My little-known history as an Amazon ebook hack

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A-list copywriter Bob Bly just sent out an email about the National Emergency Library. I’d heard of this initiative but I didn’t bother to look it up until now.

Turns out, the Internet Archive is scanning books and making them freely available online during the corona situation. That’s the National Emergency Library. To which Mary Rasenberger, director of the Authors Guild, said (and I quote from Bob’s email):

“[It is] no different than any other piracy sites. If you can get anything that you want that’s on Internet Archives for free, why are you going to buy an ebook.”

I don’t know about you, but to me this sounds like the old argument about sex and marriage. Why buy the cow, when there’s an app that hooks you up with free milk, even at 3am.

And yet… plenty of people are still getting married these days. How come? Riddle me that, Mary.

But seriously, here’s a little-known fact about me:

For about a year of my life, I eked a meager living by writing ebooks and selling them through Amazon Kindle publishing. (Don’t search for the books because they were all published under pseudonyms.)

I actually sold thousands of copies of these books — but it didn’t mean much. Kindle ebooks sell for a couple of bucks each.

Thing is, had I known as much about marketing back then as I do now, I wouldn’t have failed or given up on my Kindle publishing dreams.

That’s because selling books on Amazon (or really, on any outside platform) is not a good way to make money. It is, however, a fantastic way to get highly qualified leads who have tried a glass of your milk, and who want more.

That means you can get these folks over to your site and sell them more milk — maybe at a higher price than what Amazon encourages you to charge.

Why stop there though?

If somebody likes you and knows you and trusts you, why limit your offer to a carton or two of milk?

Instead, take your new-found customer by the hand to the back of your property… open the barn door… and introduce her to your gorgeous cow. It might be just the bovine your customer has been looking for all her life.

In other words, if the National Emergency Library, the National Milk Authority, or any other pirate institution starts giving away samples of your money-maker for free, it might not be the end of the world. It might even be the start of something great. As multi-millionaire marketer Joe Sugarman once said:

“Each problem has hidden in it an opportunity so powerful that it literally dwarfs the problem. The greatest success stories were created by people who recognized a problem & turned it into an opportunity.”

Sharing news about new in five minutes or less

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There are two things I want to share with you today. One is news, the other is new. Let’s start with news:

I read an article today about how the media failed to predict the corona situation — and that’s why their initial reporting was so complacent.

To which I made the Scooby Doo “huh?” noise. Because from what I’ve seen over the years, the media doesn’t do prediction, at least not seriously. Instead, the media reports on the status quo.

Before the corona situation exploded, the status quo was complacency. Now, the status quo is panic, and the media is reporting accordingly. When the pandemic begins to wane and it’s time for things to go back to normal, the media message will likely be obliviousness that anything bad ever happened.

Which brings up this distinction between news and new. I first heard it from computer scientist Alan Kay. Says Alan,

“News is stuff that’s incremental to what we already know. This is why you can tell the news in five minutes. ‘Hey, a train just crashed.’ We all know what that means. […] New is by definition not like what we already know. There’s no news about new. There’s nothing you can tell somebody in five minutes about what new is.”

So I got two takeaways for you:

First, I’m not sure if it’s possible to do a good job predicting the future. Perhaps, among enough people, a few just get lucky.

But, if it is possible, then like Alan Kay says above, it’s unlikely you’ll find the future on the evening news, on Facebook, or on Vox.

But really, we’re here to talk about marketing.

So the other thing I want to tell you is how this news vs. new business can make you money. This is something I heard from marketer Todd Brown.

I didn’t know who Todd Brown was until recently. Apparently, he’s a big name in the IM space, and he’s worked with Jay Abraham, Clayton Makepeace, and Rich Schefren.

Todd’s message was that, whenever you’re positioning a new offer, you should never present it as an incremental improvement over the status quo (ie. news). Instead, always look for a way to present your offer as something entirely new and different — a marketplace of one.

“But hold on,” you might say. “Your offer should be something new… and yet there is no way to share news about new. So how do you convince prospects to buy in?”

