This is my no-bs review of Self-Publishing Revolution. I will cover what I liked and what I didn’t like about the course. If you have any questions please ask them at the bottom of the page in the comments.

Self Publishing Revolution Review

Self Publishing Revolution is a course that teaches self-publishing on the Amazon Kindle platform. From the course description:

The most comprehensive program to create, scale up and maintain a Self-Publishing Business which earns, passively, $100,000+ per year.

Proven strategies and tricks.

 

Who Is Luca De Stefani?

Luca De Stefani is an Internet Marketer and Kindle Publisher. He actually holds the world record for making the most money using Kindle Publishing in a single day. I actually first encountered Luca in another Kindle course. We were both members of a private Facebook group that came along with the course. I remember him because one minute he was making $300 a month and then the month after he jumped up to $3,000. Then the month after I think he went to over $5,000. I have never seen anyone in Kindle Publishing before or since make such a massive jump in income in such a small period of time.

That was for 12 days worth of sales! When he was making $300 per month I was making about $500 and then in the space of one month, he completely blew me out of the water. I remember seeing that and thinking “If this guy ever brings out his own course I’m going to get it to see what he’s doing differently than what I’m doing”. He did eventually bring out his own course so obviously, I made sure to buy it.

What Is Inside The Course?

Here are what all the videos in Self-Publishing Revolution cover:

Lesson 1: How to find profitable keywords + market domination

To start, Luca goes straight into how to find profitable keywords. On the sales page for this course, he says he has a unique method to find profitable keywords that no one else was teaching. I’ve taken 3 other Kindle courses and thought “Yeah OK, I’ll bet” expecting it to be exactly what the other courses teach. But I was wrong he does genuinely have different criteria that vastly increases your likelihood of success as long as you follow it without deviation.

Lesson 2: Kindle Spy

Luca then shows us Kindle Spy (also known as KDSpy) a keyword research app for Kindle Publishing. He demonstrates how to use this tool with what you learnt in the first lesson to maximise your potential income from your books.

Lesson 3: The (Un)importance of the subtitle

The next section deals with how important the book’s subtitle is. Luca says that the subtitle in unimportant and you do not need to worry about coming up with an amazing subtitle.

Note: I personally don’t agree with video 100% because I’ve found that a good subtitle can help sell more books. So I would still spend that extra 5-10 minutes thinking up a catchy subtitle.

Lesson 4: How to choose a good cover

The next lesson focuses on what makes a good Kindle cook cover. Luca shows some examples of what he considers good book covers. A good cover will literally make the difference between your book selling well and not selling at all. He also gives some tips about a theme with your book covers that will help you to sell more books.

Lesson 5: Get your book cover on Fiverr

Next Luca details how to get your book covers designed on Fiverr.com. If you already know how to do this you may want to skip this section but he does have a good tip for finding a good graphic designer whose work you love. So I do recommend watching this video anyway.

Lesson 6: Get your book written

Next, it’s time to cover getting your book written. Luca also provides the writing service he uses personally to get his books written so that you can use it as well. I also use the same service and it is very good.

Lesson 7 – Upload your book

In the next lesson runs through how to upload your book and what information to fill out in the KDP dashboard. If you have already published a book and know the process you may want to skip this lesson.

Lesson 8 – Category analysis strategy

Next, he goes through picking the correct categories and analysing which categories would be the most profitable for your book. Luca has a good strategy for what categories to choose.

Lesson 9 – Keywords analysis strategy

The final lesson in this section covers how to pick good profitable keywords to use as the 7 keywords you can include when uploading your book. Again this is a good strategy as I was picking them without much thought in the past with my other books.

Reviews – Second Step

Now we move on to one of the most critical aspects of Kindle Publishing. How to get your book some reviews:

Lesson 1 – Hiring a virtual assistant

The first lesson covers how to hire a virtual assistant to gather reviews for you. This is a fairly straight forward process but Luca does have some tips to avoid falling foul of freelancing sites such as Upwork.com and Freelancer.com.

Lesson 2 – Gift cards

This lesson covers how to pay your VA to be able to gather $0.99 reviews. He goes into the different ways you can find your VA to make the $0.99 review swaps for you.

