lkmreads's reviews
1086 reviews

It was alright. Good but very basic advice, I liked the case studies. Could have done with more concrete, deeper advice. It was all a little glossed-over.

I'm sorry, but this was a terrible read. The first book was informative, this one was seriously lacking. It expanded in all the wrong things from what the first one needed. It's just a "slightly expanded" rehash of only a handful of subjects from the first book, all of which were perfectly understood on the first book to begin with; and I put expanded in quotes because it was less expanded on the topic and more expanded on the adjacent friendly-chatter. Would not recommend at all, just read the first book instead and keep to that.

 This is one of those hard to rate books. Like, do I give it 3 stars? 4? 3.5? I don't know.

The advice in it is good- well, I don't know if it's good as in, I haven't actually tried it yet, but it all sounded very reasonable and mostly along the lines of what most advice online seems to say (not counting some advice that was contrary to what some people say, but... ).
It did go a little deeper than the average blog post, so I give it points for that. But at the same time, I feel like it didn't really go deep enough into other things.

Presumably I'm reading the book because whatever I'm doing is clearly not working, so you kind of want something a little deeper than general ideas (which were good and helpful), and I get you can't really address every possible case in the book, but some parts seemed to gloss over a bit to much on generic that it bordered on unhelpful, while others at least tossed some random examples.

It also felt a bit out of order. As in, it started speaking about the onboarding process, then after mentioning the first email it sort of skipped to things you should probably know before onboarding (like your bait/cookie/lead loss), and then we skipped to how to keep people engaged or re-engage them, and though it was, again, solid sounding advice, it took me all over the place. I also seem to recall it mentioning we would discuss forms "later", and then never discussing them? 🤷
It would have certainly benefitted from better organization, I think. Perhaps with things more explicitly in the order you would do them if you were setting up from zero.

Also, I kind of expected some small samples for onboarding, maybe not word for word, but a bit more than what was given; there were none. I mean, ok, I give them the freebie on mail x, and what do I do with the next however-many emails? Was this to have people buy the course? I don't know. Would the course actually offer the answer? I also don't know. Yes, I get it, introduce myself and books... I still don't really know how. Introverted, somewhat asocial or awkwardly social people who don't like mailing lists themselves won't know how to (Author or not), it will always feel awkward (more than to regular people), and they (we) will always need more help.
As in, I'd totally buy an "Author newsletters for socially awkward people" book.

All in all, leaning towards being a helpful book with lots of sound advice, but needed a bit more. We'll see if book 2 expands on those. 

This book was a wild ride.

I went into this book knowing little more than what the blurb offered. Boy, did it get dark <i>quickly</i> and I did not expect it at all. 

Just as a warning to those wishing to read it: 
There is rape, fairly graphic depiction of a teacher abusing a minor.
Also abuse, physical and psychological, of minors (and adults, I guess).
Incest between cousins, mentions of trying other types of incest.
Cannibalism.
And lots of insanity in between.

It was hard to put it down once I started it, it really drew me in, and I could really understand what most the characters were going through for the first part of the book. I could really understand that they needed the escapism of thinking they were aliens to survive the dark things they went through, and I could sympathize with the convenience marriage, which I thought was a great solution to their problems.
In all, I was really taken by the story and ready to give it 5 stars, up until the three characters decided to escape together to "live as aliens".  What made me rate it down then? It wasn't so much that they embraced the insanity, not even the cannibalism, thought it was pretty gross to read, but that the rationalizations they drew from "being aliens" made zero sense.  And I know, I guess you can't expect people who've gone insane to make sense, but the turn it took seemed still just so out of the blue, it completely took me out of it.

In all, I highly recommend the first part of the book if you like weird, dark stuff . I thought the use of the alien thing as a coping mechanism was really well done; but the latter part after the 3 decide to just live as aliens... yeah, I'd stop there.