to that, you could add something like 30-day challenge with 30 videos for the day challenge. And then you have also a bonus stacked on top of the positioning, which makes the book even more unique. And if you have all of these things inside your title, the positioning, and that's set, you can then, based on that, create the cover, because obviously the title is on the cover. So you need a great positioning, you need a great title before you then can create a great cover. And the cover is the most important element that then communicates your concept, your positioning, your uniqueness to the audience. And it makes sense to spend a lot of time there, maybe even a lot of money there, and make tests, cover surveys. Let real people from your audience rate your cover against the covers of your competitors. The most effective thing you can do if you want to have a cover that wins on Amazon.
Next point is product page optimization. So in general, the product page is your book listing. You have, of course, the book cover there, you have the title there, you have the reviews there, you have the entire description there, and so on. So the elements to emphasize: first of all, description. So if you have a winning description, a really well-written description that addresses the needs of the target audience, that's perfect. Then the A+ content. Obviously, the A+ is the best place to show the interior of your book, because if you have a great product, a great book that maybe is in color (doesn't have to be), but if it is in color, then show that in the A+ content. Also, if it's not in color, but has a great interior design that's black and white, also show it in detail in the A+ content. People want to see what they buy. They want to see the inside pages of your book, and the A+ content is perfect for that. Then additional product images. And most people don't know about that, but it's actually possible as KDP publishers to add additional product images. Here is an example. What are additional product images? Those are these images right here. You have normally only as a KDP publisher the cover and the back cover. And all of these images, we don't really have the option to upload them, at least not inside KDP. But there is a method, and also inside DPE, the community I was talking about, we have a service or a method strategy to add those additional product images to your book listing. I won't share how we do that or what's the process behind it, because it's something exclusive to DP. But I just want to mention that this possibility exists, and you can imagine if people see your product listing and they land on it and they not only see the cover, not only see the back cover, but have something like a second A+ content immediately up there. So they open the product page and it's right at the top of the product page. They have those images. It's a huge conversion booster. So just so you know, there is the possibility to add those product images. And if you have this possibility, I would use it, because it's a huge conversion booster.
Then get Amazon influencer reviews. Um, maybe I don't even know if they have that, but maybe they have. No, there are something called Amazon influencers. And Amazon influencers are people you can contact, for example, on Fiverr, and they can then make a video of your book, review your book. It's not a customer review. It's an Amazon influencer review, but they can make a video about it, post it on their own Amazon influencer page, and then this will pop up as a video review. Not in the customer review section, but normally I think it's normally at the top of, um, it's somewhere here, um, between editorial reviews and the customer reviews, somewhere in between here. And that's great, because if you get one, two, or three of those videos, even without getting normal customer reviews, you have something people can watch. Real videos they can watch. They see people holding the real physical book in their hands. And that's also a big conversion booster.
Then next point: nail the quality of the few reviews you have. If you don't care about reviews at all in the launch phase, you shouldn't not care about the quality of the reviews. You should care about getting a huge number of reviews, because that's what most people struggle with. They struggle with getting 30, 40, 50 reviews before they even promote the book. But what's nice is if you get like one, five, or 10 reviews for your book, really focus on the quality of those reviews. And what that means, I talked about that in multiple videos, where you can get high quality reviews. So if you check my channel, I have even a playlist on this channel where I talk about reviews and also in some videos about review quality. So, watch those videos, because it's way too complicated and way too much to explain it in this video.
Then the next thing is Amazon ads. If you're great in Amazon ads, it's also a benefit when reviews don't care that much, because you can also compensate with better ads than your competition. Branding, of course, if you have multiple books. Um, if you published a sixth book in a brand, so you have five books published previously, you have a readership, a followership, people who read your previous books. And you can then funnel them with social media or an email list, if you build one. You can funnel them into the newest book, and then the newest book obviously has a better start than the first book had, as an example. So if you are really good at branding, that's also something that compensates a few reviews.
