There’s no question it’s a fib. Why? Because people don’t usually seek out business books. Because even if your ideas are terrific, if you don’t sell the package of the ideas, they won’t get read and they won’t get spread. Purple Cow is a two paragraph book, really. The rest of it… all the words, all the stories, the title… are there to help the idea move around. The reason that a book sells and spreads is that the core is worth spreading. No amount of hype will get you over that hump. Which makes it a fib. A fib is a lie that people are glad they believed, even (especially) once they discover the truth. A fraud is a lie that rips people off or takes when it should give.
2 – No fancy packaging this time, no free downloads, however you have launched a corresponding blog. Given the subject matter, I’m guessing that this was strategic rather than simply a buzz generation tool. What was your thinking here, and how does this relate to the “story” concept introduced in the book?
Well, the cover is a little fancy, but this isn’t a book about packaging, it’s a book about stories. Blogs are a great place to tell stories. I built a separate blog for it because I didn’t want current blog readers to feel alienated or distracted. What’s fascinating to me is that the Liars blog gets about 20% of the traffic of the other blog. Why should that be? I cross post a bit, and the topics are very complementary. Maybe it’ll change over time…
3 – In Purple Cow, the epiphany came while driving through France with your family. Did you have a eureka moment like that when you came up with the core concept of this book, if so, what was it?
I did. It was watching the Democrats lose the election. Watching Howard Dean get tarred and feathered. Watching Karl Rove doing his evil genius shtick. He’s a very, very good liar, and he understands how to tell a story that many people in the US really want to believe. Once I saw things through this lens, I saw it everywhere. I saw it in my town, in the supermarket, in world events. It was sort of scary how clearly it made everything appear.
4 – Permission Marketing asked for it, Unleashing the ideavirus did, and Purple Cow was one. At first I thought that you had missed this step in All Marketers are Liars until I realized that the book itself creates a new worldview for the reader, thus explicitly proving one of its key concepts. Was this intentional, or am I just looking to deep?
Well, I’m trying for a lot here, so I’m flattered if you feel like it was deep. The mistake of LIARS is that I’m not playing to the existing worldview. By telling the truth as I see it instead of packaging it in a way that most of my potential readers see it, I’m taking a huge risk. That risk is that those people will reject this message out of hand because it isn’t clean, positive and simple, which is generally what sells a business book. BUT, since the idea came to me, liars and lying have become the buzz of the day. So it may very well be, after the fact, that my story matches an emerging worldview. That’s when hits really happen (the Beatles didn’t invent rock and roll, but they sure had good timing) and maybe I’ll get lucky again.
5 – By way of a case study; I love google, I’ve told myself a story about google, I’ve told myself, and others, that it’s a clean, simple, bare-bones, yet brilliant search engine. Now it seems that google is trying to get me to change my story. Clever or crazy?
Neither. Inevitable. As the brand grows and expectations increase, there’s just too much pressure to keep it simple. The question is this: can the market absorb the added complexity (as it did with cars–the Model T didn’t have a radio, didn’t have onstar, didn’t even have air conditioning) or will it reject it once the baggage gets to be too much (microwaves, for example, continue to be pretty simple appliances).
I think Google has a challenge as they try to get to the next level. They have to invent NEW stories that attract people with DIFFERENT worldviews while not jeopardizing their core. Not easy.
6- I mentioned in a review I wrote that I felt that this was your best book to date, definitely the most important. As I see it, it’s a prequel to your other books, it’s the one I would now tell people to read first in order to create the worldview that is required for them to better implement the practical stuff presented in your other books. How does this one rank for you in terms of personal pride? Is it the one Seth Godin book you should read if you could read only one?
Benefits of Belleville Auto Insurance
Auto insurance as we all know can be a very big benefit for anybody, especially when you encounter a very bad and traumatic accident. Auto insurance will be responsible for covering your medical expenses and car repair, and ensuring that you and other members that are involved in the accident are safe.
Belleville auto insurance has a lot of plans that can be of benefit to you and the passenger that you are riding with. Some insurance companies also offer very cheap and affordable plans, so that you will not have a problem with paying for the monthly or annual fees.
Here are the benefits of having auto insurance in Belleville:
- It can save your life – as we all know, modern insurance is responsible for ensuring that you family has the protection that they need to survive a serious illness, an accident or an untimely death. It will be responsible for ensuring that your family will be covered in terms of financial support. The same goes for car insurance, it will be very useful especially when you get into a serious accident and you do not have the money to pay for the damage that you might have caused to the other driver and its possible passengers. It will also be responsible for covering for your medical expenses and the other person.
- It is affordable – there are many auto insurance plans that you can get at a very low coverage. There are also plans that will allow you to pay on a monthly basis which is preferably better than paying annually which will cause you to take out a bigger amount of money. Some companies will also have normal insurance plans that have variables, which means that whatever you pay monthly, a percentage of the amount you pay for every month will go to the stocks that you purchase and will turn into savings and become your retirement fund.
- It will cover lawsuits – some auto insurance coverage will also cover legal fees due to the accident that you either caused or have been a victim of. This is actually a good investment because you wont have to worry about paying for anything. If you also do not have money on hand and you don’t know how or where to get the money to pay for lawyers, your insurance will be in charge of covering for the fees that you have to pay.
- It will pay for liabilities – there are a lot of insurance plans that have liability coverage that will really come in handy in time of an accident. The insurance company will be in-charge of paying the medical expenses for the person who is included in the accident along with you. This will be less headache for you, because you will not only have to worry about paying for the damage, but you also wont have to worry about having to shell out money. Insurance companies have good reasons for including these in their packages, because they know that not all people will be aware of what they need right after an accident, or know about their surroundings.