Perennial Seller summary

There are loads of people who say they’d like to play professional football. Why do they want to do this? Many believe that “it would be fun.” But that kind of flabby rationale really isn’t enough to fuel success. It's not concrete, and it's not going to lead to the kind of motivation that produces actual results.

The same holds true with creative work. A strong sense of purpose is the surest way to success.

Somewhat paradoxically, there’s more to being creative than creativity alone. Novelists don’t get published by simply jotting down a masterpiece and mailing it off to some grateful publisher.

It’s not that simple.

You might think that if your product is close to being finished, you can relax a little more. Well, banish the thought. As you near the finish line, you should get more obsessive still by testing and improving your creation.

In fact, for your work to be successful, you'll have to test and rework it over and over.

It’s easy to feel swamped by the amount of culture and art out there. As a creative person, you may feel intimidated and daunted. How exactly are you supposed to make yourself stand out from the crowd?

The answer is marketing. But remember: this requires hard work and independent effort. You can’t rely on others to do the work for you.

If the bad news about marketing is that you always have to start from a position of audience ignorance, then the good news is that there are plenty of strategies to spread the word.

In fact, sometimes the most creative approaches are the most successful. There are no hard-and-fast rules when it comes to marketing, as author Steven Pressfield well knows.

Once you’ve put your product out, the temptation is to feel that you’ll be forever defined by this one achievement.

But if you want continued success you’ll have to develop your presence in the public eye, independent of any one single creation.

Imagine that one day, on a whim, the media and the industry lose interest in your work and decide to blackball you.

Until recently, you couldn’t really have done much to combat such a turn of events. But now you can.