In class today, Evan Adams summarized the three core lessons he discussed from his last lecture, but I want to focus on selling the simple. In this practice, Adams recommends listing three great ideas for a product and then cutting #2 and #3. The reason this is important is that no one understands our products better than ourselves. Yet because of this, we are often prone to give way more information than is necessary and sometimes even fail to realize the most important parts of our product that need to be communicated. Sometimes in order to best sell our product or business, we need to simplify our product to the bare essentials for both the ease of our presentation and for the efficiency of communication with the prospect or client.
This is especially true for novelists. Authors can sometimes be the worst people at selling their own books because they’ve spent more time in that world than anyone else and often go way too overboard in describing the plot, characters, and setting of the book. In some cases, this can overwhelm my readers who otherwise need a simple and straightforward summary to get them hooked. Practicing your elevator pitch is something a lot of literary agents recommend in preparation for meeting editors so that you have something short and catchy to sell them, but this also seems to connect really well with selling the simple. This can be the case for any product or business and entrepreneurs would do well to not only do this with their own ideas but to ask friends to help tell them what they see as the essentials of their own services!
BoweryJE22
Selling the simple is extremely important. Like you said, a lot of times we will try to give way too much information because that what we know but most people won’t understand that. It can also come off as sounding arrogant and even degrading to the customer and force them away. It is always important to simplify things so that everyone can understand it.