That’s a good question. And it’s something I’m trying to answer in my new book on the use of insight in marketing. I’m making good progress on this book, and I hope to finish it in the next six to seven years (just kidding, hopefully another month or so).

If you’d like to get notified when it comes out, sign up for my daily email newsletter and you will get more emails from me about it.

The persuasion moral of the cock and the jewel

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Let’s start with a short story:

“A COCK, scratching for food for himself and his hens, found a precious stone and exclaimed: ‘If your owner had found thee, and not I, he would have taken thee up, and have set thee in thy first estate; but I have found thee for no purpose. I would rather have one barleycorn than all the jewels in the world.'”

If the old English puts you off, I can understand. And I’m sorry. Please don’t keep reading in that case.

If you’re still with me, what would you say is the moral of this story? Think about it, and we will get back to it in a second.

Meanwhile, let me tell you this is one of Aesop’s fables.

Aesop’s fables have been used for thousands of years to give pithy illustrations to situations we’ve all experienced but we don’t have a good and short name for. Like sour grapes. Or the boy who cried wolf. Two more of Aesop’s fables. I bet you know what those two mean.

But what about the cock and the jewel above? To start to answer that, let me first share a quote with you from a book I’m reading about analogies, written by one John Pollack, and titled Shortcut:

“The degree to which an analogy is or is not ‘accurate’ in a given circumstance is irrelevant, it is the feelings and ideas they evoke that makes them so powerful.”

Fact is, we humans love stories and analogies and fables so much that we are really not too critical about them. We accept the implied meaning and we take it for granted.

Of course, that’s good news for persuaders, influencers, and manipulators of all stripes. As one magician of persuasion, Gary Bencivenga, wrote a while ago:

“This process of transferring the qualities of one thing into another takes place instantly, bypassing critical analysis and resistance. All you do is compare A to B in an effective way and voila! your point is made instantly without disagreement.”

There’s good science behind why this is so, but I won’t go into that now, because I am so concerned with the cock and the jewel.

What does this fable really mean?

The best I can do is to point you to an article titled “The Moral of the Story.”

It was written a couple years ago by an actual poet named Anthony Madrid. If the mention of poetry scares you, as it scares me, then I want you to take a deep breath and relax. Because Anthony Madrid’s articles are all easy to read and fun, and they are mind-opening if you’re interested in language.

​​So here’s “The Moral of the Story,” which explains the moral of the “Cock and the Jewel,” or rather, the half dozen contradictory morals that have been scratched up over the centuries:

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/11/21/the-moral-of-the-story/

Gratuitous fun to make readers beg for buttermilk

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For the first 20 or 30 years of my life, I had this serious mental defect where I couldn’t enjoy a good bangemup action movie.

“So unrealistic,” I snuffled. “So predictable.” That’s how I wasted decades of my life.

Thank God I’ve grown up. Because I just watched and enjoyed True Lies, James Cameron’s 1994 action comedy, starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as super spy/boring suburban dad Harry Tasker, and Jamie Lee Curtis as his stodgy/talented wife Helen.

The initial reason I watched True Lies was the following famous line, delivered by a used car salesman who’s trying to seduce Helen… and who is unwittingly confiding to Harry about it:

“And she’s got the most incredible body, too, and a pair of titties that make you wanna stand up and beg for buttermilk. Ass like a ten year old boy!”

Which modern Hollywood screenplay would dare have that?

But even beyond the risky dialogue, I was surprised by how fun this movie is. I guess that’s the only word to describe it. For example, as the movie goes on, you get to see:

– an old man sitting on a public toilet, calmly reading a newspaper, during the first shootout between Harry and the bad guy

– Harry riding a horse into an elevator, and an aristocratic couple in the elevator getting whipped in the face by the horse’s tail

– Tia Carrere (the evil seductress in the movie) rushing to grab her purse before the bad guys drop a box with a nuclear warhead onto it

– a pelican landing on a teetering van full of terrorists and sending it crashing off the bridge

– Harry saving the day flying a military jet, perfectly landing the plane, and then accidentally bumping a cop car

The point is that all these details are what I call “gratuitous fun.”

