Book review: Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday

Martin Bamford
Jul 28, 2017 · 4 min read

My 30th read of 2017 was Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work that Lasts, by Ryan Holiday.

If you’re a creative of any type, you want the work you create to have a lasting impact. So much focus these days is placed on the ‘launch’ of a product or service. But what about the following days, weeks, months and years?

In Perennial Seller, Holiday shares the lessons of creating and marketing something to become a lasting success.

Here are some of the passages I highlighted on my Kindle:

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.

How to make something last — whether it’s for a few months more than the average or for a century — has been my lifelong fascination.

Is there a common creative mindset behind work that lasts? How is it different from work that’s popular one day, gone the next?

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

Ideas are cheap. Anyone can have one.

In the course of creating your work, you are going to be forced to ask yourself: What am I willing to sacrifice in order to do it?

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.

“Either you’re controversial,” as the perpetually controversial writer Elizabeth Wurtzel advises creatives, “or nothing at all is happening.”

More than four hundred hours of content is uploaded to YouTube every minute. Every year, more than 6,000 startups apply to Y Combinator. Ten thousand people get advanced degrees in drama. More than 125,000 people graduate with MBAs each year, and more than 300,000 books are published in the United States.

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?

A great package on a great product is what creates an explosive reaction.

Marketing is both an art and a science, and must be mastered by all creators who hope their work will find traction.

The only way the job will get done — to make people care — is if we do it ourselves.

A recent study found that when you visit the Facebook News Feed, more than 1,500 pieces of content are vying for your attention. There is, in other words, a 1-in-1,500 chance of even seeing a desired customer.

Our marketing efforts, then, should be catalysts for word of mouth. We are trying to create the spark that leads to a fire.

A smart business friend once described the art of marketing to me as a matter of “finding your addicts.”

The publisher and technologist Tim O’Reilly puts it well: “The problem for most artists isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.”

Most endorsements are organic, accidental even. The question is: How do we draw influencers to our work and increase our chances of it happening to us?

While the media might not necessarily convince customers, it definitely helps with recruiting investors and employees and impressing other important gatekeepers.

We know that these sites feed into the bigger ones, which feed into bigger ones still. The hard work there is finding the influencers of the influencers — and that can be done only with real research by people who actually care about the market they are trying to penetrate.

Just as Casey Neistat chastened would-be creators about the worthlessness of their ideas compared with their execution, no one gets coverage for thinking about maybe doing something. You get coverage for taking a stand, for risking something, for going out there and creating news where there wasn’t any before.

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.

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.

When it comes to creating a perennial seller, the principle to never lose sight of is simple: Create word of mouth.

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.

Perennial sales are not guaranteed. Hard-won reputations can be undone. Fans, once chewed up and spit out, do not come back.

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

Everyone should know who their detractors are and rile them up every once in a while just for fun.

As Nassim Taleb puts it, “Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.”

Holiday is an excellent writer and Perennial Seller is a valuable read for creators who want to make their work successful over time.

Next up, I’m reading Your Move: The Underdog’s Guide to Building Your Business, by Ramit Sethi.

Martin Bamford

Written by

Podcaster, author & columnist, Chartered Financial Planner & Accredited Later Life Adviser @informedchoice, chairman of Knowle Park Trust, ultra runner.

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