The last point is external traffic. That means traffic from organic sources. That's YouTube. Can you do a YouTube channel for your books? Biggest publishers I know have a YouTube channel for one of his main brands. It has hundreds of thousands YouTube followers. You can imagine how many people from YouTube then click on Amazon and buy his books. And that's very effective organic marketing for your books. Of course, it's a lot of work and it's a lot of time. And I personally never dived into organic traffic. So, I'm not an expert at that, but I see people succeeding on YouTube, on Instagram, or also on TikTok. TikTok Shop, for example, is really huge. But those are all potential sources of external traffic. But as I said, I'm not an expert at organic traffic. But um, I would call myself an expert at ads, at external traffic through ads. For example, meta ads. So Facebook and Instagram ads, you can run them to sell your book on Amazon. And since Amazon loves external traffic because you bring completely new buyers that were on Facebook, not on Amazon, but on Facebook, and you bring them to Amazon, and then they maybe buy your book, but maybe they also buy something else like a fridge. That would be very random, but you know what I mean. So, you bring someone that's not on Amazon to Amazon, and they potentially spend more than just buying your book, potentially added hundreds of dollars in revenue for Amazon just by running an ad. And that's why Amazon loves that and incentivizes that. And the organic ranking boost on Amazon that you get from something like meta ads or in general external traffic is huge. And that's why if you are great at external traffic, you can also compensate a lack of reviews.
Now the second point is: start caring about reviews, but from real readers. Because what most KDP publishers do is caring about the quantity of reviews, and they use this gray area scammy review platforms to boost their book before they even start ads. Before they sell one copy, they have like 30 reviews, and that's obviously inorganic. That's obviously not real readers. What you should do instead is, as I said, don't care about the quantity of the reviews at the beginning. Start with zero reviews already. Start the Amazon ads and compensate the lack of reviews through excellence in those areas, and then start caring about reviews after the book starts to sell. How do you do that? One way is focus on organic review methods. And that means something like a review call to action inside your book. If 100 people buy your book, let's say 70% of those people really open the book. That's just a guess. I have no idea, but I would imagine not every person who buys your book really opens it and reads it. I, for example, if I buy 10 books, I guess I only read eight of them, and two of them are just somewhere in my room and I've never touched them or never opened them actually and read through them. And I think that's a normal behavior, not from all people, but for a lot of people. So not all people who buy your book read it, but let's say it's 70 or 80% of the people open your book. Of those people, let's say half of them read the review call to action. And if they then only a few of them, like 5%, open Amazon and think about reviewing, and then half of them actually leave a review, then you have more reviews than you would have else if you hadn't had that review call to action. I hope that explanation makes sense. But my point is, if you ask them honestly and really kindly, "Hey, um, if you want to share your honest opinion about this book, feel free to do that on Amazon. It would be a great help for me. It's completely um your own decision, of course, but it would be a great help for me and the book." If you just write a sentence like this in your book, then a lot more people review your book than if that sentence would have if there wouldn't have been a sentence like this.
Second thing is building an email list and asking them in the emails. If you build an email list, for example with Facebook ads or with your books inside the book, you can collect their emails. All people who then gave you their emails, you can make something like an autoresponder and then email them. And the second or third email could be something like, "Hey, uh, if you like the book so far, I would appreciate if you could, same as a call to action, just ask them if you be open to it. Share your honest opinion would be a big help for me." And communicate with your audience on social media or emails. If you have a followership on social media, you can make private messages with them. If they contact you, for example, in the DMs and share how they like your book, you can then just let them know, "Hey, a review would really help you. If they could write what they just wrote you as a review, that would be really appreciated." Something like that. Just communicate with your audience. I, for example, in the beginning of my book, I always have my email address. So, if the people want to contact me, they can just type in my email address and write me an email. And that's a huge help, because if they email me, a lot of them just email me to thank me. They just tell me, "Hey, I just read your book and I love it. Thanks." That's it. It's a really short email. A lot of people email me like that. And then I can respond to them. And again, just first of all, tell them thank you. I appreciate it a lot. Just by the way, if you want to review it on Amazon, that would be appreciated. Would be a big support for me and the book. That's it. And a lot of people who made the effort to write you an email to thank you are happy to review your book on Amazon. So that's also something how you can get real organic reviews from real honest readers.
