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

The question, then, is: 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. (And by the way, with the exception of ultra-high-status premium brands, I think damaging the perception of your product through price is very hard t

Audiences can’t magically know what is inside something they haven’t seen. They have no clue that it will change their lives.

Developing the right relationships with the right people is the long game.

go” but you feel some serious doubt that you’re not ready, please make the difficult choice to stop the presses and take the time to get it right, even if it means extra

can cut back on a lot of things as a leader, but the last thing you can ever skimp on is marketing. Your product needs a champion. As Peter Drucker put it: “[Each project] needs somebody who says, ‘I am going to make this succeed,’ and then goes to work on

In my definition, a platform is the combination of the tools, relationships, access, and audience that you have to bear on spreading your creative work—not just once, but over the course of a career.

In 2008, I came to the realization that while I would one day like to publish a book, unless things changed, I would have no way of actually telling readers about my book. I decided I would build an email list. But what about? I wasn’t important or interesting enough for people to just sign up based on my name alone. So I came up with an idea: What

Many massively popular artists have followed this path in their own way. 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?

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.