Chapter 6: Reaching Millions of Readers

Chapter 6

Reaching Millions of Readers

Life is a hospital

in which every patient is possessed by the desire to change his bed.

— Pierre Charles Baudelaire

I Pay Attention to Good Advice

I’ve had several years in Hollywood

 and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.

— Wilson Mizner

Although I began writing book reviews before coauthoring The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, I didn’t become committed to this path until well after that book came out. It was in late 2000 that I discovered that book reviews could be used to bring attention to what should be read and applied and to steer attention away from what would be harmful or a waste of time.

My younger son, Mark, played a big role inspiring the learning in this chapter. When The 2,000 Percent Solution was about to be published, Mark told me that Amazon.com reviews by ordinary customers and readers would be a large influence on the book’s sales. Boy, was he ever right!

He also suggested I try my hand at writing a few “customer reviews” on Amazon.com to see what the process was like. Knowing that Amazon.com was famous for its customer reviews, this suggestion struck me as something worth trying. With young tutors from my office on both sides of me, I succeeded in putting up my first “review,” which was actually just a few words in favor of a book called Augustine’s Travels (AMACOM, 1997) by Norman R. Augustine. My review was three and a half lines long, and I mainly wrote about what a good leader Mr. Augustine was. The review is dated January 23, 1999, less than a month after The 2,000 Percent Solution was published.

I must have liked the experience: The next day I whipped off 11 more slightly longer “reviews.” Each comment focused on a book I knew well. As I reread those comments, I’m surprised by how helpful people found them. For instance, my brief comments about Getting to Yes (Penguin, 2nd edition, 1991) by Roger Fisher, William L. Ury, and Bruce M. Patton have garnered over 90 “helpful” votes by Amazon.com readers over the years. Some of my early reviews also referred to overcoming various stalls described in The 2,000 Percent Solution. By February 3, 1999, I seemed to have run out of steam after 29 reviews. After that reviews appear sporadically for the rest of 1999, with only 31 more written later in the year. Interestingly, I also reviewed some novels and children’s books among the 31. I must have been enjoying the writing because these later reviews are longer and occurred more frequently.

I no longer have my e-mail records from that year, but I recall being surprised by several effects of my reviews. Since I originally included my e-mail address on my reviews, I began getting fan e-mails from readers who appreciated my thoughts. What was remarkable to me was that I got many more such fan e-mails for my few Amazon.com book reviews than I did for The 2,000 Percent Solution. That was counterintuitive to me because I had sent thousands of free books and sold many thousands more.

The second surprise was that authors began e-mailing to thank me for the reviews. When I later saw some of these authors in person, they went out of their way to be cordial to me. Clearly, I had developed a better and different kind of a relationship with people I had known for many years just by taking a few minutes to comment honestly on what I thought of their work.

The biggest surprise of all was when I began getting e-mails, telephone calls, and letters from publishers, authors, and publicists who wanted me to review new books. What was that all about? Since the books were free, I usually encouraged people to send them along.

With a new book to write, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, my reviews slacked off in early 2000. An exception came in March when I wrote a very enthusiastic review of The Soul at Work (Simon & Schuster, 2000) by Roger Lewin and Birute Regine. Roger was so pleased that he suggested that Carol and I join Birute and him for lunch at our favorite spot in Harvard Square. We had a delightful chat and made new friends. Who would have thought that jotting a few words online could have such nice consequences?

As the possibilities of writing reviews began to expand in my mind, the experience of writing reviews provided even more stimulation. I began to realize that if those who are devoted to progress could all become capable book reviewers, the world’s reading habits could be greatly improved. With that in mind, the rest of this chapter and the appendix look at how I applied the eight-step process of The 2,000 Percent Solution to writing high-impact reviews that millions read. If you follow the same lessons, the impact can be spread to tens or even hundreds of millions of readers — just the sort of approach I was looking to incorporate into the 400 Year Project.

The Theorist Becomes an Experimental Subject

Step One: Understand the Importance of Measuring Performance

— Donald Mitchell, Carol Coles, and Robert Metz in The 2,000 Percent Solution

I have often wondered how B. F. Skinner would have fared if he had been the subject of one of his own experimental theories about behavior modification rather than the experimenter. Well, I got my wish indirectly when I found myself on the receiving end of one of my own ideas. I want to develop this point in detail because it will also help you understand how exponential improvements occur.