And the core of this method is slow start. It's not ramping up. It's not high ad spend. It's not aggressive launches. It's very defensive. It's slow start. But it's a long-term focused strategy to focus on building a real publishing business, to build books that sell for years, hopefully that sell for 5 years, 10 years, or decades to come. Of course, we never know that, but that would be the dream ideally, of course. And it's not based on hype, and that's what makes this approach completely different than most things that you hear nowadays on KDP, because hype is, I think, the main strategy at the moment, and it's a viable strategy. It works pretty well. And I'm actually focused on combining the slow long-term brand building approach with the hype approach. Working on a really huge YouTube video about that topic. I will talk about that more in a second. But to combine both, so hype is not bad. At the moment, how most publishers use hype books, for example, for the people who don't know what I'm talking about. Um, books like the six-seven activity books. If you look for six-seven activity book on Amazon, you see a lot of books, thousands of them I guess, about this six-seven social media meme, and that's a hype topic that sells well for maybe three months, maybe six months, or a year, and then it slowly declines and dies off. If you only focus on those approaches, it's not really long-term centered. But if you use the hype and combine it with brand building, it's really huge. But I will talk about that in a second.
So most of this is already really advanced. So let's jump into the second section of this video, the basics. So as a beginner or someone who's intermediate, you will now understand how you can use all of the theory I just talked about the last 20 minutes. You then know how to really execute them in practice. So how to execute it for beginners? First point is think very basic about niche research. And that means go into a niche that has two or three competitors, and all of them have 100k BSR or even 150k BSR. Most people will tell you to focus on niches where the books have most of the time below 50k BSR, or better below 30k BSR. For people who don't know what the BSR is, it's the best seller rank. So the BR1 is the one best seller on the entirety of Amazon.com, for example, and the BSR 100,000 is the book that's on place 100,000 of all books on Amazon.com. And BSR 100k is normally a BSR that's okay, it's not great, you make maybe $100 or $200 a month. And most publishers focus on, as I said, lower BSR. So they do niche research and they always check the BSR on Amazon. This book, for example, that I showed, has a BSR of 1,789, and that's a very, very low BSR and a really, really good one. So the revenue, um, 10 guesses is $10,000 in revenue a month. So that's a really, really successful book right here. But if you are a beginner and you want to use the approach that I am sharing you in this video, then go into a niche with low competitors, like two or three books. Actually, the number of books is not that important. It's more about the quality of the competitors and that they are in this range, because normally if it's that BSR range 100k to 150k, not that many self-publishers are in there with an aggressive strategy, and that's your advantage. If you go into this niche with the zero review strategy, you can be quite successful. That doesn't mean that you will have a 10k BSR, because the demand obviously is not there, because no books have that low of a BSR, but you can compete with those two, three, four, five books in this niche and maybe become the best seller in this niche. Even if this only means to have a BSR from 100k or 80k. So, it's not a huge success. It's not a success like this book, but it is a really good success as a beginner or someone who's intermediate and wants to have a consistent output of books that make one, two, or $300 a month. And that's a really good approach, because you can really go in there, try to nail every point I was listing in the theory section of this video, and don't care at all about reviews, and just get a feeling of this new strategy where you don't care about reviews. And you will see that this will work. Not for all of you, obviously, I can't promise anything, but it's most likely will work better than other approaches you may have tried. That's my guess.
