Rating: Average
Perennial Seller blurb excerpt: Bestselling author and marketing strategist Ryan Holiday reveals to creatives from all industries how to produce and promote a classic work.
Holiday stresses that this is not a Marketing Book, Instead he breaks down the elements of success into; Producing, Positioning, Packaging, Pitching, and Platform.
My opinion: I am a huge fan of Ryan Holiday's and most other readers rate this much higher than I did. However, I felt that overall it was pretty vanilla. The book definitely gains momentum the further you read with some great references backed by real-life results. However, for a book of this length, the takeaways were few and far between and very general in nature.
Lessons from Perennial Seller:
Perennial sellers are things you recommend even when they are no longer "hot" or "trendy". Therefore quality is paramount. Many of the Best Marketing Books recommend 20% of your time should be dedicated to producing and 80% of your time should be invested in promoting. If your product isn't high quality, doesn't meet a need or fill a gap, and isn't entertaining or extremely practical it's unlikely to have a lasting impact. A good product is the best sales and marketing tool.
To do great work, you have to be motivated by the work, not the potential rewards of what you produce. There is no place for shortcutting or outsourcing critical work.
Questions to answer before every project: What does this teach? What does this solve? How am I entertaining? What am I giving? What are we offering? What are we sharing? Who are we for?
Summarise your project into one sentence, one paragraph, and one page. If you can’t communicate your project, its value, and who it's for succinctly, you’ll need to refine the idea further.
Test your idea early and often. Creative people naturally produce false positives - things they think are original and exceptional which are neither.
Perennial bestsellers don’t have to be made whole, you can iterate and review as you go. Classics are built by thousands of small acts.
Perennial sellers aren’t always immediate successes. Whilst a good launch is ideal, it’s not always a telling representation of long-term success. Immediate success is also not a great indicator of long-term success.
Many of the Best Business Books, Best Marketing Books, and industry experts focus resources on optimising for quick and obvious success. This short term focus often comes at the detriment of long term success. Where the focus goes the effort follows.
When creating meaningful work, the job doesn’t just stop at creating it, but it also extends into marketing and promoting to ensure you achieve reach and impact. If you have invested in a project, don't let someone else controls its destiny.
Perennial sellers benefit from a compounding like growth. This growth rarely occurs naturally in the beginning. It requires authentic and strategic effort.
The Lindy Effect theorizes that if something’s been around for a long-time, the likelihood that it will remain around for even longer is already higher by virtue of its "staying power".
Many creators want to be for everyone and as a result, end up being for no one. Pick someone real who can represent who you are creating for. Now create, assess, adjust, and iterate with them in mind. Many of the Best Marketing Books refer to this as developing a buyer persona. This is critical as the absence of an intended audience is not just a commercial problem, it’s a creative one.
It’s sometimes better to draw inspiration from things that have lasted in other industries rather than focusing on what is currently popular in your own industry.
Popularised in one of The Best Marketing Books of all time, Blue Ocean Strategy, If you can’t be first in a category, break ground on a new category and own it. Only is better than the best.
Positioning is really important as you take this thing that means so much to you personally and prime it to mean something to other people too. In this process, the end-users opinions are vital as they will become buyers, users, and consumers.
Becoming a perennial seller requires that you build a fan base before and after a project. This is often referred to as a platform. In 2020 it often takes the form of a social following or mailing list.
When building a community or platform it’s often easier to reach a smaller well-defined niche, WOW them, then expand from there.
Collaboration is a great way to expand your audience.
Free is a conscious marketing strategy. It still costs the user their time, effort and attention so don't be disheartened if the wrong people don't want what you are offering.
Like free, price is a conscious marketing strategy.
Doing the unexpected is a great way of gaining attention. Attention can lead to an audience, an audience to a community, community to lasting impact.
You can deploy “earned media arbitrage” by buying small media in one place, then creating a story around that media buy to get it amplified in other mediums or outlets.
Your network will determine your net worth. Never dismiss anyone, play the long game, focus on pre-VIPs (people on the rise who are accessible but soon to be influential).
Producing your next great work is a good way of promoting older works.
Advertising can add fuel to a fire, but rarely has the power to start one.
You have a community of people with assets at their disposal. Don't be afraid to ask for help.
The Perennial Seller Best Quotes:
“A book should be an article before it’s a book and a dinner conversation before it’s an article. See how things go before going all in.”
“Be a person. Be nice. Think relationship first and transaction second.”
“Platform is not a stepping stone. IT’s the finish line.”
"Great things are timeless, but take time"
"Marketing is the art of allocation resources"
What Next:
If you are interested in this book, you may want to check out our list of reviewed Marketing Books.
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