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Reader,
If you don’t know the show, feel free to skip to the secrets. Well, 28 people started at 11 on Saturday morning.
12 hours of puzzles, physical endeavors, and complex social schemes later, I had, for the first time ever, made it to the final 3. For those who know the show, it all comes down to a speech at the end. A speech where you convince a jury of fellow players why you deserve to be voted the winner of the game. In my speech, I confidently went through a play-by-play of all the people I was personally responsible for removing from the game. I wanted to make it clear who played the most strategically and deserved to win. Well…instead of proving to everyone why I deserved to be crowned winner, I was actually just rubbing salt in the wounds of those voting members I had been personally responsible for getting out. I write this as a great reminder that it’s our job to understand the story that’s playing in our audience’s head, not our own. In case you’re wondering, I did not win. Know your audience, I guess?
3 Secrets The question I recently asked Scott Hogan, of the 300,000-copies-sold Built From Broken. Scott’s answer: “My family and friends buying the book” At ShelfLife, we call this Mom’s Purchase doesn’t count. Promoting your book to your college friends or getting your friends to buy it is like just creating an author website: It’s instantaneous gratification. However, a week or two later, you realize it did nothing to get your book into the hands of the right people. Now, maybe you are solving your family and friends’ problems. However, if you’re not putting your book in the hands of people whose problem you’re solving, those people won’t recommend your book, and there will be no further word of mouth. Focus your efforts on getting your book in the hands of readers whose problem you’re solving, and you’ll save years of effort and thousands of dollars. 2. A cover and title that sells Scott attributes much of his success to his bold, scroll-stopping book cover and title.
Weird anatomical type image with notes. Orange lettering on a white background. You seem to intuitively identify with “Built from Broken” even if you don’t know what he means by it. It’s not just about how I’m going to recover and be better, it’s about how I translate all this stuff that’s happened to me into being better than before. Not just coming back but coming back stronger. A GREAT book cover example to learn from. 3. How do you see AI coming into your work as an author? “Right now you can go on Amazon, search for Built from Broken, you’ll see 30 different titles using that name and they are popping up faster than you can submit support tickets to get them taken down. Things like this are irritating for authors, but it’s also irritating for readers who are inundated with AI slop content right now. It’s a tsunami of AI content. What I’m seeing is people are more prone to just go someone they trust and say, what do you think about this? Of course people are using ChatGPT and Claude or whatever and they’re prompting it like crazy… but I’m seeing a lot more people lean on us in general and say: Trust is going to become the ultimate commodity. Any little things that companies or authors are doing that’s a chink in that trust armor are what you have to avoid right now. So our whole goal right now is to get people to believe and trust us, and we have to do the right thing in order to build that. From an author standpoint, even if you don’t have a huge social media following, if people trust you’re an authority, people will come to you eventually.” 2 Links
1 Book Growing up, I remember Winston Churchill as a fat guy smoking cigars and signing documents in my history textbooks. This entirely changed my view of him. Turns out he’s done a lot more in his life. Entirely changed my view of this incredibly fascinating character in history. As a side note – he believed he’d be the Prime Minister of the UK at a very young age. Growing up, we didn’t spend much time learning about the continent of Africa. Opened my eyes up to a part of the world I’ve not read much about. It’s my most gifted book and I’ve recommended it to at least 50 people already…
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