When that editor told me that backlist bestseller had taken on a life of its own, what she meant was that the fans were now selling the book, with no effort needed from the author or publisher. To me, this is the #1 most important takeaway from Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday, and it’s also the most difficult to understand and engineer. Word of mouth is the most important form of marketing. (By the way, if you do decide you want the book, would you consider buying it through the link above? It supports the many hours of work Jarrett and I put into the site and helps us keep the site free.) The 4 best takeaways from Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday 1. To get a complete understanding of how to create a perennial seller, you can buy Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts by Ryan Holiday here! These 4 takeaways are the ones that will change the way you approach your writing right away, and I hope they help you stop aiming for one-hit wonder and start aiming for perennial seller. There’s so much in Perennial Seller for writers, bloggers, and creatives to learn about how to create a lifelong bestseller, and I’m officially adding it to my must-read books for writers and bloggers list.Īfter almost painstaking paring down, I finally distilled the 4 best takeaways from Perennial Seller. These ideas will show you how to get off the hamster wheel of trends they teach you to take the long-view of your own career and they explain how, exactly, people create books that take on a life of their own, as perennial sellers do. I devoured this book: underlined it, scribbled in it, opened Evernote a thousand times to take notes, and soaked up all the new things I learned and all the things I knew that needed reinforcing. Perennial Seller is about the art of making and marketing of work that lasts, and it looks at books, music, movies, video games, and more to distill what makes something stick and what sends it to the remainder bin of history. If you don’t know Ryan Holiday, he’s the author of 6 books and a partner at the creative agency Brass Check, which works with authors such as John Grisham, Tim Ferriss, Tony Robbins, and others. And a self-education in publishing through books like this is the best way to start. I now know enough to understand there’s no silver bullet, but I also know there is a lot authors can do to stack the cards in their favor. So when another agent at Stonesong handed me Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday a few weeks ago, I was immediately excited. But the problem was that I was too dense to understand it yet–I didn’t get that book publishing is an art, and that readers are not always predictable. Weren’t there thousands of data points (books) available every year, and millions more in the publisher’s records? There had to be some conclusions that could be extrapolated from all that experience? Right? I remember that moment so well because I could not comprehend how an entire industry didn’t have a clear-cut system for creating bestsellers. I huffed back to my tiny cubicle, outraged like only the clueless can be. It was nothing they had done–it was almost a force of nature. Was it the author’s platform? Was it the idea? Had they marketed the heck out of it?īut all the editor could tell me was that the book had taken on a life of its own: sales had built and built and all that momentum had snowballed into something that was unstoppable. What I wanted to know was exactly how that book had become a perennial bestseller. You can recognize these books because they wave you down with numbers: “2 million copies sold,” “now published in 15 countries!” The book was a perennial seller for the publishing house. It had built momentous word-of-mouth and now needed almost no help from the author or publisher to keep it selling steadily. I had asked one of the senior editors about a backlist book that was still selling and selling, even after 10 years. I blinked at this-what did that mean? It was 2009, and I was working at a Big 5 publisher in New York. “That book has taken on a life of its own.” The 4 best takeaways and a book review of Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts by Ryan Holiday–plus a free downloadable PDF art print to inspire you to become a perennial seller!
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