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Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

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Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts

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Highlights & Notes

People claim to want to do something that matters, yet they measure themselves against things that don’t, and track their progress not in years but in microseconds. They want to make something timeless, but they focus instead on immediate payoffs and instant gratification.

Surely one way to ensure that creating amazing, lasting work is impossible is by convincing everyone that it cannot be done on purpose.

perennial success is also the result of the right decisions, the right priorities, and the right product.

That’s the dream. To matter, to reach, to last.

Promotion is not how things are made great—only how they’re heard about.

To be great, one must make great work, and making great work is incredibly hard. It must be our primary focus. We must set out, from the beginning, with complete and total commitment to the idea that our best chance of success starts during the creative process.

It’s why all the pre-work matters so much. The conceptualization. The motivations. The product’s fit with the market. The execution. These intangible factors matter a great deal. They cannot be skipped. They can’t be bolted on later.

Phil Libin, the cofounder of Evernote, has a quote I like to share with clients: “People [who are] thinking about things other than making the best product never make the best product.”

Paul Graham explains, “The best way to increase a startup’s growth rate is to make the product so good people recommend it to their friends.”

Above all, they have to want to produce meaningful work—which, I can say from experience, is often not the goal of people in the creative space.

They want the benefits of creative expression, but they desire it without any of the difficulty involved. They want the magic without learning the techniques and the formula.

The desire for lasting greatness makes the struggle survivable, the sacrifice worth it.

The difference between a great work and an idea for a great work is all the sweat, time, effort, and agony that go into engaging that idea and turning it into something real.

If you are trying to make something great, you must do the making: That work cannot be outsourced to someone else.

Collaboration is essential, but if this is your project, the hard work will fall on you.

The hard part is not the dream or the idea; it’s the doing. It is the driving need that determines one’s chances.

Here are some good ones: Because there is a truth that has gone unsaid for too long. Because you’ve burned the bridges behind you. Because your family depends on it. Because the world will be better for it. Because the old way is broken. Because it’s a once-in-a-lifetime moment. Because it will help a lot of people. Because you want to capture something meaningful. Because the excitement you feel cannot be contained.

To create something is a daring, beautiful act.

From sacrifice comes meaning. From struggle comes purpose. If you’re to create something powerful and important, you must at the very least be driven by an equally powerful inner force.

Art is the kind of marathon where you cross the finish line and instead of getting a medal placed around your neck, the volunteers roughly grab you by the shoulders and walk you over to the starting line of another marathon.

“Focus on the things that don’t change.”

“If you focus on near-term growth above everything else,” he has written, “you miss the most important question you should be asking: Will this business still be around a decade from now?”

The creator often starts with a hazy intuition of where he or she is going, but breakthrough innovations rarely resemble the seed idea or vision. This is because creative ideas, by their very nature, evolve over time, reflecting the colliding of seemingly disparate ideas. The best we can do is sit down and create something, anything, and let the process organically unfold. Tolerating ambiguity, frustration, and changes in the grand plan and being open to new experiences are essential to creative work. Indeed, they are what makes creativity work.”

What the poet John Keats called “negative capability”—the holding of multiple contradictory ideas in your head at the same time—is an essential phase of creativity: the part where your mind is a whirl of ideas. You have to be able to tolerate this and then refine your idea like mad until it gets better.

To wrestle with all these conflicting, difficult ideas that go into creating, you often need real silence. Meditative isolation, where you sit and wrestle with your project.

In the way that a good wine must be aged, or that we let meat marinate for hours in spices and sauce, an idea must be given space to develop. Rushing into things eliminates that space.

And the only way to do that is by doing the work at least partly in front of an audience. A book should be an article before it’s a book, and a dinner conversation before it’s an article. See how things go before going all in.

Creating is often a solitary experience. Yet work made entirely in isolation is usually doomed to remain lonely.

You don’t have to be a genius to make genius—you just have to have small moments of brilliance and edit out the boring stuff.

In asking questions and soliciting input, you’re not letting other people determine what you work on. But by thinking this way you substantially reduce the fantastically inhuman pressure to be great simply by epiphany or a visit from the muses. Instead, it’s about finding the germ of a good idea and then making it a great product through feedback and hard work. Forget going off into some cave.

