Seth Godin is a master at saying it better than me! He has the knack for speaking in simple, easy to digest words. And, in his recent post Information Density, he nailed the whole point of Book Rapper. And, a BIG opportunity for authors.
Providing Choice
Seth was talking about choice for customers. How much do you give them?
And, let’s use the example of your website. When someone clicks on by for the very first time, do you want to give them lots of detailed information or not? Ideally, not. Keep it simple, get to the point and then if your customer is interested, give them more.
The Full Story
The same applies to authors of books, publications, ebooks, reports and other business documents.
Too often they simply publish the full story. And, whilst, that’s the full story, it’s not always what the reader wants – particularly when they’re confronted with your material for the first time.
Three Reasons For Reading Book Rapper
One of the things that surprised me about Book Rapper was the feedback I received. Roughly three types of Book Rapper readers emerged.
- The first was the obvious one – or at least the audience I thought I was designing for. These were the people that wanted to read the summary because they weren’t that interested in reading the whole book.
- The second was the group who wanted to read the Book Rapper summary to see if they then wanted to read the book. The summary was the warm-up act for the book.
- And, the third group was the most surprising of all. Book Rapper was designed to be read in under 30 minutes. This group of readers wanted a quicker version than this! This shocked me. So I create a five-minute version as a series of 26 tweets and shown as an animated slideshow. This is Twit Rapper. (Twit Rapper example: Smart Growth)
BIG Opportunities for Authors
The opportunity for authors of books, ebooks, business reports and other publications is to present your information in a range of formats. Seth Godin called it ‘Information Density’.
I call it timeframes. My research shows that a typical reader takes between 6-10 hours to read a 250 page business book. And, this depends a lot on the book and how it’s designed and structured. A blog post for another time… Thus Book Rapper targets the 30 minute reader. And, Twit Rapper the five minute reader.
And this is the BIG opportunity for authors of all types – particularly business reports – is to provide layers of information. Provide light to dense layers of information. And, provide quick to longer timeframes of information. And, by doing this you’ll spread your message further and deeper.
