If you listen to the self-proclaimed Gurus of Internet Marketing they would argue that a good responsive mailing list is the corner stone of your business, and yes selling books is a business.

Some of these Gurus are more concerned with their income than they are with their reputation but ultimately their lists become less and less responsive and their incomes fall so they scramble more.

If reputation is then the most important thing how do you develop a good reputation online?

If that doesn’t scream BS at you I don’t know what would.  And of course you would be wrong, mostly.

If you put your mind to it I’m sure that you can think of many instances where there have been books published, some of them best-sellers, where the author on the dust cover didn’t write a single word in the book.

Some of these authors are incapable of writing, some can’t even read well.  Most of them are extremely well known.