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

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 don

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

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.”

many people approach their work with polluted intentions. 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. When we look to great works of history as our example, we see one thing: that powerful work is a struggle and that it

The first step of any creator hoping for lasting success—whether for ten years or ten centuries—is to accept that hope has nothing to do with it.

Contrary to what most people think about the viral content BuzzFeed is famous for, its founder Jonah Peretti has said that every article BuzzFeed publishes isn’t supposed to be read by millions of people. Yes, every post is supposed to spread socially, but it is supposed to be viral for its intended audience, whatever the size. Doing that requires

Here is another famous Hemingway line on writing: “The first draft of anything is shit.”

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

How we put this into practice is simple: Ask questions. How can I give people a sample of what I’m thinking? How does the idea resonate in conversation? What does an online audience think of it? What does a poll of your friends reveal? These might seem like small questions in the face of a big task like creating a classic work that lasts—but classi

This is good news. It means that your perennial seller does not have to be birthed in some single episode of genius. Instead, it can be made piece by piece—or, as Anne Lamott put it in her meditation on writing, “bird by bird.” 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 stu