- The marketing campaign was a blinder. The Ning site for the first 3000 people to sign up to the book - which was a bit of mess and kinda lost my attention but still a brave experiment.
- Sending you two copies of the book for the price of one to those 3000. One to give away. A nice(ish) gesture. It wasn't like it was ice cream or anything but that doesn't travel so well. But a fantastic idea in terms of spreading the word.
- Giving the audio book away for free. Some people bitched about this but so what? It's free!!! And it's different to the book so that's fine.
Now let's get to the actual book. SG writes cool, buzzy sentences. Even his paragraphs are quite good. Things start to unravel at the chapter level and the final result is not really a book as many traditionally might think of it. There is no line of argument rather there's a rant that riffs around tribes and leadership with lots of case studies - a statistically improbable number of which are based in New York restaurants. I'm not finished yet but I'm getting a similar feeling to reading "Purple Cow" last year. There is an idea here but it feels more like a talk thats been worked up (really worked up) into a short bookette. I suspect the audio book would actually be better because then you might lose yourself in the momentum of the SG verbiage. Maybe he should charge for the audio book and give the paper one away for free.
I don't think that SG was always like this as a writer - I mean Permission Marketing felt like a, you know, proper book. Or are proper books, like, soooo 20th century? Plus the prose has a bit of a Tony "Awaken the Giant Within" Robbins feel to it. Is there going to be a 5-day, 5-figure seminar series off the back of this?
As for the idea? That (informal) tribes are more important than formal organisations? That leadership comes from all over the place? It's not a bad idea by any means and there are parts that I absolutely agree with. But it didn't feel that new to me. Maybe it's "Here Comes Everybody" if you have ADHD.
So Seth Godin. Genius marketer. Good blogger. Book writer? Not so much anymore...
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2 comments:
I felt exactly the same way as you after reading "Predictably Irrational".
By the way, have you noticed that just about every non-fiction book in the "amazing new concept" now does this?
Essentially, they take one cool/nifty idea that you can write down on the back of a postcard, and then pad it out to a book of 300 pages by selectively citing a dozen or so cases that support their idea. Oh, and don't forget to use large-ish fonts and even larger spacing.
Personally, I'm getting quite sick of it.
I blame "Chaos" by James Gleick for starting this trend. But his book at least covered some genuine scientific research and more than one topic.
Whereas if you just read the first chapter of most of these books, you won't miss out on a thing. Even the conclusion is just a re-statement of the premise stated on page 1.
In the old days, if you wanted a coffee-table book, you'd buy something with pretty pictures. Now, apparently the thing to see is buy whatever book has the latest "meme" and let people know you're intelLECTual :-/
-- Stephen.
Stephen
I think you're being a bit unfair to 'Predictably Irrational' - Dan Ariely has actually done lots of experimental work in behavioural economics that he included in the book.
Are there any books that you feel buck this trend?
Cheers
Matt
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