Lesson 3 – How many reviews?

Luca then covers how many reviews you need to get for your book to have the best chance of success. I admit I was surprised when I watched this lesson because it was different than I thought it would be. It was certainly different than what I had been doing for my other books the previous 18 months as a self-publisher. He goes into both how many paid and free reviews you should get for each book.

Lesson 4 – Reviews strategy

The final lesson in this section covers the strategy for getting reviews. You see Amazon gives new books a ‘boost’ when they are first published but also if you get a certain number of positive reviews in a certain time period Amazon will give you another boost allowing you to sell a lot more books. He details a step by step breakdown of how to do this.

Createspace – Third Step

Lesson 1 – How To Register

Createspace is classed as a separate company to Amazon even though Amazon owns it so you will need to register. This lesson goes into how to set up your account.

Lesson 2 – Update Payee & Payment Method

Next Luca goes into how to update your payment information so you can get paid. You need to do this before you can create a new book. You also need to submit tax information before you submit any books.

Lesson 3 – How It Works

Then he covers how Createspace works and how to see how much money you have made.

Lesson 4 – Get Your Book Converted

Next Luca explains how to get the interior of your book re-formatted to be able to upload your book to Createspace. You cannot upload the same file that you used for Kindle as it needs to be in PDF format and also it needs to be a specific size. He also tells you where the best place is to go to to get this done.

Lesson 5 – Get Your Cover Converted

Then he goes into how to get your book cover converted for Createspace. Again he tells you what service to use. Also, like the lesson above your cover needs to be in PDF format so you cannot just upload your JPG Kindle cover.

Lesson 6 – How To Upload The Book

Luca then explains how to upload your book to Createspace and fill out all of the information.

Lesson 7 – Pricing Strategy

Finally, we go into the Createspace pricing strategy. This is how you will make most of your money from Kindle Publishing.

Extra

Dealing With Bad Reviews

Luca explains how to deal with any bad reviews you may get. Every book on Amazon gets bad reviews so you need to know what to do when that happens.

ACX (Audible)

Lesson 1 – Add A New Title

This lesson explains how to get one of your Kindle books converted into an ACX audiobook. Your books need to be on Kindle or Createspace first before you do this. It will also explain how to hire a narrator to narrate your new audio book. He also goes into detail explain if you should pay for production up front or do the royalty split with the narrator.

Lesson 2 – Price Strategy

Luca then details the pricing strategy for the ACX platform. ACX has fixed prices for audiobooks depending on their length (in hours) so he gives a strategy for how to make more money from audiobooks.

Strategies

Next, he details 4 strategies to make more money from Kindle Publishing. I don’t want to give the strategies away here because it’s not fair to people who have purchased the course but what I will say is these strategies have helped myself and other people in the course to make a lot more money per month from the same amount of book.

Assessing The Competition

Lesson 1 – Title & Keyword

The first lesson covers how to assess your competition for books in the same keyword as your book. This lesson is a continuation of the keyword research lesson in the first section.

Lesson 2 – Cover

Next Luca goes through how to assess the competition in regards to the cover. This lesson is not an exact science, you need to go with your own taste and instincts. The good news is a lot of the covers of kindle books are absolutely terrible so it is fairly easy to have a much better cover than all of your competition.

Lesson 3 – Description

Finally, the third lesson covers how to have a better description than your competition.

FAQs

The next section covers frequently asked questions. These are questions that were getting asked again and again in the private facebook group so to avoid having to answer them over and over again Luca created videos for each question.

The topics covered are:

1. FAQ 1 – Penname vs. Real Name.
2. FAQ 2 – What If My Book Stops Selling?
3. FAQ 3 – How Many Books Do I Need?
4. FAQ 4 – How Many Books Shall I Publish Every Week / Month?
5. FAQ 5 – Shall I Wait For Createspace?
6. Average Earnings.

I found FAQ 3 – How Many Books Do I Need? to be the most interesting and useful.

Build An Email List

Next Luca explains the basics of how to set up an email list for your pen name for affiliate marketing and the promotion of free books (to help with more downloads and organic reviews).

