What Does the Perfect Substack or Book Review Look Like?

It's not what you think

Happy Monday, y’all! While you are thinking about it, please hit the Like button for me, it will help this issue get more visibility on Substack and it gives me a reason to go back to your Substack and return the favor. Thank you!

So let’s talk about reviews. Every day on Substack, I see writers sharing reviews that their subscribers have given them.

The reviews always fall into one of two buckets:

1 - “I love this writer”

2 - “I love this Substack”

Right? You’ve seen these same reviews, every one either says the writer is awesome or their Substack is awesome. Some say both are awesome.

So which is better? Should I want readers to say I am awesome, or should I want the reader to say my Substack is awesome?

The answer, according to Kathy Sierra, is neither.

Kathy and her husband were unfortunate victims of the dot-com crash in the early 2000s. Both of them were unemployed, with two daughters, no money, and no prospects. This was also in the days before social media. Twitter and Facebook weren’t around yet, and neither was blogging to any real degree. As a result, neither Kathy or her husband had any real presence online.

So they decided to do the only sensible thing: They decided to write a book. And they decided they needed their book to provide them with enough income to support their entire family.

Then they told their editor they needed to write a book that would give them the income to replace what they lost from being laid off. You can imagine what the editor’s response was.

Yet, Kathy and her husband went on to write a series of books that have, so far, sold over 2 million copies. And those books have provided their family with enough money to live off book royalties alone, for years.

So…how did they do it?

Both Kathy and her husband came from an engineering background. As such, when they started their writing journey, one of their first steps was to attempt to reverse-engineer what led to a bestseller on Amazon.

Kathy began to study the books that were bestsellers in the category that she needed to do well in. Specifically, she studied the reviews that readers were leaving. And in the course of her research, Kathy found one specify type of review that bestsellers received the most.

It wasn’t “This book is awesome”.

It wasn’t “This author is awesome”.

It was “*I* am awesome!”

What Kathy found is that the best selling books more frequently had reviews where the readers talked about themselves. The readers were talking about a positive change that the book had created for them.

Here’s an example. Let’s say you are reading reviews for a Substack written by Sarah, that promises to help you make money online. Which of these reviews for Sarah’s Substack would make you more likely to want to subscribe?

1 - “Sarah is awesome. She clearly breaks down how to make money online into easy to understand steps that can be easily implemented. Could not recommend her more.”

2 - “Sarah’s Substack is awesome. Every week, she shares the latest tips and tactics for making money online. I love that it includes actionable tips to get you started quickly.”

3 - “I’ve been a subscriber of Sarah’s Substack for 3 months. In that time, I’ve used her advice to go from zero sales online, to averaging $500 a month in less than 90 days.”

The first two reviews talk about Sarah and her Substack. But in the third review, the subscriber talks about what changed for THEM as a result of reading Sarah’s substack.

If you are writing on substack, you want your subscribers to leave reviews where they talk about themselves. You want your subscribers to talk about the benefit that your substack has created for them.

So, how do we do that?

“You’re not a content creator, you’re a context designer” - Kathy Sierra

In studying Amazon reviews, Kathy began to realize that the key to creating creating a bestseller wasn’t in attempting to reverse-engineer the book’s structure, its marketing or really anything that had to do with the publisher or the book itself.

Instead, Kathy strived to reverse-engineer the reader. She noticed that some readers simply will not shut up about their favorite books.

What was the reader’s motivation for telling others about their favorite book? The book had created a positive change for them. The book had helped them kick ass at something that they valued.

That ‘something’ is the larger context that your book or Substack lives in. For instance, if you subscribe to a Substack on fitness, which outcome would make you more likely to recommend that Substack to others?

1 - You love the stories that the writer tells

2 - You lost 5 pounds in a month by following the writer’s fitness advice

It will be #2 all day long!

Your job as a writer is to understand why someone reads your Substack. What are they trying to accomplish? Once you understand what your reader wants to accomplish, then your job becomes helping the reader kick ass at that one thing they are trying to accomplish.

What superpower are you giving your reader? What skills are you going to teach them, and why? Because once you teach your readers how to do something, they will use their new-found skills. Others will notice, and ask them about it.

“Wow that’s amazing! How did you learn to do that?”

“I read it on Sarah’s Substack, you should check it out!”

And what YOU should check out is both of the videos in this post from Kathy. Kathy is a mentor, she is a friend, and no one has taught me more about what successful marketing looks like than Kathy. Again, she’s sold over 2 million copies of her books for a reason.

That’s it for this free edition of Backstage Pass. Thank you for reading, I appreciate all the feedback from last week’s issue recapping my second month publishing on Substack. These monthly recap posts have proven to be very popular so I will do another one recapping August on September 2nd.

Thursday’s paid post will be How to Create Engaging Content at Every Stage of the Buyer’s Journey. It will be the first big how-to issue for paid subscribers, and you can subscribe now if you want to make sure you have access to it.

Have a great week!

Mack