They weren’t in any way central to the action of the movie… and even the comedic part of the plot could have done without them.

They were just pure, unnecessary fun that made the movie sparkle a bit more. And I guess they helped it become the success that it was, netting almost $400 million in 1994 dollars.

I think the message is clear:

This year, surprise your readers with some gratuitous fun in your online content, in your sales messages, and even your one-to-one business communication. People love James Cameron’s movies. They will love your stuff, too. In fact, you’ll make them wanna stand up and beg for buttermilk. Whatever that means.

Machiavellian logic applied to your next sales letter

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“Because this is to be asserted in general of men, that they are ungrateful, fickle, false, cowardly, covetous, and as long as you succeed they are yours entirely; they will offer you their blood, property, life, and children, as is said above, when the need is far distant; but when it approaches they turn against you.”
– Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince

Direct response marketing doesn’t expose you to the most noble parts of the human soul.

Fear… greed… shame… vanity… these are the lowest common denominators we appeal to reliably in order to close the sale.

Sometimes it’s clear which of these appeals you have to go with — your offer or your market simply says so.

But what if you have a choice? Are some of these snarling, slobbering, psychological gremlins stronger than others?

Well, Niccolo Machiavelli, who would probably own many direct response businesses had he lived today instead of in the 16th century, has something to say about general human nature in his quote above.

Men are fickle and swayed by the present moment, says Machiavelli. In other words, just because someone starts, say, writing a book today, that doesn’t mean he will continue to work on it next week. And vice versa. Just because a man will suffer from a hangover tomorrow, that doesn’t mean he won’t drink tonight. So let’s take that as the first axiom of Machiavellian mathematics:

Present >>> Future

Moving on. Here’s a second Machiavelli quote:

“And men have less scruple in offending one who is beloved than one who is feared, for love is preserved by the link of obligation which, owing to the baseness of men, is broken at every opportunity for their advantage; but fear preserves you by a dread of punishment which never fails.”

What is Machiavelli saying here? Maybe I’m reading into it, but it sounds like he’s saying people are motivated more by negative emotions than by positive ones. Or in precise mathematical notation:

Pain >>> Gain

Of course, there are going to be exceptions to this. Some individuals and some markets will be immune to these nasty Machiavellian laws. After all, people volunteered to cross Antarctica by sled 100 years ago.

But don’t bet the house on it. Most of the time, if you’re in doubt, remember the two axioms above. And in particular, remember it will take an enormous amount of future gain to outweigh even a little bit of present pain.

A primate’s copywriting epiphany

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Many, many Aprils ago, I read a book titled A Primate’s Memoir. The author was one Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford biologist who studies baboons.

Based on the title, I assumed the book was going to be the made-up diary of a baboon. After reading the first 50 pages, I realized I was wrong. The book was not a made-up diary, but real, and the primate was not a baboon, but Sapolsky.

I’ve had a soft spot for Robert Sapolsky and his humor ever since, and I’ve continued to read his books. Right now, I’m also watching his excellent series of lectures on YouTube about evolution and behavior. And today, while watching these lectures, I learned something new to me:

95% of human DNA doesn’t code for any kind of protein. In other words, only 5% of DNA actually has any kind of productive output. The rest of our DNA — 95% of it — simply controls when that productive 5% of DNA gets turned on and how.

And now let me tell you a second story, this one about copywriting:

A few months back, I got hired to write an upsell VSL. There was already a control in place, which was doing ok, but the company wanted to see if I could do better.

“No problem,” I said to myself. “This control doesn’t really emphasize consistency or urgency, and it does very little to sell this particular solution.”

In short, I wrote the new VSL. And in spite of all my consistency, urgency, and selling, the new VSL did no better than the control.

But then the CEO of the company noticed a tiny detail. “We forgot to include the headline you sent us.”