Lesson 1 – Get Aweber & Leadpages

The first lesson covers how to sign up for Aweber (email autoresponder software) and Leadpages (landing page software).

Lesson 2 – Aweber – Create a List

Then Luca explains how to create your first email list.

Lesson 3 – Aweber – Create a Form

Next, he goes into how to create a form that will add the subscriber to the list.

Lesson 4 – Leadpages – Create Opt-In Page

Finally, he details how to create an opt-in page using Leadpages and how to link it up to your form.

Organic Reviews

Lesson 1 – Gather Reviews With Facebook Ads

The final lesson covers how to get organic reviews using Facebook ads and a Facebook page for your author pen name. This will enable you to build a following of customers who are fans of your books and then ask them for a review when your books are on a 5-day free promotion.

Private Facebook Group

The best part of the course, in my opinion, is the private Facebook Group you will get access to once you have got the course. In this group, you can ask questions about any struggles you have encountered in your Kindle Publishing business and Luca himself and the other 400 members will help. Chances are 99% of the problems you could have will have been experienced the other members. So you will have an answer to your question within 30 minutes. I’ve only had to ask 2 questions since being a member of the course and they were both answered in less than 5 minutes. I’m glad I joined the course just because I got access to this group.

My Results

Here are my recent results from Self Publishing Revolution. Please note these are just for 1-month of sales.

Here are my sales for Kindle:

And also for Createspace:

 

Does it work?

You might now be thinking but does it work for everyone or are you just an anomaly?

This is a screenshot of another publisher in the group, this is just a screenshot of his CreateSpace dashboard, one for December and another for the total unpaid (November and December combined).

Here is someone else doing very well especially in Createspace (over $25,000!).

Here is another guy in the Facebook group making about $3,402 in December on Kindle and Createspace, which is very impressive.

Some of those people make me look like a complete amateur, which is crazy because I have been doing this for almost 2 years at this point.

Not satisfied? Ok well here is a video of Luca himself going through the Facebook group showing screenshots of members dashboards (for December). You might even see me in there somewhere.

My Verdict

Here is what I liked and didn’t like about the self publishing revolution course.

What I Liked

• Pricing Strategy for Createspace and ACX – This for me was worth the price of the course. Putting this strategy into action made my income jump up by £900 in the first month of altering the prices. So in essence, the course paid for itself in the first month (and actually made me more money without publishing any additional books).
• Keyword Strategy – I really like Luca’s keyword strategy. I have been through 3 other Kindle Publishing courses and Luca has the most in-depth training videos for finding profitable keywords to publishing books around.
• Facebook Group – For me, this was worth the price of the course alone. It’s a great place to ask any questions you have regarding self-publishing but more importantly, on the first of every month, everyone posts screenshots of their dashboards which are very inspiring when you see other people making $20,000+ per month. I’m still an active member of this community because the group of people are really nice and supportive to each other.

What I Didn’t Like

• Luca does not go into what the minimum word length which your books should be. This wasn’t an issue for me because I’m an intermediate Kindle Publisher. But for someone who is new to book publishing, this could be a stumbling block. At the time of writing your books should be at least 10,000 words minimum. I actually publish books that are 15,000+ words but I don’t recommend that until you have experience finding profitable niches because you could end up wasting a lot of money.
• He can sometimes gloss over the basics of Kindle Publishing such as signing up for a KDP account and uploading your first book, which again is not an issue for me but could be another stumbling block for someone who is completely new to Internet Marketing or publishing. But Amazon has helpful videos to walk you through the process and there is also the Private Facebook Group which exists so users can ask those sort of questions.

Conclusion

So in conclusion, I am very happy with the course. Since buying the course a couple of months ago I have managed to scale my business up to the point where I am making double what I was making per month before I bought the course. So as you can see buying the course was the best decision I made for my business and it has paid for itself and a lot more besides.

I think the course is great for beginners and it will help you to make a lot of money. But I think experienced Kindle Publishers will get a lot out of it, this is because you will already know the process and you will be able to scale up your business a lot quicker than someone who is new. This will lead to you having bigger jumps in your income month-to-month. It was worth buying the course just to find out Luca’s pricing strategy for my CreateSpace books.

Rating: 10/10

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