Amazon.com: Perennial Seller: The Art of Making and Marketing Work That Lasts (Audible Audio Edition): Ryan Holiday, Ryan Holiday, Penguin Audio: Audible Books & Originals

Ryan Holiday never disappoints me, this is a well written, insightful read that I am for sure going to revisit the very near future.

In my 2013 personal annual review, I wrote that I wanted to build something that would last 100 years. I have made no progress over the last four years. It is such a large and intimidating goal that it seems impossible to begin. Where to start? What are the steps along the path? Ryan Holiday's "Perennial Seller" promises to help us "make something that can stand the test of time," and he delivers.The book surprised me with its focus on the marketing side of things. A quarter of the book is about actually creating a masterpiece. The remainder of the book deals with the positioning, marketing, and platform strategy needed to make a work grow and endure. This part of the process had always been a mystery to me. I was one of those naive people who thought writers just handed off their works to their publishing companies ("kissing it up to God") and then their work was done.Holiday insists that great creators see "every part of the process as their responsibility" and he relentlessly pushes us build a platform to connect with our fans. I had never thought about having a pre-built platform/network of people to help jumpstart the spread of my work. It's such an obvious idea that I can't believe I hadn't been doing it before. And to give us a clear and achievable target, Holiday quotes Kevin Kelly who says: "Anyone producing works of art — needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living"Beyond the importance of a platform strategy, I found Holiday's thoughts on the advertising interesting. While the initial launch is an important opportunity, he discounts the long-term importance of advertising: "If a product is going to sell forever, it must have strong word of mouth. It must drive its own adoption. Over the long haul, this is the only thing that lasts"But how to rate this book? It's certainly not great literature itself. Most of Holiday's recent work (including his "Obstacle is the Way" - http://books.max-nova.com/obstacle-way/) is written according to the same formula. Find a bunch of great quotes and then include a very thin veneer of analysis and add some link to modern situations.Having followed Holiday for years, I feel like he recycles the same guys (Churchill, Epictetus, Lincoln, Robert Greene, Aurelius) over and over again. He seems brilliant and widely read when you first encounter him, but repeated exposure threatens to expose the shallowness beneath the surface. I'm particularly concerned by his increasing promotion of James Altucher (one of his clients at Brass Check) who follows a similar but less well-executed formula for writing his own mediocre books. See my 2-star review of Altucher's "The Choose Yourself Guide to Wealth" (http://books.max-nova.com/choose-yourself-wealth/) for why I think this is a bad direction for Holiday.Yet this book accomplishes what few other books have - it made me change my behavior. Taking Holiday's advice that, "the best time to have built your network was yesterday. The second best time is right now," I have started to set up my own "platform" for connecting with people who enjoy my book reviews. One day, when I write my great American novel, I'll be well-prepared to begin the next step of the journey: turning it into a perennial seller.Full review and highlights at http://books.max-nova.com/perennial-seller/

A great book can be measured in many different ways: was it a fun read, did you learn something, will you do something different as a result. Perennial Seller falls in the latter category. I have an enormous collection of sales, marketing, and product development books that were first published over a span of the last 100 years. I can't think of a single one that focuses on creating and marketing a classic. This one does.Some books are loaded with counter-intuitive ideas, new concepts never heard of before, old concepts almost forgotten. Holiday's prior books such as Trust Me I'm Lying and The Obstacle are the Way (both excellent incidentally), fall into this category. This book differs as it's a paradigm perspective book.The newness isn't in any one particular idea (many I have heard of before), it's in the way the ideas are stitched together into a unifying perspective and paradigm. It's a book that gets you to SEE your opportunities differently than you did before your read it. When you SEE things differently, you automatically DO things differently.I've been fortunate enough to create a perennial seller in my niche field and to be well known in my field. In short, much of what Holiday advocates I've already done. BUT, I didn't know WHY it worked. I do now. This is important because for me I can repeat the process with more insight and intentionality than before.For most books I take notes on a dozen or so key phrases worth remembering. For this book, I took notes on my "To Do" list... discovering 3 significant opportunities siting right in front of me that I've overlooked for 5 years. The ideas weren't in the book. The PERSPECTIVE Holiday shared prompted me to see my own assets from a different perspective -- that of a perennial seller.In a world of instant gratification and a sea of "how to" books with the latest, soon to be obsolete, marketing technique, it's refreshing to read a book that's outlines key principles that don't change and oriented around a worth goal -- to create, market, and sustain a classic.