Around the beginning of 2000, Amazon.com started a new feature that I referred to previously when I mentioned my reviews getting “helpful” votes. Amazon.com customers could express opinions about the reviews that other customers had made. You could indicate that you thought the review had or had not been helpful to you. The announcement from Amazon.com made this sound like a big deal, but I didn’t think anything of it at the time.

Like most people in 2000, I had only a slow dial-up internet connection. The time it took to make such a vote was quite lengthy, which made it annoying to me. Why would anyone ever bother to vote “yes” or “no”?

I had always been an avid reader so the list of books that I had already read was quite large, and I still had copies of most of them at home or in the office. I also have a good memory for what I read. It was easy for me to thumb through those volumes and write a review. With The Irresistible Growth Enterprise due out in the fall, I thought it would be a good time to write reviews and mention that I was a book author. Perhaps someone would be curious and take a look at my books. I also was enjoying the writing practice.

Sometime during the year, Amazon.com began ranking all of the reviewers by some secret formula. Although I had written only a few dozen reviews, I was surprised to learn that I was ranked number 55 from the top of all reviewers at Amazon.com. Having put little effort into becoming number 55, I was amused by the thought of doing a little more reviewing to see how easy to it would be to move up in rank. I didn’t know it, but I had just been bitten by the reviewing bug in a very fundamental way. Within weeks, I was in the top 10 reviewers, but progress slowed down from there.

I couldn’t figure out why my progress became like molasses flowing in winter after moving upward like a tidal surge. There were people ranked ahead of me who had written almost no reviews and had far fewer “helpful” votes than I did. At that point, I made a good decision: Ignore the rankings and enjoy the experience. But it was fun to peek at my reviewer rank after seeing what my book sales ranks were for the day. As they had with me, by instituting rankings Amazon.com had set a hamster wheel in motion that would eventually capture the energies of over two million people.

Life in the Amazon.com Reviewer Top Ten

Step Two: Decide What to Measure

— Donald Mitchell, Carol Coles, and Robert Metz in The 2,000 Percent Solution

Someone at Amazon.com was having a lot of fun with the new ranking program, and most of the reviewers were too. People who wanted to move up in the ranks started to contact me by the dozens to ask me about the secrets of what I was doing to succeed. Actually, I would have happily told them my secrets, but I had no idea why I was successful. I told them to write more reviews, which was better advice than I realized at the time.

A happy idea occurred to me: I could use these customer opinions to shape a better writing style. Better writing had been a concern of mine since one of my high school English teachers, Miss Hempstead, predicted that I would flunk out of college because I was such a bad writer. Her prediction proved to be wrong when I arrived at college a few months later. Actually, I was by far the best essayist in my freshman writing seminar, and I could never figure out why my former teacher held such a bad opinion of my writing. But her comment has stuck with me and led me to continually want to learn to write better: Later I realized I was fortunate that she knew how to get and keep my attention in such a powerful way.

Successful writing requires three actions: get organized; write clearly according to the rules; and say something that appeals to somebody. By 2000, I had spent decades working on the first two, but had less experience with writing appealing prose.

My daily routine began to include checking out which reviews were garnering helpful votes the fastest. Then I analyzed what those reviews had in common and did more with those elements in subsequent reviews. In that way, I could check my theories about what was appealing to people about my reviews.

What a deal! Amazon.com was spending billions to give me free writing lessons. I was very grateful … and still am.

Writing positive comments about terrific books was no problem; readers and authors benefited from my enthusiasm. Accepting all those new books presented a new challenge because some of the books were real stinkers. If I were as negative as I could be, those authors would see their books sink beneath the waves and they would never want to write again. Knowing how hard it is to write books, I didn’t want to inflict that punishment on anyone. Instead, I wanted to encourage writers and readers.

After much thought, I came up with an approach that I hope has been fair to readers and authors: I review books from the perspective of the ideal reader for that book. For example, suppose someone wrote what they thought was a cutting-edge look at advanced financial theory. If I found the book to be a compendium of basic facts about traditional financial theory appropriate for college freshmen, I would write a review that identified who the ideal reader was and would focus on which college freshmen would get the most benefit from the book. I would rate the book as though it were only intended for those college freshmen.

