Steve Jobs showed me WHERE WE'VE GONE WRONG

WHERE WE'VE GONE WRONG.

It started with the news :

Steve Jobs is dead.

He revolutionized our society by never letting go of his dream, thinking outside the box, and not letting what he didn't have (like a college degree) stop him from utilizing to the max what he did have ...

imagination and the ability to see the bigger picture (And we have Pixar Pictures because of that)

Also he took set-backs on the chin, using them to make himself better. (Fired from his own company, Steve Jobs was asked to come back 12 years later to raise the company from the dead.

And we have the iPod, iTunes, iPhone, and now the iPad because he could see where the path NEEDED TO GO, not where everyone said IT HAD ALWAYS GONE.)

He made a true difference in his personal and professional life.

Then, I had an epiphany ...

you know --

what Victor Standish calls the strange sensation

the donkey got when the 2 X 4 smacked him in the head.

The epiphany?

We, as authors, have been going where everyone said writers have always gone :

WE'VE BEEN SINGING TO THE CHOIR.

We have marginalized ourselves. Worse, we've been blind to it.

We're writers posting to other writers, hoping they'll buy our books and tell other ... guess who?

that's right! Other writers.

Yes, they should be PART of our audience.

NOT ALL OF IT!

If we do that, we will never sell enough copies to be any more than a ripple in the ever-shrinking pond of readers.

READERS!

I can hear Robin Williams as the voice of Genie in ALADIN, "Yes! The boy can learn!"

READERS, all of them, are our target audience.

"Duh!" you go.

Yes, it's obvious ... but we have still been insisting on mostly just writing for authors.

True, authors read a lot. But the MAJORITY OF READERS are NOT authors.

We need to write UNIVERSAL posts that speak to the heart of each person who reads our prose.

AMUSE the readers.

Make them THINK.

Make them go :

"Ain't that the truth!"

or

"I never thought of it that way."

or

"I'm not alone."

If we are perceptive enough, funny enough, honest-to-life enough,

provocative enough --

the readers will come back to our blog for more of the same.

So how do you appeal to the non-writer, not turning them off with a "BUY ME!" plea

while still interesting them in picking up a book from you?

Tune in SATURDAY for

"EVERTHING I NEEDED TO KNOW ABOUT LIFE I CAUGHT HELL LEARNING!"
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