Focusing on smaller, progressive parts of the work also eliminates the tendency to sit on your ass and dream indefinitely.

“Getting into action generates inspiration. Don’t cop out waiting for inspiration to get you back into action. It won’t!”

An audience isn’t a target that you happen to bump into; instead, it must be explicitly scoped and sighted in. It must be chosen.

Successfully finding and “scratching” a niche requires asking and answering a question that very few creators seem to do: Who is this thing for? Instead, many creators want to be for everyone … and as a result end up being for no one.

For any project, you must know what you are doing—and what you are not doing. You must also know who you are doing it for—and who you are not doing it for—to be able to say: THIS and for THESE PEOPLE.

You can’t afford to wait until after it’s finished to figure out who what you’re making is for. Why? Because too often the answer turns out to be: no one. You have to think about it now. Before you’ve made it. While you’re making it.

If you don’t know who you’re writing for or who you’re making for, how will you know if you’re doing it right? How will you know if you’ve done it? You are unlikely to hit a target you haven’t aimed for. Hope is not helpful here; having something and someone to measure against is.

A critical test of any product: Does it have a purpose? Does it add value to the world? How will it improve the lives of the people who buy it?

The bigger and more painful the problem you solve, the better its cultural hook, and the more important and more lucrative your attempt to address it can be.

Instead, the timeless, recurring problems that make us human—those are ambitious problems to tackle.

So the creator of any project should try to answer some variant of these questions: What does this teach? What does this solve? How am I entertaining? What am I giving? What are we offering? What are we sharing?

“Only is better than best.”

The higher and more exciting standard for every project should force you to ask questions like this: What sacred cows am I slaying? What dominant institution am I displacing? What groups am I disrupting? What people am I pissing off?

“I didn’t want to water down. The idea of watering things down for a mainstream audience, I don’t think it applies. People want things that are really passionate. Often the best version is not for everybody. The best art divides the audience. If you put out a record and half the people who hear it absolutely love it and half the people who hear it absolutely hate it, you’ve done well. Because it is pushing that boundary.”

So we ask ourselves: Why are things the way they are? What practices should be questioned and which should remain sound? This allows us to be both exotic and accessible, shocking but not gratuitous, fresh without sacrificing timelessness.

You want to provoke a reaction—it’s a sign you’re forging ahead.

Ignore what other people are doing. Ignore what’s going on around you. There is no competition. There is no objective benchmark to hit. There is simply the best that you can do—that’s all that matters.

“The counterfeit innovator is wildly self-confident. The real one is scared to death.”

The hunger and drive to create something great, coupled with the sincere belief that you can do it, can very quickly trip into delusion and hubris if you’re not vigilant.

It takes time and effort and sacrifice to make something that lasts.

The first wake-up call for every aspiring perennial seller must be that there is no publisher or angel investor or producer who can magically handle all the stuff you don’t want to handle.

Instead, prior to release, considerable effort needs to be spent polishing, improving, and, most critically, positioning your project so that it has a real chance of resonating with its intended audience.

Many creatives want to be just the creator, or only “the idea guy.” They like that because it’s sexy and because that’s what comes easy to us. But I suspect we like it also because we’re afraid. We’re afraid of taking full responsibility for everything that comes next. A lot of decisions are going to be made—many of which can sink or make a project—that it’d be nice to have someone else to put it on. If we hand it off to someone else, then we have someone to blame when the project fails.

Adults create perennial sellers—and adults take responsibility for themselves. Children expect opportunities to be handed to them; maturity is understanding you have to go out and make them.

If you want to be successful, you’d better be cut, polished, set, and sized to fit.

At a very basic level, if you’re not amazing in every facet, you’re replaceable. To publishers, studios, investors, and customers alike.

Seth Godin explains that “being really good is merely the first step. In order to earn word of mouth, you need to make [your product] safe, fun, and worthwhile to overcome the social hurdles to spread the word.”

YOU need to do this. You are the CEO of your work. All the responsibility and leadership falls on you, as the creator—even if you have partners like a publicist, buyer, publisher, or whatever.