Or if a novel was filled with factual mistakes but had good action scenes, I could identify that those who loved action but didn’t care about factual accuracy would like the book best. Then I would compare its quality for action to other action-oriented novels.

Occasionally, even this generosity of spirit left me with little good to say. Some books had major problems that kept them from achieving anywhere near their full potential. I began adding sections at the end of reviews where I would mention how the book could have been improved and encouraged the author to make those changes in future editions.

This prescriptive approach led to unexpected consequences: Authors began to take this advice seriously. Here’s an example: One day, Carol told me I had missed a call from Dr. Spencer Johnson, author of Who Moved My Cheese? (Putnam, 1998). In my review, I had suggested some changes in the ways that the characters were developed. Dr. Johnson wanted to discuss those changes so that he could make them in the next printing of the book. I called him, we had a lovely chat, and he made the suggested changes. After the changes appeared, he asked me to contact Amazon.com to change my review to omit those suggestions. I did that, too, and Amazon.com kindly made the deletions.

The only negative consequence I ran into was that friends of authors would sometimes think my reviews weren’t positive enough. A number of sarcastic reviews of my books would suddenly show up from the vicinity of where the author lived while the author’s book quickly received a number of short positive reviews to push my comments onto another page where my review would be seen much less often. I felt like I was back in high school dealing with jealous classmates.

Although Amazon.com was very good about deleting reviews that barely masked personal attacks, I’m sure that I lost a few book readers as a result of these so-called reviews. However, I felt that the benefit of reaching many more readers through reviews at the expense of selling somewhat fewer books was worthwhile. Undoubtedly, the positive reactions to my reviews more than made up the difference by attracting more readers for my books. As one of my friends explained the experience to me, if you shine a bright light, you will create shadows: Some negative reactions are just part of attracting attention for something beneficial. From that perspective, negative reactions are a sign of your influence and should be welcomed.

The Internet Is Doubling Every 90 Days

Step Three: Identify the Future Best Practice and Measure It

— Donald Mitchell, Carol Coles, and Robert Metz in The 2,000 Percent Solution

I hit my reviewing stride in 2001, just after the dot-com bubble started to collapse. Many commentators had been repeating the statement that the Internet’s usage was growing by 100 percent every 90 days. Well, that wasn’t true, but no one knew it then; growth was rapid but not that rapid. I found myself mulling over the implications of Amazon.com’s success in attracting book buyers and wondering what it meant for authors, reviewers, and readers in the future.

While some argued that almost all books would eventually be bought online, I was skeptical. Book store browsing is a major pleasure for most readers. As book stores became ever more pleasant, their attraction grew for me and I was spending more and more time in them. But before I bought anything I usually checked it out online to see what people other than the publisher had to say. Was it possible that online comments would be the dominant influence on book buying at some point? I thought that level of influence could happen. After all, few of us know anyone who reads very many books. You cannot usually rely on your best friend to give you a view on dozens of books you are considering for the one volume you’ll read this month or year.

Brand name book reviewers could become important and emerge from the internet. After all, movie reviews are dominated by a few high profile people who are regularly seen on television and write in newspapers and magazines. With newspapers and magazines shrinking their book review sections, could there be an opening for online reviewers? It seemed possible to me.

Where did matters stand in 2001? Amazon.com was secretive about its numbers but public information showed that lots of people came to Amazon.com: How many of them read one of my reviews?

There was reason to be pessimistic. In those days, most books carried only eight customer reviews on the top page for that item. You could click to go back and see older reviews, but that process was slow and annoying with a dial-up connection. For a best seller that received many comments, a review might be up on the top page for only a few hours.

Then I got an unexpected clue. Amazon.com invited reviewers to provide photographs of themselves for the Top Reviewers section of the site. The original software was set up to load a photograph from the reviewer’s site rather than putting the photograph on the Amazon.com computers. That decision provided a major breech in Amazon.com’s secrecy. Why? Every time someone clicked on a page on Amazon.com with my photograph on it, the hit registered on my Web site’s counter. The hit quantities were huge and exploding!

