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As the author of a number of influential marketing books, Seth Godin knows what he’s talking about when it comes to writing and marketing a book. Advice for authors is a list of his top 19 tips.
- Lower your expectations. The happiest authors are the ones that don’t expect much.
- The best time to start promoting your book is three years before it comes out. Three years to build a reputation, build a permission asset, build a blog, build a following, build credibility and build the connections you’ll need later.
- Your cover matters. Way more than you think. If it didn’t, you wouldn’t need a book… you could just email people the text.
- Writing a book is a tremendous experience. It pays off intellectually. It clarifies your thinking. It builds credibility. It is a living engine of marketing and idea spreading, working every day to deliver your message with authority. You should write one.
When three young girls caused $30,000 worth of damage to Chick-fil-A founder Truett Cathy’s mansion, instead of involving the authorities he decided on his own unusual punishment.
“I tried to be lenient with them but wanted to punish them,” Cathy said. “I wanted to show them there was a better way than the way they were going.”
The punishment includes four terms: Each of the girls must write “I will not vandalize other people’s property” 1,000 times, abstain from TV and video games for six months, read a “good book” for three hours a day and submit weekly written book reports to him for 13 weeks.
I love reading about food-related psychological studies and this one on how our eating preferences are influenced (by our personal values, the food’s cultural meaning, and its physical appearance) is no exception:
How we feel about a sausage […] says more about our personal values than about what the sausage actually tastes like.
A large group of people were given a “human values” test which seeks to measure fifty six different values (loyalty, ambition, social order, etc.) Then, the subjects were asked to rate a variety of sausages. People who scored high on “social authority” – they believed it was important to support people in power – tended to label the “vegetarian” sausage as inferior, even when the vegetarian sausage was actually from a cow. Likewise, people who scored low on “social power values” tended to score the vegan sausage much higher than the beef sausage, even when they were actually eating meat. Instead of judging the food product on its merits, they ended up preferring the product that more closely conformed to their value system.
I wonder what this means for me. I like vegetarian sausages and always give serious consideration to the Sunday nut roast; but I always go for the meat because, well, it’s more traditional, isn’t it?
via Link Banana
Worldly advice from Ask MetaFilter.
How do you let go of love? […] For an added level of difficulty, this is a relationship that you don’t really have any bad memories of, so you can’t use those to change the direction of your thoughts.
One piece of advice from me? Originally written as advice on purging book clutter, this is a profound statement that has already helped me in many areas of my life:
De-cluttering involves recognizing that regret is part of life, and being OK with that. Yes, I’ve given away books that I now often wish I still owned. But I’ve also screwed up relationships, made iffy career choices, etc. — you suck it up and move on. If you try to cling to every single thing (material, spiritual, or emotional) that you might need one day in the totally hypothetical future, you’re going to end up bogged down in a lot of stuff.
via Lifehacker
Don’t have the time to watch that new film or read that classic book? Got a minute?
Citizen Kane, directed by Orson Welles (1941)
Orson Welles: Rosebud. (dies)
Reporter: What does it mean?
Everybody Else: We don’t know.THE END
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Gatsby: Daisy, I made all this money for you, because I love you.
Daisy: I cannot reciprocate, because I represent the American Dream.
Gatsby: Now I must die, because I also represent the American Dream. (dies)
Nick: I hate New Yorkers.THE END
Self-trepanation seems the realm of low budget horror films and historic medical literature. However Neurophilosophy has a transcript of an interview with a recent self-trepanner.
M: How exactly did you perform the trepanation?
HP: I used a hand trepan initially, but that wasn’t proving to be terribly successful. Then there was a problem with the people who owned the property we were staying in, so we decided we’d have to just leave it. I wrapped my head up in a towel and we got out of there. A couple of days later, we had another go. We abandoned the hand trepan and got an electric drill instead. I injected myself with a local anaesthetic and then slashed a big T-shaped incision in my scalp, right down to the bone. I was sat there in the bathroom feeling quite relaxed and they started with the drill.
via Mind Hacks
When 40 finance greats are asked for the best financial lessons they ever learned, you’re sure to learn something. But who wants to trawl through 40 separate pages to get to all that advice (apart from me)?
The back-to-paper trend is gaining momentum, and Bill Westerman recently joined the movement; Getting Sh-t Done is his beautifully described analog productivity method.
An example of his system can seen on flickr.
In a different take on the book list ‘genre’, Martin Seymour-Smith’s 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written doesn’t list the books the author believes are ‘best’, but which have been the most influential.
The list is ordered chronologically, and there are some novels present. I’ve read an embarrassingly small amount of these.