This is the power of bringing in the perspective of a second person. It’s the difference between a life- and world-changing classic and a disappointing flop.

As infuriating as it may be, we must be rational and fair about our own work. This is difficult considering our conflict of interest—which is to say, the ultimate conflict of interest: We made it. The way to balance that conflict of interest is to bring in people who are objective.

When it comes to feedback, I think Neil Gaiman’s advice captures the right attitude: “Remember: When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.”

Every project needs to go through this process. Whether it’s with an editor or a producer or a partner or a group of beta users or just through your own relentless perfectionism—whatever form it takes is up to you. But getting outside voices is crucial. The fact is, most people are so terrified of what an outside voice might say that they forgo opportunities to improve what they are making. Remember: Getting feedback requires humility. It demands that you subordinate your thoughts about your project and your love for it and entertain the idea that someone else might have a valuable thing or two to add.

Nobody creates flawless first drafts. And nobody creates better second drafts without the intervention of someone else. Nobody.

Not only should you be testing your project as you create it, you must most seriously test your creation as it begins to resemble a final product. So you know what you have—so you can improve it. So you know what you have—so that you might figure out what to do with it. So you know what you have—so you can adjust your expectations.

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We have to have this kind of discipline. The discipline required to hit pause and return to our prospective studios until the work meets the standards we’ve set for ourselves and that the fans have for us.

That’s why we test and retest, polish and perfect. Even when we’d like to be done, even when we’re ready to move on, we don’t stop until we’ve passed the test.

There is a fundamental question of knowledge that goes all the way back to Plato and Socrates: If you don’t know what you’re looking for, how will you know if you’ve found it?

Sometime after the bulk of the creative production is done but before a work is fully wrapped up, a creator must step back and ask: “OK, what was I trying to make here? Did I get there? What do I need to change or fix in order to successfully do so?”

A similar exercise that I like to do with all my projects is one I call “One Sentence, One Paragraph, One Page.” It goes like this: Put the website or the beta version of your app or your manuscript aside and grab a piece of paper or open a blank Word document. Then, with fresh eyes, attempt to write out exactly what your project is supposed to be and to do in … One sentence. One paragraph. One page. This is a ______ that does ______. This helps people ______.

When your proposition to prospective customers is, “This is like [random genre] mixed with [random genre] with a little bit of [third random genre],” do you know what they hear? They hear confusion.

“Everything that has a clear path to commercial success is in a genre.” We need to be able to put things into categories so we know where they fit. And you as the creator need to be clear and honest with yourself about where this work is going to fit for people.

That’s why we do this exercise. So we know where we fit. We know what expectations we’re setting and what we’re going to have to do to meet them (which in some cases may require us to be twice as good just to make up for how unclear our proposition is).

When you know what genre you’re in and you know what you’re trying to accomplish, it becomes clearer which decisions matter and which don’t.

The most important part of the process is comparing the results of the exercise against the product we’ve made. Does your one-pager really describe what makes your screenplay worth producing? Would your one sentence capture an investor’s attention in an elevator? You might find that, yes, your answers are compelling, but the work itself does not rise to meet the proposition they promote. Alternatively, you might find that the work is a lot more complex and important than your encapsulation suggests. If that’s the case—if your product is great but your one-pager is blah—you probably need to rethink how you’re talking about it. Perhaps you don’t truly understand the topic well enough yet.

You must be able to explicitly say who you are building your thing for. You must know what you are aiming for—you’ll miss otherwise. You need to know this so you can make the decisions that go into properly positioning the project for them.

The key to this is to service the core audience first and do so in a way that does not alienate the others—only then can you emanate outwardly from the center.

Regardless, you must start somewhere—ideally somewhere quantifiable. By which I mean: Who is buying the first one thousand copies of this thing? Who is coming in on the first day? Who is going to claim our first block of available dates? Who is buying our first production run?

Are you really sure that you have features and scenes and material that are relevant to your core audience? And to your potential audiences? And to your audience’s potential audiences? If you don’t have this, then you need to fix it now, or may God help you. Because you’re going to need divine intervention.

Positioning is what your project is and who it is for. Packaging is what it looks like and what it’s called. The Pitch is the sell—how the project is described and what it offers to the audience.