And then the goal is to try to make a better positioning—and that's even more important—a better product than the competitors have. Just make a book that's more appealing for that small audience and a book that's actually better, that offers more value than the other books inside that niche. And what then will happen is that you will start selling through ads, through all the strategies I explained later, and real people will start getting your books, reading your books, and leaving honest positive reviews, because the product is great. So they leave good reviews, hopefully, maybe even with video or image reviews, and over time you will get 10, 20, 30, 50, 100, 200 reviews organically over a year or two, and slowly this book will become a very, very successful book that's hard to attack from other people. And since the book doesn't have that huge of a demand, a lot of self-publishers will try to attack your book. So you can create an asset here, a book that maybe earns $200 a month in gross royalties, or 300, or maybe 400 even, doesn't get a lot of new aggressive competitors, because most publishers don't look at this BSR range. And that's the basic idea behind this approach. And if you then do this five to 10 times, you can try to earn 100 to 200 gross per book per month. And then, of course, some books will by accident earn more, because it's maybe just got lucky, lucky strike, and one book makes $500 gross per month. But also some will earn less. Some will maybe earn only $50 a month, and some unfortunately will earn nothing. But if you do this with five to 10 books, you learned all the basics, you understand all the basics. You understand this new strategy with zero reviews that I'm now talking about in this video. And based on that, you can then go to the more advanced strategies, because you learned the basics. You have actually earned something with KDP. You have successful books in small niches, but they are really successful books. So you learned a lot just by using this new approach. And that's actually how I would start over if I wouldn't have the knowledge that I have now. If I would start KDP with zero knowledge, I think that's the most effective way to gain this knowledge as fast as possible, because in the beginning, or if you're intermediate, if you have never had a really successful book, your main focus should be to get knowledge, to get experience. Because with that experience, you can then create bigger products, bigger books, books that you invest more money, more time, you invest more in that book, because you then know the basics. You don't feel that scared if you pay a $1,000 or $2,000 for the creation of a book, because you knew, okay, I succeeded with 10 previous books. I have 10 books that make $100 a month. So, you have this proof that you are able to create books that earn you money, and then you can jump and take the bigger risks. And the bigger risks normally, for me, for example, when I create a travel guide, a travel guide costs thousands of dollars. Before Publish Flow, it cost me $6,000 to create a travel guide, and now the writing part is way cheaper thanks to Publish Flow and AI. But still, we need to find someone who designs the travel guides. We need to find a real travel agent who writes the book with Publish Flow. And all of that still costs money, and we have normally around 200 to 300 images in the travel guide. We also need to pay for those images and or for the maps. So it's still a few thousand just to create one book. And if you're not certain that you're skilled to create a book that sells, it's a huge risk to invest that much money just to create the book without even having $1 spent in ads, because the ad spend comes on top of that obviously after you launch the book. A huge risk for a beginner. If you don't have the proof that you're able to create books that actually sell. So that's why this approach for beginners, for intermediate publishers, is, I think, the by far best thing you could do: gain that knowledge and experience KDP on a professional level before you do the more advanced stuff. And that's what we're talking about now.
How to execute this for advanced publishers. The first thing, and I emphasize this in this entire video and in all of my other videos, that's my most important talking part. Normally, it's the positioning. Just aim to have the most special book in your entire niche, even if it's a really competitive niche. Because that's what I did. I went into a niche where the best sellers had a 1,000 BSR. And then a lot of other books had like 5,000 BSR, 10,000. Multiple had below 20,000 BSR. It's a really high competitive niche with dozens and actually hundreds of books. A lot of them don't sell obviously, but hundreds and thousands of books and competitors, and like dozens that sell actually well. That means you have normally really strong competitors and especially really aggressive competitors. That means they run heavy ads, and then it's hard with this approach with low review count to get inside those niches. But still, through my special positionings, I was able to get into these niches with books that had like four reviews or seven reviews and outsell not the best seller, but the third best seller in this niche, and get a BSR of 4,000 with a book that had, I think it had nine reviews and was at 4,200 BSR or something with less than 10 reviews, just because the positioning, the angle, the concept of this book was so unique. So nail that, and your life gets a lot easier.