By doing a little assuming and extrapolating, it became clear that within five years more than five million people annually could be reading my reviews on Amazon.com. If I also provided review material to other Web sites, the numbers could be higher.

To put this conjecture in perspective, I could reasonably expect that many more people would read my book reviews than ever read any of the books written by major business authors including Peter Drucker. Forget writing books; writers who want to be influential should just write book reviews!

Setting a Higher Standard

Step Four: Implement Beyond the Future Best Practice

— Donald Mitchell, Carol Coles, and Robert Metz in    The 2,000 Percent Solution

Books about improving the world are rarely big sellers. Self-improvement books are more popular, especially if appearance or relationships are involved. All nonfiction categories are relatively small when compared to novels, especially romance books.

If I limited my reviewing to serious nonfiction books, most people who could benefit from reading those books would never find out about those books or me as a reviewer. Why? They wouldn’t know where to start to find good books or good reviewers for serious nonfiction.

I needed to broaden my audience if I was to help people find the best nonfiction books that could improve their lives. Could I learn to be an excellent reviewer of children’s literature, cookbooks, romance novels, and mysteries? I found the thought daunting but the potential reward for the 400 Year Project was enormous. If I could eventually attract hundreds of millions of people to read my book reviews, I could help shape the world’s ideas about how to make progress by affecting which books were read and applied. The copying process that allows useful improvements to go into broad use could be greatly accelerated.

I took it slowly, beginning with one genre at a time. Fiction is particularly difficult to review well because readers want a sense of the story but without spoilers that will lessen their reading pleasure. You can be quite explicit about the first few pages (especially if the publisher has given something away on a jacket blurb), but you need to be broadly descriptive without saying anything specific for much of what follows. As I wrote about the latter parts of novels, I was reminded of the code words that teachers used to describe our children during conferences. Someone who was “lively” was a cause of classroom disruptions. A child who “doesn’t participate” was asleep much of the day. I gradually learned to create my own code words that would tip off readers who were familiar with my reviews.

As a result of these constraints, many of the top reviewers who look at contemporary fiction didn’t appear to bother reading past the first 100 pages. You can always tell when that happens because they mischaracterize the book in hilarious ways that only those who finish the book will ever realize. Unfortunately, a lot of people read books that dissatisfy them as a result of these dishonest practices. Hopefully, those reviewers will eventually earn the reputations they deserve.

As my helpful votes grew for a new genre, I would begin to learn another genre. In each case, I would insert little lessons for life into reviews that fit into the book’s context. For example, if a character in a mystery had trouble solving the murder, I might comment that if the characters had been more open-minded about who should be suspected, the story line would have been simplified. In that way, I would remind review readers to beware of the misconception stall without necessarily calling it that.

Nonfiction was, of course, a simpler challenge. In most cases, reviewers don’t bother to give you a complete sense of what’s in the book and the style of presentation. If you take the time to make those two explanations before offering your opinions about who should read the book and why, you have done a major service to people who cannot browse through the book before purchasing it. That’s a major problem these days: More and more books are published and a smaller and smaller percentage of them are stocked in book stores. A majority of any year’s best new books won’t be in your local book store. Amazon.com has helped by making it easier for publishers to put in excerpts you can preview, but those excerpts aren’t nearly as useful as a brief summary in a helpful review.

With enough people being guided to the books that are most helpful to the 400 Year Project, I expect that ideas for and implementation of the project will be greatly advanced. Over five million people now read one of my reviews each year. As time passes, the audience will probably grow to tens of millions. When I am joined by other book reviewers who favor the 400 Year Project (as is occurring now), the potential influence on bringing support to the project grows exponentially.

* * * *

If you would like to learn more about how to become a helpful book reviewer, I’ve described more of that process in Appendix A. You’ll find the last four steps of the eight-step process in the 2,000 percent solution process there.

Just to give you a sense of the intellectual challenges of reviewing, let me leave you with an interesting question to think about. If you read a novel where the author is writing about illiterate people who speak poor English, how do you describe and rate the language in the book? Obviously, the language doesn’t follow good English usage, but is it good language for portraying the character? If you have trouble following the language, is that a plus or a minus? Do the character’s fellow characters also have trouble understanding? How do you decide what good “bad” language is? 

Copyright © 2007. 2012 by Donald Mitchell.