Keep in mind, this was a VSL. People aren’t reading, they’re watching and listening. The headline was just a bit of copy above the video itself. I wasn’t hopeful it would make any kind of difference.

And yet, two days ago, I got an email from the CEO, letting me know that my headline + VSL are in fact beating the control by 50%. Which is definitely nice, especially since there are royalties in play here.

On the other hand, it makes me wonder what I’m doing with my time. I spent two weeks working on that VSL copy… and it had no effect on its own. It was only when that headline was included that the copy actually seemed to get activated.

You can see now why this made me think of Robert Sapolsky, and the 95% of DNA that does nothing but activate or deactivate the “payload” DNA.

As copywriters, we spend so much time agonizing over structure… sales arguments… consistency, urgency, and all the other Cialdini buzzwords…

And yet, 95% of the time, all that stuff doesn’t even get activated. The offer is a bust, or we chose the wrong headline, or there’s something wrong with the design, or we sent the promotion out a week too early or too late.

I’m not sure what my point is, except to share this epiphany with you, and reassure you that if your copy underperforms, it probably had nothing to do with the copy itself. (95% certainty at least.) And also, to advise you to put yourself in a position, as soon as you can, where you can run different pieces of copy frequently — more often than every few weeks, or God forbid, every few months.

Shutting the drawer on the Rule of One

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“One good idea, clearly and convincingly presented, was better than a dozen so-so ideas strung together. That rule made a difference. When we obeyed it, our essays were stronger. When we ignored it, they were not as powerful as they could have been.”
– Michael Masterson

I first read about the Rule of One in Michael Masterson and John Forde’s Great Leads. You get a feel for the rule in the quote above. In a nutshell:

Focus on one idea, one emotion, one problem — not a dozen.

I read Great Leads early in my copywriting education, and the Rule of One sank deep into the fresh soil of my newbie brain. I’ve been following this rule ever since. And here you are, reading what I write.

Only one problem though.

Even though Michael Masterson says his favorite essays and stories all follow the Rule of One, I can’t say the same. In fact, I can think of lots of great content that looks and reads like a grocery list:

– James Altucher’s post “11 or 12 Things I Learned About Life While Daytrading Millions of Dollars”

– Dan Ferrari’s email “35 direct response lessons from 35 years on Earth”

– The Every Frame a Painting video “Akira Kurosawa – Composing Movement” (which covers five ways that Kurosawa used movement in his shots)

But you might say, those are all examples of content, not sales copy. All right then, here’s a relevant quote from Gary Bencivenga about sales copy:

“I know this sounds like heresy, but I’d much rather have in a good direct mail package three or four or 10 good reasons to buy, than to have to sacrifice nine of them in favor of the one USP. The USP really can be misapplied to direct marketing where you have the luxury of closing the sale on the spot and can give one dominant reason to buy but also seven or eight other reasons. You don’t have to abide so religiously to a single Unique Selling Proposition.”

Maybe I’m simply misapplying the Rule of One, or maybe I don’t understand what it really says. And I do think there is value in focused writing.

But for me personally, I am moving the Rule of One from the “rule” drawer and into the “tool” drawer. Focusing on just one idea can be useful in a given situation… but it’s not something to obey blindly. Perhaps you’ll consider whether this makes sense for you too.

Anyways, if you’re interested in reading James Altucher’s post above or watching that Every Frame a Painting episode, both are easy to track down on the Internet.

Not so with the Dan Ferrari email. Dan doesn’t archive his emails anywhere. So if you want to get them when he sends them out, you’ll have to be on his list.

And even then, you might have to wait a while, because Dan emails very rarely. (I guess he’s too busy counting all the zeroes on his royalty checks.) But when he does send something out, it tends to be great, like the “35 lessons” email above. So if you want to sign up to Dan’s list so you don’t miss his next (sporadic) email, here’s where to go:

http://www.ferrarimedia.com/

Send the juices rushing back to your prospect’s manhood with a new diagnosis

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“You start with the pills, next thing you know you got implants with pumps. I think a hard-on should be gotten legitimately or not at all.”