Then make great books. That's the most important part. As I said for marketing, the positioning is the most important part. If you plan long term, if you want a long-term business, then making great books is the most important part, because then you build a followership, you build a big email list, people who love your books, who buy not one book, but 10 of your books long term if you have that many books, and so on.
Then create the best covers. I've already emphasized on that in the theory section a lot. It's really, really essential.
Then hyper optimize the product page, and especially if you are an advanced publisher, then do those strategies like the advanced product images. Really find a way to add them to your page, because it is a huge conversion booster. Then also the A+ content, make it better than you are currently doing it. Just improve everything you do at the moment on the product page. Improve it. Go through everything, description, the A+, everything, and ask yourself the question, "How can I improve this book's A+ content?" And then make a list of five points, for example, and then execute on that list. I think that's one of the most important things as an advanced publisher that you could do now to execute this zero review strategy, because if you are really optimizing your product page, you can sell your books with zero reviews, because you have just a better product page, a better product, a better cover, a better positioning. Everything is better except the reviews. But since everything else is better, you will sell even though you have zero reviews. And that's the magic behind all of that. It's not that complicated. All of it is obvious, but often takes a video like this that just tells you that and makes sure that you think about it, execute on it, and so on. Most people who watch this won't execute it. I still appreciate you watching, of course, but really try to execute it, even if you don't have time now, but after this video maybe take time half an hour to really do this, to write a list, take pen and paper, and execute on this, because else you watch the video and, as I said, I'm happy that you watch the video, but it's about the doing, not about the watching, not about the listening.
Then build an organic review machine, like I talked about also previously. Build a system where you get emails or where you get a followership on social media, and through those people, followers, you have access directly to your readers. You can get their opinions on a cover, for example. You can get their feedback on your books, and through that feedback, maybe some of them are open to leave a review. And that boosts or makes it easier for each new book that you publish. It's easier to get new reviews. And then you maybe launch a book and after one or two weeks, it already has 30 reviews. But organically, without those review sites, because just so many people know you, know your books, know your brand. Then also, it goes hand in hand with organic review machine. It's build a brand and use the customers from the previous book. I just talked about that. And then also be okay with slower launches, but try to win long term. If you are currently doing a lot of hype, a lot of aggressive launches. As I said, it's a viable strategy. But maybe try to mix in some slow books that won't sell that crazy in the first few months, but after three or six months or 12 months, maybe change your approach to make a 50/50 approach. 50% hype, 50% slow books. Your catalog will thank you for switching in this direction long term.
And then use meta ads to push. As I also talked about in the theory section of this video, if you use meta ads, it's excellent traffic. And Amazon, as far as we know, of course, we never know for certainty. It's always guessing when we talk about the Amazon algorithm, but we have the feeling, we can monitor that, we can analyze that. If you run meta ads, the organic ranking gets way better. So, if you use meta ads to push, that's a huge benefit and also something how you can, as I said previously, compensate that you have not many reviews. We actually inside Publish Flow we have a new tool. We have a Facebook ads creation tool that's really, really new, and you can create those Facebook ads. It's an example book I create in Publish Flow. You can create those ads in 10 minutes, and you can, I think it's 10 variants, and I normally run always 10 variants on meta ads also for split testing. And I have one ad copy, the publish, or three ad copies actually, that Publish Flow created for me, and three titles, and all of that I can now put into the Facebook ad, just click start. Of course, there's a bigger setup behind it and so on, but the creative part of the meta ads creation is now really optimized through Publish Flow. Sorry for that shameless self-promotion, but it's a new feature. If you have Publish Flow already, just try it out. I would be happy to get your feedback. Uh, I built it mainly for myself, because before I had this, it took me like an hour to get these 10 variants, and now it takes me 10, 15 minutes to get the variants plus the entire copy for that. So that's really convenient. If you want to do meta ads and you are a Publish Flow subscriber, then just try that out.