It’s also doing the things that allow you to have the market fit you need to stand out and be interesting.

Who this is for Who this is not for Why it is special What it will do for them Why anyone should care

My “book about Stoic philosophy,” for example, had to become “a book that uses the ancient formula of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius to teach people how to not only overcome obstacles but thrive because of them.”

What is it that you want? What is truly motivating you? What are you trying to accomplish with this project? The answer should be clear by now: I am making a ______ that does ______ for ______ because ______.

As in: I’m writing a book about depression for the millions of Americans who suffer in silence every year because if I can save a single life, the entire project will be worth it. I am writing a summer anthem for teenagers that makes them roll down the windows and turn the radio up because I miss that feeling and want to bring people together. I am creating an app that helps women track and monitor their pregnancy because there wasn’t anything like it during mine and I know I would have paid a ton of money for it. I am writing a film about the poker craze that captures what this world is really like because it’s a huge scene that everyone else has ignored and I know they will love it.

Nothing has sunk more creators and caused more unhappiness than this: our inherently human tendency to pursue a strategy aimed at accomplishing one goal while simultaneously expecting to achieve other goals entirely unrelated.

“confidence in yourself and the belief that you are on the right path, and not led astray by the many tracks which cross yours of people who are hopelessly lost, though some are wandering not far from the true path.”

Knowing what your goal is—having that crystal clear—allows you to know when to follow conventional wisdom and when to say “Screw it.”

There are too many famous Steve Jobs anecdotes to count, but several of them revolve around one theme: his unwillingness to leave well enough alone. His products had to be perfect; they had to do what they promised, and then some. And even though deadlines loomed and people would have to work around the clock, he would regularly demand more from his teams than they thought they could provide. The result? The most successful company in the history of the world and products that inspire devotion that is truly unusual for a personal computer or cell phone.

Customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen and it’s harder than it looks. —Peter Thiel

Each new work competes for customers with everything that came before it and everything that will come after.

“You’re better off with a great salesman and a mediocre product than with a masterpiece and a moron to sell it.”

The idea that you won’t have to work to sell your product is more than entitled.

“In order for the product to speak for itself, it needs someone to speak to.”

“[Each project] needs somebody who says, ‘I am going to make this succeed,’ and then goes to work on it.”

It’s on you to take this great thing you’ve made and reach as many people as possible with it.

I always prefer to start from a place of reality, not from my own projections and preferences. Humility is clearer-eyed than ego—and that’s important because humility always works harder than ego.

The mark of a future perennial seller is a creator who doesn’t believe he is God’s gift to the world, but instead thinks he has created something of value and is excited and dedicated to get it out there. Guess what? A sense of entitlement is not how you’re going to reach them. Hunger and humility make the difference.

Ben Horowitz: “There is no silver bullet… . No, we’re going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.”

According to a study by McKinsey, between 20 percent and 50 percent of all purchasing decisions happen from some version of word of mouth. And the study found that a “high-impact recommendation”—an emphatic endorsement from a trusted friend, for example—converts at fifty times the rate of low-impact word of mouth.

“Free and cheap helps.” So does making the entire process as easy and seamless as possible. The more you reduce the cost of consumption, the more people will be likely to try your product. Which means price, distribution, and other variables are not only essential business decisions, they are essential marketing decisions.

What is the right price to create a perennial seller? This is going to be controversial, but my answer is: as cheap as possible without damaging the perception of your product.

As a general rule, however, the more accessible you can make your product, the easier it will be to market. You can always raise the price later, after you’ve built an audience.

The first step is the hardest: making something really awesome that exceeds the expectations even of busy, important people with exacting taste.

Be a person. Be nice. Think relationship first, transaction second.

Advertising can add fuel to a fire, but rarely is it sufficient to start one.

Working on improving your product until it screams “Share me with everyone you know”—that’s less fun than buying a back-page ad that everyone (who still reads newspapers) will see.

When the product has real revenue and traction and can fund its own advertising? That’s when it starts to make sense.

The fact is, humor and levity will probably do more for your brand over the long term than trying to beat people over the head with brilliantly effective advertising copy.

