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

What I mean to say is that sometimes the best way to monetize your work—and we do have to make money to live—is not from the work itself, at least not in the short term. We know that perennial sellers can be immensely profitable over time, but they need room to grow, and what better place to grow them than in the fertile ground of your own budding

As Goethe’s maxim goes, “The greatest respect an author can have for his public is never to produce what is expected but what he himself considers right and useful for whatever stage of intellectual development has been reached by himself and others.” This is true for any type of creative person.

Most people are unaware that Churchill made his living as a writer, publishing some ten million words in his lifetime across hundreds of publications and published works.

Platforms come and go like the wind. It’s always better to focus on the bigger picture, on the things that don’t change.

At the most basic level, my only strategy for finding and getting media is straightforward. I google reporters’ names to find their email addresses and phone numbers (yes, they’re publicly available). Then I reach out and explain what I’m doing or what I’ve done. I let the work and the fact that it matches what they cover—that it’s interesting and

A reality of our culture is that if you or your product has never been covered in the press, there is a risk that people will think you’re a nobody. Unless something is brand-new, it’s very rare that someone or something is both definitive and unknown. That’s why press matters and why it is part of most successful marketing plans. Still, this signa

Kathy Sierra, a well-known programmer and game developer, has spoken about needing to consider “your audience’s audience” when designing and marketing a product. She says that creators shouldn’t be thinking “Does this make me look good?” When they are pitching or producing they should be focusing on making their audience look good. Even better, for

If your goal is to create a perennial seller, you can’t measure yourself against people who aren’t aiming for the same thing—you can’t be endlessly checking industry charts or lists, and you can’t be distracted by the trends and fancies of other creators who are hopelessly lost.

The one sentence and one paragraph can be taken and tweaked for public consumption. It’s creating a literal elevator pitch: You’ve got fifteen seconds to catch an important person’s attention. When you were creating or when this was all in your head, you could get away with a sloppy approximation: “It’s a book about ______.” “I’m writing a movie ab