What’s Your Secret?
“I like scrambled eggs and I eat them a lot. But I don’t like them green, or too runny, or too hot. I eat them with sausage, or a bagel, or toast. Served with hot sauce or herb’s how I like them the most.”
by Bob SchwarztrauberYesterday I was fixing some scrambled eggs for breakfast after writing my blog post. I tend to write first because I find the early morning always has fresh ideas waiting in my head. Ideas are slippery things, if you let go of them even for an instant, you could lose them.
I like scrambled eggs. But fixing them the same way, day after day can get boring. After a while, I grow tired of the same thing. But here’s what I’ve found…if you add some tarragon to the eggs they taste great. Actually, I got that tip from Tim Ferriss in his book, The 4-Hour Chef.
Sometimes, I slather them with Frank’s Hot Sauce. I just heard on the radio that putting hot sauce on your food helps you eat less. You could lose weight. Different way of fixing, different results. Pretty cool right?
And then I thought, I love many things in life, but with over-exposure to the same thing I get bored. How many times can I read one photography magazine, or one photography book. Or any book for that matter. I crave variety and I’ll bet you do too.
As long as we’re on the subject of photography, a subject I like very much, let’s stay with that and I’ll show you why you need to write your book.
I have TONS of books on photography. Do you know why?
It’s because I hope to learn something new from each book. No, wait, that’s not quite true.
What I want is for each new book to give me that ONE TIP, that ONE SECRET that will make my photography so good that people come from all over the world to view (and BUY) my work.
People buy golf books and magazines for the same reason. And cookbooks. And business books. And books of all kinds. A romance novel might even turn us into an ubber-desireable prince or princess, if only for a little while.
Even if we’ve read books by all the experts in our field, if a new book comes out, even by someone we’ve never heard of, often ESPECIALLY if it’s by someone we’ve never heard of, we often feel a compelling need to buy that book.
Why? Because this new book just might contain “THE SECRET” that will finally give us the edge or the means to be as good as we’ve always imagined we could be.
And it just might.
Malcolm Gladwell wrote about just such things in his best-selling book, “The Tipping Point, How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”.
Often, all we need is that ONE detail we’ve been missing. Or that ONE way of doing things that we never tried before. Or that ONE way of explaining things that makes us finally “get it’.
You might just be harboring such a detail yourself. Or a way of explaining things that makes people finally get it.
We crave variety. We seek the secret.
The scariest thing in the world, and possibly the hardest road you’ll ever travel is to write a book on a subject for which you can find no other book.
Don’t be a pioneer. Search Amazon.com for other books on your topic. Search subjects and titles. Write your book FOR and sell it TO people who are already buying books on your topic. They’ll buy more books. They crave variety. They are already there on Amazon.com searching for “The Secret”.
One of the safest lessons in marketing, and I first heard it from the famous copywriter Gary Halbert, is you want to be selling to a starving crowd.
Your book should be written to feed the starving crowd.
Just like recipes, we get tired of eating the same old thing day after day. We crave something new. (Recipe books are some of the best-selling books on the planet for a reason).
How many ways can you fix an egg?
We crave new in our food. We crave new in our hobbies. We crave new in our business.
Guess what? We haven’t read YOUR BOOK yet.
Will you sit idly by and let us starve? Or finally write that book?
Let me know how I can help.