That’s a bit of dialogue from 1999’s Analyze This.

Mafia boss Paul Vitti, played by Robert De Niro, is having problems. Hard-on failures are a part of it.

So he barges into the office of Dr. Ben Sobel, a New York shrink, played by Billy Crystal.

Vitti doesn’t know what’s wrong with him. All he knows is he gets choked up all the time, he cries without reason, he’s uncomfortable hanging out with the guys he’s grown up with. And then there’s the hard-on issue.

“Have you been under a lot of stress lately?” Dr. Sobel asks him.

“You mean like seeing your best friend murdered?” Vitti shoots back. “Yeah, I got stress.”

Dr. Sobel shrugs his shoulders and makes his first-level diagnosis: It’s probably the stress that’s causing all of Vitti’s symptoms.

Vitti visibly brightens at this. He smiles and points his finger at Dr. Sobel.

“You… YOU… you’re very good, doc,” he says. “You’re right on the money. I can feel the juices rushing back to my manhood as we speak.”

I rewatched this movie recently. It’s not very good overall, but I watched it specifically for this scene, because it’s a great (if caricatured) illustration of the power of making a new diagnosis.

And of course this goes for marketing too:

Your prospect out there has vague or intractable problems. All he knows is he doesn’t feel right. The symptoms he can point to are not something he understands, or can fix himself.

And then you, as the marketer, kindly sit him down on your couch, and you give him a diagnosis he’s never heard before:

“You’re under stress.”

Or…

“You’re a bright-shiny-object addict.”

Or…

“You have hypothyroidism.”

Once you make your new diagnosis, your prospect sees the fog lifted from before his eyes. For that moment at least, he lights up, and he thinks his problem has been solved, or at least can be solved. He feels the juices flowing back to his manhood… or womanhood.

More importantly, in that moment, he think you, YOU, are very good. And he’s willing to follow your lead, even as you explain how your product or service naturally addresses the underlying cause of his problems.

Of course, in Analyze This, the true underlying cause of Vitti’s problems turned out to be more complex than simple stress.

The same will probably happen in your prospect’s life. But if you do an honest enough job of delivering the diagnosis for the surface-level symptoms… and if your recommendation based on that diagnosis isn’t too self-serving… then your patient, I mean prospect, will still listen to you when you offer to solve the deeper problems in his life.

A planet where it rains dollars in the evenings

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There’s a planet out there called WASP-76b where it rains iron in the evenings.

(I’m not making this up.)

One side of WASP-76b always faces its star. This side is super hot — 2400 degrees Celsius — and iron melts there and rises into the air as vapor.

The other side of WASP-76b is always in the dark. It’s a balmy 1500 Celsius there.

In between the light side and the dark side, there’s a shadow area, or you might call it the evening area, where the iron vapor condenses and comes raining down.

Like I said, I didn’t make any of this up. Scientists reported it in a new paper published in Nature just a few days ago.

But what if I did make it up?

Well, I might be on to something profitable in that case.

Because as Ben Settle said in one of his recent emails, there’s a lot of value in “world building.” That’s what fantasy and sci-fi authors like JRR Tolkien and Frank Herbert do: They invent entire worlds or universes, including made up ecologies, histories, languages, mating rituals.

When done right, these made-up worlds have a coherence of their own… and they suck readers and fans in like magic.

Of course, maybe you’re not interested in writing a fantasy or sci-fi saga. Fear not.

World building also applies to marketing your stuff online.

Ben Settle is actually a good example of this, with his gooroos and Maynard trolls and conemtptible new product junkies — all characters who keep reappering in his emails.

But you know who’s even better at world building?

It’s somebody I call the “Ben Settle of Facebook.”

Much like Ben, this guy has a rabid audience that will pay outsized fees — $2k or $5k or more a month — just to sit at this guru’s feet and learn from him.

Much like Ben, he’s also a student of the classics of copywriting (Gary Bencivenga) and persuasion (Jim Camp).

