When we create information, we tend to think of a single book, a single article—and may I say—a single podcast.
That system works fine, but there's a method that is far superior. It's called a series. Here's why a series works so much better and how to go about creating a series of series.
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Note: (This is an unedited transcript)
You know that ringtone. Of course you do.
That's the sound of the Nokia. That was the first mobile phone I ever had. And it was special to me because my friend and fellow cartoonist, Wayne Logue, bought it for me when I got to New Zealand.
When we moved to New Zealand in the year 2000, I didn't know what to expect. We'd never been to the country, we knew nobody but Wayne. And even that relationship was a bit tenuous.
I only knew Wayne through a forum, which was online, and that's how we got talking. I didn't know where the way was the serial killer and he didn't know if I was truly arriving in New Zealand.
But he did something very special.
He bought a bag full of goodies. Everything it was New Zealand, Marmite, Red Sox, all the kind of things that you would think of as very keywee and they were all in this laundry basket.
He convinced the landlord to rent a place out and suggested that we would pay him when we got here. And then when he met me at the airport, he gave me this phone, the Nokia.
The moment I stepped into New Zealand, I had a phone with the number I have to this day. But I don't have the Nokia. I have the number, but not the Nokia.
And in this strange episode, is the story of why you have to have a series, why it's crucial to have that series. You want to know more, don't you. Of course you do.
Let's find out.
Part 1: Back in 1987 to brothers, John and Thomas Noel decided that they wanted to create a program.
Which they could display gray scale images, and Thomas Noel called it display. But he knew it was a crappy name, so he wanted to change it, but every time he tried to find a new name, like image pro or photo hat. Well those names were taken.
They didn't think much of the software they thought they'd sell a few hundred copies. But here we are in 2024. In version 25.6 if I'm not mistaken.
Yes we're talking about Photoshop and what it's Photoshop but a series.
We all know what series are but the beauty of series is that once you get hooked on to one version of it, you want the second and the third and the fourth.
In technology terms, it's called an upgrade. But this application, the concept of how to use series, is very crucial when you're writing something or when you're creating something for your business or the self-declines.
And so, in this first part, we'll briefly look at what is the series, you know the answer already, but just for the heck of it, let's find out what's the series.
If you listen to most parents today, they'll tell you that the kids don't read. And that's not true. One of my nieces, Marsha has read the entire Harry Potter series. And the other niece, Kiera, also, read all the Harry Potter series.
So, it's not that kids don't read.
It's that whatever they have to read has to be interesting. But secondly, in probably hidden, he's this concept of a series. And they're reading Harry Potter, but when I went to school, I was reading Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew.
We're a huge school library, But within every classroom there was also a mini-dibory. It was a cupboard full of books and it was a lending library. My teacher got sick of me because I would want a new book every single day.
I would read the book as I left school and then I walked through the bus stop. And the reason why I was enamored with these books was because it was a series.
I wanted to find out what would happen the next time and the next time and the time after that. We are so obsessed with creating one article, one book, one course, that we don't realize the magic of the series.
Well, we do. We have experienced it. We binge watch, binge read, binge everything, and yet we don't think of the series much if at all. So the first part of this podcast is just to bring your attention to the fact that we all love a series and clients like you and they also love a series.
So it's pretty clear that we all like series, but then we have to look at what are the types of series. What are the types of series that we could create that not only gets the client's attention, but also keeps us completely in the game.
We are on top of things and we don't have to think all the time. What are we going to do next. What are we going to do next. Because the series determines what you're going to do next.
Part 2: About nine years ago, a client insisted I write a book that would help him increase his prices.
On this request confused me a lot because I had written so many articles on pricing. I didn't know what new thing I was going to add to the mix. And so I went back to the client and pointed out that, hey, I've already done all of this stuff and it's all over the place and he said, that's the whole point.
It's all over the place. And I would like to see it in one place and possibly as part of a system. And you know what. He was right. Because when I went back and I started to write a book, which I called “Doubtboard Pricing,” it turned out to be three whole books.
The first book was just the psychology of pricing, which is why do you go about increasing prices, how the pricing model works specifically for your business, for your product, for your service, and why there are these three invisible gorillas place in how most of us just ignore it and be content-ignored when we're increasing prices.
And reading all these points seems like a sales pitch all by itself, but to put it in a nutshell there were three books.
And now we're closing in on the tenth year in those books continue to sell. Why?
