Henning Nelms Archives

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been running Amazon ads for my new 10 Commandments book.

One ad campaign is “automatic targeting,” where Amazon simply tries to put my book in front of shoppers on its other pages. The ad reporting shows me which of these other pages resulted in clicks and sales for my book.

I’ve also been heavily promoting my new 10 Commandments book to my own list. Since I’m using an Amazon affiliate link (this is apparently against Amazon policies, but I love to live dangerous), I can see some of the other stuff that people who clicked on my affiliate link also bought.

If you just felt a chill rush up your back, as though you’ve been stripped naked in public, calm down. I cannot tell who specifically is buying anything, only that some people who bought my new 10 Commandments book (hundreds so far) or who clicked on my affiliate link (thousands) were also in the market for other things.

As you can guess, people who ended up buying my book were also in the market for dozens of ordinary, everyday purchases such as computer cables and supplement gummies and of course a “4.4 inch fixed-blade SEAX knife with a sheepsfoot blade.”

My readers were also in the market for a bunch of books that are in some way related to my own book, such as Jim Camp’s Start With No and Henning Nelms’s Magic and Showmanship — both of which I reference in my book — as well as Made to Stick, which is one of my go-to books for effective communication.

So far, so milquetoast. But then, my readers bought some quirky things I would not have expected or even known about had I not done this Amazon sleuthing. The top 3:

#1: How To Be The Jerk Women Love — a 1991 guide to picking up women by acting the jerk, written by “F.J. Shark.” A 5-star Amazon review by a shopper who goes by “The King of Jerks”:

“Some women made fun of me for praising this book. The laugh is on them. It ended up they were dumped by bigger jerks than me. What goes around comes around.”

#2: What is Wrong with Men — a feminist social critique, I guess written in reaction to F.J. Shark’s book and its positive reviews. “What is Wrong with Men” was only published a few days ago and doesn’t have any positive Amazon reviews yet, but the NY Times called it a “kind of road map for the current masculinity crisis. Reeled me in, like Absolut and cranberry. What a pairing!”

#3, and most intriguingly: Grade 23 Titanium Externally Threaded Nipple Bar Barbell Rings. For those who are too busy living life to worry either about acting the jerk or the jerks in their lives.

I’m telling you all this as a little hack so you can safely, legally, and ethically peek into the private shopping carts of your customers.

Amazon is the world’s biggest online marketplace. An estimated 64,000 metric tons of stuff pass through their warehouses every day. I just gave you a couple of ways to see what some of that stuff is, so you can adjust what and how you sell to your audience.

If you’d like to contribute to that data (don’t worry, it’s all anonymized), or more importantly, if you’d like to read my new 10 Commandments book — about effective communication, and magic and showmanship, and one secret negotiating trick of Jim Camp that he did not reveal in Start With No — then here is my Amazon affiliate link, ready to serve you:

https://bejakovic.com/new10commandments

Last night, I went to the movies. By myself. At 10pm, which is pretty much my bedtime.

First came one trailer — some Iraq war thriller with Matt Damon as a solider yelling at other soldiers and lots of explosions and jets swooping in and rapid-fire editing between more yelling and explosions and gunfire.

Then came another trailer — a horror movie about vampires in the deep south, with bloody mouths and fangs and a vampire banging his head on the door of a wood cabin, asking to be let in, while the non-vampires inside cower and transfer their fear to the audience.

And then, after about six total minutes of this adrenaline-pumping overstimulation, the screen got dark. A Bach piece on organ started playing and a barebones title card showed the name of the movie:

Солярис

… or Solaris, if you can’t read that. A three-hour-long science fiction movie from 1972. In Russian, which I don’t speak. With Spanish subtitles, which I can barely read before they disappear. The movie opens up with a five-minute sequence of a man walking next to a lake, without any dialogue.

I’ve seen Solaris twice before, years ago. A few days ago, I finished reading the science fiction novel on which it’s based. When I saw it was playing at the local old-timey movie theater, I decided I would violate my usual bedtime and go see it again, and on the big screen.

I’m not trying to sell you on Solaris. All I really want to highlight is the contrast that was so obvious between those new Hollywood trailers and the start of the 1972 Russian movie. It reminded me of something I read in William Goldman’s Adventures In The Screen Trade:

“In narrative writing of any sort, you must eventually seduce your audience. But seduce doesn’t mean rape.”

Goldman was writing in a different era. He was contrasting movie writing to TV writing.

At the beginning of a movie, Goldman said, you have some time. You can seduce. Things are different in TV land — you gotta be aggressive, right in the first few seconds. Otherwise the viewer will simply change the channel.

Things have changed since Goldman wrote the above. Today, all Hollywood movies have become like TV. That doesn’t eliminate the fact that different formats allow you to do different things, and that not every movie needs to start with a heart-pounding sequence of bloody vampires banging their heads on the door.

The bigger point is, just because you know a trick, this doesn’t require you to use it at every damn opportunity. Holding back can in fact can make the show better.

A year ago, I read a book titled Magic And Showmanship, about… magic and showmanship. The author of that book, a magician named Henning Nelms, kept coming back to a principle he called conservation.

Conservation is keeping from overselling what you’ve got, and from making yourself out to be more skilled or powerful than absolutely necessary for the effect in question.

It’s a lesson that can apply to a lot of showmanship, including showmanship in print.

Anyways, I suspect nobody will take me up on a recommendation to read Nelms’s Magic And Showmanship, but recommend it I will. In order to sell it to you, I can only say that last year, I was even thinking of taking the ideas from this book and turning them into a full-blown course or training about running email promos, because I found the ideas so transferable.

In case you’re a curious type, or in case you simply want new ideas for running email promos:

https://bejakovic.com/nelms