Now the bonus section. I'm currently thinking a lot about those hype strategies, because I, like most publishers, I saw in December last year. So December 2025, I saw the 67 hype. I saw one book that made, I think it made $300,000 US in one month. One book gross royalties. So I don't know the nets. Maybe he spent hundred thousands of dollars in ads. I don't know. But if you calculate how low the BSR was, it should have made around $300,000 US in gross royalties. And that's just insane that a single book can do that. That's more than most publishers earn in a year, or that most publishers earn in two or three years. So it's completely crazy. But still, most publishers, also myself, are a little bit hesitant to focus on those hype topics, because it's not that long-term oriented. You have a book, maybe it sells, as I explained, half a year and then it dies. But ideally, you have a book that sells for 10 plus years. That's what I always strive for. That's why I want to create a great product, because a great product has the potential, through reviews over time, to become a book that dominates its niche and who is loved by people and recommended by people to their friends and peers. And that's how you grow long-term a really stable publishing business and a really stable publishing brand. But it would be a shame to not use this hype strategy to combine it with branding. And that's what I'm at the moment trying to do. I'm at the moment planning a huge video about my new overall approach. And that new overall KDP approach combines hype with branding. And I have already a script for this video. It's not perfectly finished, but I'm working on it for a month now, actually. And and I shared the current state of the script in our free school community. So I made a screen share of the script. I showed it and I talked about it. I don't know how long, but I think 20, 30 minutes. If you want to get this new strategy before anyone else here on YouTube, feel free to join the school community and watch it. Sorry for that shameless self-promotion, but here is the free school. Here's the video. It's just a screen share. It's actually 27 minutes. You can see it. The people liked it a lot. So yeah, if you want to see that whole approach, it's, as I said, a really quite long video, but it's about how you can combine those hype topics with branding. I will talk about this in this video especially in combination with the zero review strategy. But if you want to have the full overview, just join school, or else, if you wait another month, I will also publish this as a huge video on YouTube, also updated version, because the script as I said is just a concept at the moment. But if you want to see it right away, you can just join school. Link is in the description.
But now let's continue with basic idea of the strategy is how to combine long-term brand building with those hype books. And the issue with hype books is, if you don't care about reviews at all in the beginning, you are too slow to make hype books work, since they often only sell for a few months. In extreme cases, they only sell for two to three months. Sometimes they sell for half a year or a year, but long-term, they will die. So, you need reviews faster than what I promoted in this video, because they need to sell immediately, else you have a problem. If you want to wait half a year until it really scales, then the hype is normally over. So you need to be fast. So the approach should be to build a brand first. That's the basic idea. And when you decide to create a hype book, frame it in the brand you already have. So if you are working on a brand for months now and you see a new hype topic emerging, try to find a way how you can use this hype topic and combine it with your existing brand, where you already have five, six, seven, eight, nine books, and then make a book inside that brand with the brand topic but with the positioning of this hype topic. And I will have a clear example, because now it's a little bit, maybe some people don't know what I'm talking about. So I have an example prepared.
Because after you've built three to four books or or maybe more in a niche that are a bit successful, as I said in the basic section, if you have a few books that make $100 to $200 a month, that's a great level of success in the beginning to start building a small email list and so on. And then you should have around 100 to 200 emails, maybe even 500 to 1,000 emails, and that's enough to get a few reviews for your new hype book. And that means maybe getting 10 reviews in the first week or 20 reviews in the first week organically through your email list. So it's real people who get your book and honestly review it, instead of using those review platforms. And another benefit is hype books have the advantage that if they work, they work perfectly with the entire strategy overall that I'm sharing here, because they have the exact spirit of this new approach, because they can be framed really uniquely. So you actually don't need that many reviews. You need reviews. So with three reviews, it will be hard. So the zero review strategy is hard for those books. But you don't need a hundred for a hype book. Why? Because it's normally so unique that you're often the only book, or at least in the beginning the only book. And then over time when more competitors come, you obviously also need more reviews, because they often buy fake reviews to boost their book inorganically and, yeah, with gray area or or even scam um strategies. But if you don't just create a generic hype book like another 67 activity book, but use just the framing, just the concept, and give it to a book from your brand, then you are really unique. You don't have any competitors, and then the strategy works like magic. Why? Because the 67 hype, for example, there were thousands of 67 activity books. Why? Because the basic 67 activity book was the hype book. The one book that started the hype, and then hundreds and thousands of other publishers copied basically this book. But if you just use the essence of the hype, that's the random 67 meme, and use this and give it to your brand, it won't sell that crazy like the the best seller, but you can that way use the hype with your brand and make this magical, let's just call it magical combination that I'm also sharing in this video here.
