Bestseller Interviews

Why do some ideas thrive and others die?

This is the question that brothers Chip and Dan Heath set out to answer in Made to Stick. After reading the book in one weekend (it’s a page turner!), I managed to catch up with Dan and ask him some questions about sticky ideas and how to make your book more memorable.

Sidenote: Made to Stick embodies what it teaches. It’s now a New York Times Bestseller. 

1) Why are people talking about some books for hundreds of years, and others are forgotten before they hit the shelves?

There is nothing in Made to Stick that would explain why Shakespeare is revered more than Sophocles, for instance.  And there are lots of books that endure for centuries despite being horribly unpleasant to read—particularly in the sciences.  I suppose that if you figure out how gravity works, no one demands that you be a master communicator, eh?  All that said, I think you can see patterns in long-lasting books that echo the principles of stickiness in our books.  Think of the Bible and its wealth of parables and stories.  Or Aesop’s fables and the way they take profound moral lessons and make them amazingly concrete (“The Boy Who Cried Wolf”).  Or Oedipus and its nasty surprise.  Bottom line: Stickiness is a factor in longevity, no question, but it’s certainly not the only factor.  Luck matters, art matters, the power of the underlying idea matters.

2) What is a book concept? Sounds boring and unimportant.

To me a book concept is the publishing equivalent of a Hollywood high-concept pitch (e.g., the movie Speed was pitched as “Die Hard on a Bus”).  It should communicate the core idea of the book in as snappy a manner as possible.  Hollywood high-concept pitches do a great job of this.  Alien was “Jaws on a spaceship.”  Book concepts tend to be more complicated—authors bristle at the idea that their books can be summarized in a phrase.  As a tangent, a bizarre hobby of mine is to analyze the flap copy in books.  Note that flap copy is quite different from the book concept—the concept is created before the text and the flap copy afterwards.  (Though a wise author would synch up the two.)  What I’ve found is that there are lots of brilliant books—for instance Oliver Sacks’ The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Paco Underhill’s Why We Buy—that have really uninteresting flap copy. The typical language of flap copy—e.g., salesy, adjective-stuffed summaries—is just the antithesis of stickiness.  You know the type:  “In this fascinating whirlwind tour of real estate financing, the estimable authority James Booker provides a thought-provoking and humorous summary of finding and buying your dream home.” 

3) Should I focus on one simple concept, or should I try and write the Bible for my industry?

Simple concepts become Bibles.  Think of the Tipping Point or Good to Great or How To Win Friends and Influence People.  None of these books are, or want to be, encyclopedic in their domains.  Their “narrow” focus is their strength.

4) Are gimmicks like shipping your book in a milk carton (Purple Cow) or tactfully using profanity (The No Asshole Rule) magical tickets to bestsellerdom?

I think it’s wrong to say those are gimmicks.  They are perfect examples of sticky communication.  The Purple Cow isn’t a gimmick any more than a Black Swan is a gimmick.  (The milk carton is gimmicky, but fun, and I’d draw a bright line between the carton itself and the underlying “Purple Cow” concept.)  The Cow and the Swan are concrete symbols of profound concepts—the purple cow symbolizes the remarkable, and the black swan symbolizes the unexpected, low-probability event.  And that’s what authors should do. They should surface the concrete images that represent their insights—images that will cling to memory long after their 250 pages of prose have faded.  And Bob Sutton was incredibly brave to use the word “Asshole” in the title.  Trust me, this wasn’t some easy-money gimmick.  He ran a serious risk of sabotaging his distribution and his publicity.  (You think Good Morning America is going to talk about “assholes”?  Or that Wal-Mart is keen to stock a title like that?)  The title is unexpected (a trait of stickiness) in its bluntness.  It says, hey folks, let’s call a spade a spade.  We know what an asshole is.  An asshole is not a “jerk” or a “meanie” or a “prickly pear” or any of the ridiculous waterered-down substitutes the publishers probably prayed for. An asshole is an asshole.  I love that he made that choice, and the fact that the gamble paid off was in no way a predictable outcome.

