Simple premises sell books, and too much information fails

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 1:26:25

   It gangbangs every five pages, but there's still some pretty explicit stuff. What people may not realize, I am almost 100% sure I'm getting this right, but I'm not going to fact check it now on my phone. Do you know how Fifty Shades of Grey started? No. It was fan fiction. It was Twilight series fan fiction. So somebody was writing an extension of within the Twilight world, her own fiction, super sexualized.

2. 1:26:53

   and that turned into 50 Shades of Grey. Oh, wow. Isn't that crazy? That is insane. It is something like that. It may not be Twilight specifically, but it was fan fiction, fantasy, that then got converted into its own franchise in the form of 50 Shades of Grey. Have you ever read that book? I couldn't do it. I couldn't do the writing. I tried. And I just, all due respect to the author, it just was not, I could not digest the prose.

3. 1:27:19

   But what it demonstrated to me it was like the power of a simple premise, right? It's just like you have, people can probably familiar with the series, but it's like you have this, whatever it is, like his name, Christian Gray, like this like billionaire rich guy with a sex dungeon. And then like, you know, and super explicit. And, you know, I remember a number of different pieces of coverage described it as mommy porn for what that's worth.

4. 1:27:47

   But it impressed me. I tried to get through the pros. I couldn't do it. But the power of a simple premise, how visceral and simple is your premise and conceit. And honestly, that's where, for instance, my third book, For Our Chef, that's where it failed. It tried to do too much. It was like three books in one. It was not a simple premise. It was very complicated. I felt like it was well received. It was well received.

5. 1:28:11

   I mean, it sold hundreds of thousands of copies. It sold like 120,000 copies the first week. but that was a function of my diehard audience who would take me at my word that it's worth reading. But if you went blind, unfamiliar with me at all to the say Amazon page, it tried to do too much. And I think this is true with presentations. Like if I'm talking to someone who's going, for instance, I was just coaching someone who's going on 60 minutes and they wanted to talk about messaging. Or if I'm talking to somebody who's got a TED talk coming up and they're asking for advice, my advice is always the same. I didn't come up with this. Somebody else gave it to me, which is presentations fail from too much information, not too little information.

6. 1:28:58

   And I think that's true with books too. It's like, does this conjure a simple image in someone's head immediately? And that is not easy to do while being differentiated. So 50 Shades of Grey, nailed it, completely nailed it. And that has turned this thing into a global phenomenon. Whereas this third book, which I'm still very proud of, I think it's a great book, but it's really three or four books combined into one. And to try to convey that to anyone in a paragraph is next to impossible. Yeah. I mean, the same applies to so much in life though.

7. 1:29:32

   I mean, even on the product side of all the products that I've built over the years, it is, you know, and I watch entrepreneurs going to launch new consumer products or whatever it may be, the ones that boil the ocean and throw in every single feature. And they're like, oh, but wouldn't it be great if you add this? And I'm like, yeah, maybe someday, but can you really distill down this idea to that one concept so that when you're in that, I used to call it the crowded bar conversation, not the elevator pitch, but the crowded bar. Like if you want to say in two sentences what your thing does.

8. 1:30:04

   Can you get it out there to where they say, oh yeah, I'll go check that out. Oftentimes you can't do it. So the battle is cutting features out. This is what Steve Jobs was so good at. It's like he could have added App Store on day one for the iPhone, but it was like, he didn't. He was like, it's going to do these 10 things really well. And then slowly build on that base. Yeah. I mean, if the V1 iPhone could get away with no copy paste, remember that?

9. 1:31:04

   Oh yeah, that's right. I suck.