Month: September 2011

I have an author buddy
who is a habitual trend follower.
She writes whatever folks are buying.
She does okay sales-wise,
usually catching the tail-end of a trend,
but after almost a decade in publishing
and a lot of time spent watching trends,
she doesn’t have her own readership.

It is really challenging to build
a business
by reacting.

As Jim Collins explains

“The leaders who built
enduring great companies
showed a creative inside-out approach
rather than a reactive outside-in approach.
In contrast,
the mediocre company leaders
displayed a pattern of lurching and thrashing,
running about in frantic reaction
to threats and opportunities.”

Focus on YOUR business first.

When I worked
with the big beverage company
in product development,
we had a focus group on packaging.

All of the participants we asked
liked a certain package better.
They couldn’t tell us why
but they did.

The only difference
between that package
and another one
was the package everyone liked
had a drop of juice on the slice of orange.
No one consciously knew
the drop was there,
but they all KNEW
it was a better package.

Under one of my pen names,
I write what seems like
very basic stories.
They aren’t.
I layer every story with symbolism
and deeper meanings.

No one picks up on
this symbolism consciously,
yet they talk about my stories
being “full” and “better.”

The little details you add
to your products
may be invisible to the consumer
but consumers WILL pick up
on them.

Add the invisible.

CNNMoney has a great article on
Jim Skinner, CEO of McDonald’s
(for product developers,
the info on product development time
is GOLD).

What is really interesting
is how FAST
is a key component
of the fast food industry.

“At one time the company floated
the idea of putting deli sandwiches
on the menu.
The deal killer?
The crew couldn’t get it done
in 55 to 60 seconds.

“We talk about hospitality,
we talk about friendly relationships,
but we live in a world of speed today,”
Skinner says.

McDonald’s customers
at the drive-through
don’t want to be chatted with,
and they don’t want to wait
two minutes for a turkey sandwich.”

Yeah, a minute is too long
to prepare a sandwich
at McDonald’s
so if you think your viewer
will wait a minute
for your website to load,
think again.

The need for speed
is very, very real.

The first story I ever wrote
was 150,000 words.
It was crap.
Just because it was longer
than most stories
didn’t make it
any less craptastic.

If I wrote that story today,
other writers would be pushing me
to self publish that big turd.
I’ve heard the arguments.
“It is long.
Some reader will get something out of it.”
Right.
Because 150,000 crappy words
is better than 1 crappy word.

A loved one brought me
a package of laundry detergent.
It was a ‘bargain’
he said
because it was bigger
than the other packages.
It was more.

This detergent left residue
on our clothes
so now I have more
of a crappy detergent.

Yes,
we, product developers,
hate admitting
to developing a stinker product.

It pained me to shelf
that 150,000 word story.

But offering the prospect
more
of that crappy product
isn’t the solution.

I’ve been hearing
a lot of bellyaching in the media
about how consumers aren’t spending,
how no one is buying anything.

That’s bullshit.

I was in a Target yesterday.
An entire corner of the store
was dedicated to school supplies.
It was picked cleaned,
and disappointed parents circled
the area with empty carts,
looking for the products their kids needed.

People are buying things.
They’re buying milk and eggs
and school supplies
and back to school clothes.
Kids are going off to college
with empty dorm rooms needing furnishings.

They may not, however, be buying
YOUR product.

Recessions happen.
They will continue to happen.
Great businesswomen plan for them
to happen.
They don’t use them as an excuse.

In writing, we often ask the question
“How big is the world?”
The size of the setting we create
and the restrictions we place upon it
will determine what stories we can tell.
If no paranormal creatures exist in the world,
we can’t write about vampires or werewolves.

I currently am writing a series with five men
trapped on a tropical island.
I know, at the maximum,
there will be five romances
(as each man finds his significant other).
If these stories do really well,
I’d have to break my self-imposed rules
to extend the series
(and readers REALLY get ticked
when writers do that).

Michael Godard paints olives.
If he painted olives simply being olives,
his world would have been very, very small.
He would have only produced
a couple of paintings,
and then been forced to move onto
his next big idea.

Instead, he paints olives in rock and roll settings.
Boom.
His world expanded.
He gives the olives human characteristics.
Boom.
His world is massive.

So why limit worlds at all?
Why not allow everything?

It comes down to branding.
A world that tries to appeal to everyone,
appeals to no one.

So when developing products,
make your world big
but not too big.