5) Should I regale readers with personal stories or stick with the facts?

Stories are alternate vessels for facts.  If you want to talk about the harms of the health care system, and you want your argument to stick, you need to embrace the power of stories.  You need to talk about families who suffered because of the absurdities of the system.  The stories you tell are factual, and they encode larger truths about the health care system, but they remove the abstraction of disembodied facts.  For another example, look at the Jared campaign run by Subway.  It was a phenomenal success—the guy was on Oprah within a week of the launch, for God’s sake.  What many people have forgotten is that, before Jared, Subway ran a campaign called “7 under 6”.  I.e., 7 sandwiches under 6 grams of fat.  Notice that this is precisely the same message as the Jared campaign.  But it didn’t move the needle.  This was a head-to-head matchup between facts and stories, and stories kicked facts’ ass.  (Or should it be asses?  Not sure if all facts would share an ass or if each fact would have its own.) 

6) My book makes people cry. Is that a good thing?

It’s a good thing in terms of its stickiness.  It means you’ve made the reader care.  But maybe a more appropriate question would be, should you be making people cry?  Were your intentions manipulative or sincere?  This is a reminder that something’s “stickiness” does not speak to its admirability or truthfulness—urban legends are proof of that.  Everyone knows the idea that “You only use 10% of your brain”—it’s an idea that stuck—but it’s a a dumb, false idea.  Or take the book The Secret.  (Concept: Tony Robbins meets Good Vibrations)  It’s a preposterous, sleazy book that will sell a million copies (or two or three).  So, bottom line, many undeserving ideas stick.  

7) Which is more important for building credibility with publishers and readers: experience and accolades or actually knowing what you’re talking about?

No clear answer.  People would read hogwash about leadership if it came from someone of the stature of Jack Welch or Rudy Giuliani (not to imply that their books are hogwash, but it wouldn’t matter if they were).  But they’ll also read “leadership fables” from people who have never had an employee.  It goes both ways.  Credibility can come from authority or from the quality of the ideas themselves.  In our book, we naturally focus on the latter—how can an idea carry its own “badge of credibility”?  One idea we discuss is the “testable credential,” which is a technique that allows the audience to try before it buys, so to speak.  For example, think of Ronald Reagan’s famous question in the 1980 presidential debate: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”  Rather than argue the economy is in a sorry state, using stats and figures and charts, he simply outsourced the idea’s credibility to the audience.  “Is the economy working for you or not?”  That’s a nice technique for folding credibility into an idea.

8) My book is highly theoretical. What can I do to make it more concrete?

It is inexcusable for any business book to be “highly theoretical.”  Because business is not highly theoretical.  Businesses clothe people and cure people and exploit people and give money to employees and move things from city to city and spark communication between strangers.  Those things are real.  Ultimately, any strategy or marketing scheme or financial plan must manifest itself in the specific actions of specific people.  So talk about those people and those actions.  It’s crazy not to—you are creating your own obscurity if you stay at the theoretical level.  Here are some tactics for forcing yourself to be more concrete: (1) Imagine a teenager who continually asks you, “So what?”  after every paragraph you write.  (2) Imagine that your best friend, someone who is sympathetic but won’t accept your word as gospel, keeps asking, “Give me an example.”  (3) Reread your last few pages and eliminate any passages that lack sensory images, passages that can’t be visualized.  (4) Avoid making conceptual arguments that you don’t have specific anecdotes, stories, or details to back up.

9) Okay, I’ve got 10 minutes on Oprah (I wish)! Any final words on what I can do to increase my chances of people remembering me and my book?

Don’t worry, if you’re on Oprah, you’re all set.  You could slobber uncontrollably or speak Urdu and you’d still move 100,000 books.  But if you also manage to sprinkle in some of the concepts of stickiness—telling stories, using concrete language, seizing the power of surprise, staying simple—then bully for you.

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