If you’re already familiar with Seth Godin’s blog, or have already read any of his bestselling books — Linchpin, Purple Cow, etc. — you already know a lot of what he’s going to tell you in his newest book, This Is Marketing: You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See.
- Make a product that solves a real person’s problem.
- Get really specific about what kind of person you’re targeting and what problem you’re trying to solve.
- Don’t be a brown cow (boring, typical), be a purple cow (unique, remarkable, phenomenal).
So I wanted to focus on just one section of this book that happens to be particularly relevant to creative career types (aka “the kind of person this blog is targeting”).
In Chapter Nineteen: The Funnel, Seth writes about “life on the long tail:”
On the left are the hits. There aren’t as many of them, but they each sell a lot. In fact, number one sells ten times as many copies as number ten, and a hundred times as many as number one hundred. A hit is magical.
On the right are the rest. The long tail: good products of specialized interest. Each, by itself, doesn’t sell many copies, but taken together, the long tail sells as much as the short head.
Half of Amazon’s sales are books that are not in the top five thousand. Half!
Half of the music consumed on streaming sites isn’t available in stores. Not half the titles, half the volume.
Amazon can do great with this strategy since they sell all the available books. Each author, though, is in pain: selling one to two books a day is no way to make a living.
Seth’s advice is to become the “short head” of a specialized market, e.g. the best person selling “video courses on using a GH5 camera to make movies.”
Or, in the self-publishing world, the best person writing “steamy older woman younger man romance.”
If you’ve spent any time on Amazon recently, you’ve probably noticed that a lot of indie genre fiction authors have started using specific genre keywords in their titles. We’ve got Gloria King’s Love Thy Neighbor: Steamy Older Woman Younger Man Romance, for example, or A.R. Winters’ Cooks, Crooks and Cruises: A Humorous Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery (Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries Book 2). They want readers to know exactly what they’re getting, so the readers who want exactly what they’re offering will be incentivized to purchase.
This is one way to get around the “can’t make a living selling two books a day” effect. (At roughly $2.50 in royalties per book, that’d be $1,825 a year before taxes.)
The other way to get around the “can’t make a living selling two books a day” thing is to find ways of earning money besides selling books.
Like keeping your day job. (As many authors do.)
Or freelancing. (Ditto.)
Or freelancing and teaching and editing and speaking and a bunch of other gigs that all support and sustain each other. (Tritto.)
If you do that, and if you are ready to build a career that, as Seth notes, is about solving someone else’s problems*, then you can do the creative work you want to do without having to try to be the best person at “older woman younger man humorous romance where the younger man has a really cute dog.”
Because you’ll be making the art that only you can make, telling the stories that only you can tell, etc.
And, in a world where other people are competing to be the best at a certain set of keywords, this kind of unique creative work can really stand out.
Of course, you still have to figure out how to market it.
Which means you’ll probably still want to read Seth’s book. ❤️
*One of my most popular freelance articles, which still gets retweeted and shared at least once a month even though it was published in 2015, is Check Yourself Before You Wreck Yourself With A/B Testing at Unbounce. This is a perfect example of using a freelance career to solve someone else’s problems (both Unbounce’s problem of needing a guide to A/B testing, and the readers’ problem of… also needing a guide to A/B testing). When I teach my “how to freelance” classes — and I’ll be teaching another one this summer, so check back later for dates — I get a lot of students who want to build careers as travel writers or celebrity profile writers or writers of stuff that sounds interesting to them. You can absolutely get paid to write about travel (I’ve done it) but you’ll get paid a lot more money if you’re also able to write about A/B testing.