The only difference is that, while Ben is abrasive and loves to mock and shame, this Facebook world-builder is all smiles and cuddles.

I’ve mentioned him many times in these emails, but in case you don’t know who I’m talking about, his name is Travis Sago.

Travis has a bunch of micro-groups on Facebook and each group is like a miniature part of a bigger story. Each group explains one aspect of Travis’s money-making mythology — things like tapping, the 30 year wealth shortcut, and the mini monopoly. It’s a masterclass in world building… and in making money rain down every evening.

But The Lord of the Rings is pretty lame if you hear me retell it. You have to read it for yourself. Same with Travis Sago. So if you want to see how he builds his worlds in all their detail and complexity, here’s the entry point into his orbit:

https://www.facebook.com/groups/milliondollaroffermojo/

Outrage with stupidity to milk info out of cagey or indifferent adversaries

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[Dear reader, in Hungary or elsewhere: In spite of saying I would quit it, I’m back posting my daily newsletters to this blog. I have two reasons. One, I never got going creating bigger articles out of these newsletters the way I planned. Two, I don’t want to kowtow to Google — they prefer fewer, longer articles — and I would rather write specifically for people like you. Thanks for reading. And now onto this inflammatory post:]

Two days ago, the president of the UFC, Dana White, got trolled into revealing a highly guarded secret. A bit of background:

The UFC hosts mixed martial arts fights, and on April 18 they were supposed to host the biggest and most anticipated fight in their history, between Khabib Nurmagomedov and Tony Ferguson. These two fighters are both on 12-fight win streaks in the UFC, and they were scheduled to fight four times already. Each time, the fight was cancelled at the last minute for some reason.

This time around, as sports organizations around the world cancelled events because of corona, my man Dana White refused to give in. “We’re going ahead with the fight!”

The only problem was they couldn’t figure out where to host it. It was originally supposed to be in Brooklyn, but that was now out. In fact, any other location in the US also became untenable.

“The fight is still on, guys!” White would repeat whenever asked, though he wouldn’t give any more details. So over the past month, speculation kept increasing. Fans were alternating between getting resigned to the inevitable fifth cancellation… and hyped when some new possible location for the fight surfaced. Meanwhile, even Tony and Khabib, the fighters who were supposed to be fighting on the 18th, didn’t know for sure if the fight was still on.

So that’s the background. The update from two days ago is that somebody created a fake Twitter account, mimicking a well-known MMA journalist, and tweeted:

“#BREAKING: Dana White and Vladimir Putin have reached an agreement on travel arrangements for UFC Lightweight Champion Khabib Nurmagomedov to come to the United States. He will fight Tony Ferguson. It’s happening folks. #UFC249 will go on as scheduled April 18.”

To which Dana White, big goof that he is, immediately blasted out a Tweet saying that it ain’t so, that Khabib is not fighting on April 18, and then to prove it, he finally revealed the whole card that’s scheduled for this corona-infested bout.

Which brings us to the present day, and something called Cunningham’s law:

“The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

The sad fact is that in business, in love, and on online forums, there are many times when people are unwilling to answer your questions. Maybe the person you’re talking to is indifferent, or cagey, or hurt, or they just don’t like the implied power dynamics that come with you asking and them answering.

So if you ever find yourself in this situation, swallow your pride, and publicly make a dumb, completely wrong assumption about the right answer. If Cunningham is right, and I suspect he’s at least a little bit right, then an outraged somebody will jump in and say, “No! You’re so wrong! Let me tell you how it really is…”

But I think this Cunningham and his law go even farther. If you just swap out “right answer” and you swap in “response,” you get a good recipe for how to get yourself publicity and an audience online.

Of course, unless you want to be just a troll, you’ll have to figure out a reasonable argument to justify a seemingly “wrong” opinion that you use to attract attention. But it can be done, and guys like Matt Stone and Ben Settle prove it. Outrage and reason are a powerful combination. Aloe vera on its own is pretty bland and slimy, but it sure feels good once you burn your hand on the stove.