Because there are series. People read one book then they want to continue the second and then they keep going to the third and who knows if there were a fourth book, maybe that's how it would work.
If you think there was a flow kid wasn't because when you look at the storytelling series you see the same thing, book one, book two, book three. They're easier to consume to begin with because when you face the book of 200 pages, that's a lot to consume.
So even by virtue of reducing the size, people get to the end and getting to the end is So crucial because it gives you satisfaction and it's like having a little check mark.
You've done it. You've got to the end. And while not all of us are going to write books, some of us are going to write articles or mini articles and some of us will make videos or speeches or whatever it is that you're doing because there's always a way to make a series.
For instance, if we go to YouTube, what do we see. We see random videos one after the other and then somebody decides, “No, no, no, no, wait a second. There is a system here and they make a little playlist.” But you as the creator can do that as well.
Stage one, stage two, stage three. And of course, if it's interesting, Harry Potter style, people are going to follow right through whole sequence.
And you could do this with articles as well. We had a series called Podcasting 101, which is how to start a podcast. A tiny time-saving secret when starting up an interview podcast. Incredibly good reasons to start with an interview podcast.
And also, when you go into 5,000 BC and you look at all of the earlier articles, there was Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. If you're writing for LinkedIn, if you're writing for any place, whether it's a newsletter or a physical document, people love series.
And as I said, it's much easier to create a series than you'd believe.
You don't have to think of the next topic because it kind of flows in from one to the other. Which means that the next time you're creating content with that video, audio, text, or making the lot of the rings, think of it as part one, part two, part three.
And it could go to part 10 or part 12. And as you probably realize, this part guest is a series all by itself because we finished part one, which is we looked at what the series was all about.
Then we looked at the different types of series. But now we're going to look at series that you don't naturally see. You don't think of of them as series, but they are series and you can use them to your advantage.
Let's go to that third part.
Part 3 – One of the more popular books is the War of the Art by Stephen Presfield.
The book is strictly broken out in the three parts, but under each of those parts what you have is a chapter with a paragraph or two and then it stops and then another paragraph or two and then it stops.
Stephen Presfield didn't write this as a book. Someone sat down and thought about it and said to Presfield, “Look, we could collate all of this stuff and we could put it together as a book.”
We could create what seems like a series that this is part one, this is part two, and this is part three. And when you read it, you make it perfect sense. Because what you're really doing is the same thing that the client asked me to do with pricing.
They said, you have all these articles. They're hanging all over the place. And all you need to do is just put them together in one system, one place, something that I can follow. That is kind of the thing that clients want most of the time.
They want you to go there and make it easy for them to follow that system.
And even if you're giving it all away for free or have given away for free, when you put it together in a document, suddenly it changes perspective for you as the creator, which means that you can package it and sell it, as well as for the reader, who knows that it's free but once this version anyway.
Another book, The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel. I really like it. Well, it's a a whole bunch of articles and it's put together. But it's put together in a systematic way so that it flows like a series.
If you're just thinking, okay, I'll just take all of my blog posts and throw them together and that's fine. No, no, I don't think so. I mean, I can already see that on your blog.
What I want is some sort of categorization. I want you to think a bit. I want you to make life easier for me. And that's where the series really shines.
So there are two ways to go about creating a series. One is where you go, I'm gonna write a lot of the rings and from the very start, it's going to be a series.Or you go, look, this topic is too big. We're not gonna have 250 pages.
We're gonna have 80 pages instead, book one, book two, book three, and it still goes up to 250 pages, but now it's a series. Or, or you just do a Photoshop did, which is you start something and then you keep upgrading it all the time and automatically it becomes a series.
It started way back in the 80s, when our 40 years down the line and that series is still going and of course now because of how Adobe has structured it, we're all paying for all the upgrades all the time.
But it's the series and it's the series that works.
The best part about a series is that it's up to you. You can take work that already exist and put together a series or you can decide, “No, no, no, I'm going to write something as a series and both of those ways work.
The funny thing is as I'm giving you this advice, I know that the best thing for me has been to write series. Every time I sit down and go, “Okay, let me think of which article to write, I am stuck, which podcast to create.”
Well, it's a lot of work. But if I were to sit down and go, “Let me do a series on storytelling.” I think I could do that quite easily.
And I think you can do it quite easily, so that's what this podcast is about. It's about creating a series. Go out there, do your Harry Potter.
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