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

The company would have been far better off if it had solicited this kind of feedback or done this kind of thinking earlier on in the project. The problem was that they believed they were ready to start marketing, and therefore were unwilling to consider feedback that felt like it was taking them backward.

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.

Our goal here is to make something that people rave about, that becomes part of their lives. The buried insights found in those other great works were not put there on the first pass. Work is unlikely to be layered if it is written in a single stream of consciousness. No. Deep, complex work is built through a relentless, repetitive process of revis

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

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

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? In short: What are these people going to be paying for?

Yet, too often, the approach of the average creator is to hope to get lucky. On top of that, we focus on all the wrong metrics for measuring our success and, in the process, actually diminish our chances for longevity.

You may be important in your world, but they are important in theirs.

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.”