And here's an example. My favorite example that I always use in most videos is the piano learning. So, how to learn to play the piano, music learning, the instrument learning niche. And the example here is the six-seven piano learning book for kids between 8 and 12. And I can imagine multiple people in front of their screens, on their smartphone or on their laptop, and just shaking their hands and thinking that I'm um I'm crazy. But I haven't seen this book and I haven't published this book. unfortunately, but I bet it would have sold like crazy. Even though it makes no sense, there is no reason why you should frame a book as a 67 piano learning book. There's no benefit in it. It doesn't make the product better, but it will sell because people who are looking for a piano learning book for their kids, when they search piano learning book for kids, when they type in this keyword and they see a 67 book and they have heard the 67 meme from their children, they will, not all of them obviously, but a lot of them will click on this book and maybe also buy it because they know their kids love this meme. They love this stupid meme, and that's why they will buy this book. If I want to motivate my kids to learn how to play the piano and I get a 67 book, the likelihood of them really reading this book increases when it's a 67 book, and that's why they will buy it, or that's why a lot of people will be tempted to buy it and actually buy it. And that's why a concept like this works. And that's how you use hype and combine it with a brand, with a serious "how to learn how to play the piano" niche, with a serious brand that you maybe already have 10 books in, and use the hype to make one book that stands out, targets this special hype niche, and maybe is a bestseller for a few weeks or months. And because of that, because this book has at least the potential to sell better than all of your other books because it is this hype topic, you get a lot of new people that hear of your brand the first time. A lot of them not only buy this hype book that you created, but they actually buy the other books from your brand. So, it's an entry point to your brand. And this hype book generates traffic. And a lot of those people then buy multiple books of your brand. And that's the essence of the strategy that I'm also explaining in this video, but it's combined now as a bonus section of this video. It works perfectly with the zero review strategy. And that's why I wanted to mention that. If you create this book and use this hype topic, it's so unique. Nobody else will do that. Maybe if they see it, they will then copy you, but if you're the first book and you do everything correct, you have the first mover advantage. That way, you will sell with 10 reviews. You will even sell with zero reviews, because it's so unique. A lot of parents, as I said, will resonate with that, even if they don't like the meme, but they just know their kids. They know that their kids would love a book like this and would be motivated to learn the piano if they get a book like this or anything else. You can combine it with any other topic. It's just an example, of course, but that's the way how you can position your book and use the zero review strategy to get sales with no reviews at all. And maybe if you get to 10 reviews, it will sell even better. Then after it starts selling, you will get organic reviews. You will climb to 50 reviews. After a few months, you will climb to 100 reviews. Maybe after a year to 200 reviews, after two years, and so on. And this book long term, if the hype doesn't die or just gets slower, maybe it will sell also for years, or maybe it will just stop selling after a few months or a year, and then that's it. But as I said, you attract a lot of people getting interested in your brand as a new thing. It's just the entry point for people to get to know your brand. I hope that makes sense, and I hope it wasn't too complicated.
If you want to learn more about this strategy at its core, feel free to join the free school. And else, I'm happy you watched this long, detailed video until the end. I hope it was valuable for you. Like and subscribe. Join school, and I'm happy to see you in the next.