I have left out descriptions of how to optimize for different social media platforms for a reason. As I put the finishing touches on this book, Instagram launched its “Stories” feature as a direct assault on the hockey stick growth of its newer rival, Snapchat.* Imagine if I spent an entire section on specific tactics for either platform and the other one ended up winning the arms race to photo- and video-sharing dominance. Platforms come and go like the wind. It’s always better to focus on the bigger picture, on the things that don’t change.

Principles are better than instructions and “hacks.” We can figure out the specifics later—but only if we learn the right way to approach them.

Almost every industry is facing the same reality, which is why you have to subject yourself to that same scrutiny: Do I have the reach to pull this off? Is my platform big enough for me to launch yet? What investments can I make now that will lengthen my career by strengthening my audience and fan base? No matter what you’re selling, a platform is an invaluable asset.

Networking is not going to networking events and handing out business cards—that’s flyering. It is instead about forming, developing, and maintaining real relationships. It’s about being valuable and being available so that one day the favor might be returned.

No one is entitled to relationships only because their work is genius. Relationships have to be earned, and maintained.

You can pay for influence the way you can pay for sex, but from what I understand neither is quite the same as when you get it the old-fashioned way. Just as earned media is always better than paid media, cultivating real influence and relationships is far better than paying for eyeballs and fake friends.

When we said the Lindy effect means that the things that last would continue to last, the exception to that rule is when owners undermine what made them great in the first place. Perennial sales are not guaranteed. Hard-won reputations can be undone. Fans, once chewed up and spit out, do not come back. Conversely, the more intimate and personal the connection between creator, work, and fan, the more the relationship can endure. You do not want to be on the wrong side of the ledger when it comes to your relationships and karmic debt. You never want to owe.

Not that anyone should have sacrificed their classic design, but small continual improvements make a big difference.

The best marketing you can do for your book is to start writing the next one.

More great work is the best way to market yourself.

creating more work is one of the most effective marketing techniques of all.

“If you do something and it turns out pretty good, then you should go do something else wonderful, not dwell on it for too long. Just figure out what’s next.”

“You go from project to project with your heart in your mouth,” John McPhee has said. Abandoning proven material or comfortable stomping grounds to start from scratch is a scary prospect because, as McPhee reminds us, “Your last piece will never write your next one for you.” Each time you do this, it not only increases your mastery in your chosen craft, but as a result it also increases your odds of creating something brilliant and lasting. The key is that you must do it—you must create, create, create.

Don’t be afraid to try crazy things. Don’t let your brand tie you down to the point where you don’t explore or experiment. It is precisely these little endeavors that might illuminate a new direction for your career. They might expose you to a new community or group who will eat up your other work. Keep yourself from getting stale. Choose never to become so settled into a rut or routine or type that you are constrained by it.

What are new areas that my expertise or audience would be valuable in? (Think of celebrities investing in companies or starting their own.) Is it possible to cut out the middleman like a label or a VC and invest in myself? (Like when musicians buy back their masters or authors get their rights reverted. Jay Z has a famous line that says if you don’t own your masters, you’re a slave—which is partly true.) Can I help other artists or creatives achieve what I have achieved? (Be a consultant, coach, or publisher/label head/producer.) What are other people in my field afraid to do? What do they look down on? (These are almost always great opportunities.) What can I do to make sure that I am not dependent on a single income stream? (You never know what can happen.) If I took a break from creating, what would I do instead? (Maybe there is some long-lost passion to rekindle.) What are parts of the experience or community surrounding my work that I can improve or grow? (Live events, conferences, memberships, personalized products, etc.)

Diversity and productivity are critical parts of that type of longevity. But they require the ability to experiment, to try new things, and to support a body of work, which in turn requires the development of independence and infrastructure.

So don’t wait. Build your platform now. Build it before your first great perennial seller comes out, so that you have a better chance of actually turning it into one. Build it now so that you might create multiple works like that. Build it so you can have a career—so you can be more than just a guy or gal with a book or movie or app. Because you’re more than that. You’re an entrepreneur, an author, a filmmaker, a journalist. You’re a mogul.

The more you do, the harder you work, the luckier you seem to get.

That’s the truly fortunate part of being able to do creative work for a living. It’s the best goddamn job in the world.

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