A plethora of posts
And I read this on Creating Passionate Users:
LESS EGO
Most of you already know our mantra on this -- "Users don't care about YOU--they care about themselves in relation to what you offer." It's simply not about you. My co-authors and I believe--quite literally--that our "secret sauce" for why our books have been so successful is because we work very hard to take our ego out of the books. We are not 100% successful (we're human), but it is our number one priority to try. (One of the ways this shows up is in the number of topics we choose to leave OUT. Our job is to help you learn, not show you how smart we are.)
We believe that if we write these with the intention of what readers will think about us, then we probably aren't doing the learner any favors. We do not write so that people will say, "Wow, these authors sure know their stuff." We want people to say, "Wow, I know Design Patterns now." We did a very detailed analysis of several hundred Amazon reviews of our books against our closest competitors, and discovered dramatic differences in the language used in the reviews. The most important benchmark we were looking for is that our readers would use first-person language. In other words, we want our readers to talk less about us, and more about themselves. We are delighted if someone says, "these guys are really tacky and could seriously use some writing skills, but I actually LEARNED something."
It's often a conflict of interest to write a book (or blog) meant to teach or inspire, with the goal of furthering your own reputation. What's good for your reputation (i.e. demonstrating your deep command of the topic) may be dead wrong for the readers. And this is true for just about anything--are people listening to music to be impressed with the artist, or for how the music makes them feel? Are they eating at a restaurant to be impressed with the chef, or because of how the experience of eating there makes them feel? Are they buying a Mac to be impressed with Apple, or because of how it feels for them to use their Mac?
Hmm, I'll definitely keep that in mind when blogging from now on.
LESS EGO
Most of you already know our mantra on this -- "Users don't care about YOU--they care about themselves in relation to what you offer." It's simply not about you. My co-authors and I believe--quite literally--that our "secret sauce" for why our books have been so successful is because we work very hard to take our ego out of the books. We are not 100% successful (we're human), but it is our number one priority to try. (One of the ways this shows up is in the number of topics we choose to leave OUT. Our job is to help you learn, not show you how smart we are.)
We believe that if we write these with the intention of what readers will think about us, then we probably aren't doing the learner any favors. We do not write so that people will say, "Wow, these authors sure know their stuff." We want people to say, "Wow, I know Design Patterns now." We did a very detailed analysis of several hundred Amazon reviews of our books against our closest competitors, and discovered dramatic differences in the language used in the reviews. The most important benchmark we were looking for is that our readers would use first-person language. In other words, we want our readers to talk less about us, and more about themselves. We are delighted if someone says, "these guys are really tacky and could seriously use some writing skills, but I actually LEARNED something."
It's often a conflict of interest to write a book (or blog) meant to teach or inspire, with the goal of furthering your own reputation. What's good for your reputation (i.e. demonstrating your deep command of the topic) may be dead wrong for the readers. And this is true for just about anything--are people listening to music to be impressed with the artist, or for how the music makes them feel? Are they eating at a restaurant to be impressed with the chef, or because of how the experience of eating there makes them feel? Are they buying a Mac to be impressed with Apple, or because of how it feels for them to use their Mac?
Hmm, I'll definitely keep that in mind when blogging from now on.
posted by Ben at 1:15 PM
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