Book Marketing Fundamentals: How to Promote Your Book Effectively - Author Blueprint Guide for Writers & Self-Publishers | Boost Sales & Reach Readers

How-to books about creative work are almost universally awful and full of terrible, ineffective advice that will just infuriate you (for example, the book How To Write A Movie in 21 Days made me so angry that I actually stabbed it). So when I decided to start writing book reviews, solicited for books, and Book Marketing Fundemantals by Hank Quense was one of the responses, I almost said no without even thinking about it. I just decided to read it for myself anyway because I'm terrible at marketing, and was pleasantly surprised at how much it exceeded my expectations.First of all, the book is short. Often, reading a book like this ends up being an experience much like trying to google how long you are supposed to bake a potato, but instead of finding the info you want (the temperature and number of minutes), you end up on some page that has a 1000+ word recipe that mostly just says things like "It wasn’t until a few years ago that I finally came to appreciate for myself the difference between a good baked potato and a great baked potato" (I didn't make that up, it's an actual quote - by the way, the answer is 90 minutes at 350 degrees). At a mere 70 pages (the PDF version I read anyway), Mr. Quense's book just tells you how to bake the potato.The book is written informally, with the author inviting you in a few places to email him for copies of various marketing spreadsheets he uses. It's almost like a reference book, with sections divided logically, and you can skip over the stuff you don't need to know more about without losing track. I read a more professional and more expensive book about book marketing a couple years ago, which was bloated and definitely fell into the stab-worthy category I mentioned above. It didn't have nearly half the useful information that this book does.The book isn't perfect and there are a couple quirks about it. Like when there's a URL in the book, you can tell it's sometimes been copied and pasted without the unnecessary parameters being removed, so sometimes the links don't always work (but you should be able to figure it out). And if you look at his other books on Amazon, they're doing ok for an independently published author (better than mine), but they're not doing great - so if you assume he's following his own advice, you can probably expect similar success and you have to understand this really is a book for beginners. I'm going to give the book 4.5/5 stars though (rounding up on sites that only have whole star options) because for me it introduced me to sites and strategies I didn't know about and wouldn't have known about if I hadn't read it.