Why is ‘story’ more important than ‘writing’? How can you write characters that engage the reader? And how can you sell more books by connecting authentically? Douglas Vigliotti shares his tips.
In the intro, Bookshop.org will start selling ebooks [TechCrunch]; LinkedIn for Book Promotion [ALLi]; The Money Making Expert, branding and marketing [DOAC]; 24 Assets – Daniel Priestley; My J.F. Penn books by location; Death Valley, A Thriller; Copyright and Artificial Intelligence [US Copyright Office]; Superagency: What could possibly go right with our AI Future – Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato
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Douglas Vigliotti is the author of four books, a poet, and podcaster. His latest book is Aristotle for Novelists: 14 Timeless Principles on the Art of Story.
You can listen above or on your favorite podcast app or read the notes and links below. Here are the highlights and the full transcript is below.
Show Notes
- Why Aristotle?
- Creating characters that resonate with our readers — and the four important elements to keep in mind
- Why story is more important than writing
- Creating complications that make readers want to read on
- The intersection of commerce and art
- Tips for pitching podcast interviews
You can find Douglas at DouglasVigliotti.com and his latest book at AristotleForNovelists.com.
Transcript of Interview with Douglas Vigliotti
Joanna: Douglas Vigliotti is the author of four books, a poet, and podcaster. His latest book is Aristotle for Novelists: 14 Timeless Principles on the Art of Story. So welcome to the show, Doug.
Douglas: Thank you so much for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Joanna: It’s great to have you on the show. So first up, just—
Tell us a bit more about you and how you got into writing.
Douglas: My journey is long and winding, but that’s probably similar to most writers. I grew up as a pretty, I would say, average or normal American childhood. Youngest of five boys, played hockey, played sports.
Believe it or not, writing and books and all of that was not even a thought in my mind until I reached probably my 20s, early 20s, mid 20s. Then kind of a light switch turned on. The first book that I ever wrote, and the first writing that I ever did publicly, was actually a derivative of my business career.
It took me following my interest, and growing as a writer and as an artist, to start exploring that more creative side of writing. Then that’s how I ended up writing novels and poetry and all that good stuff.
Joanna: What was that business?
Douglas: My professional career, I started, let’s see, 20 years ago. It was sales, selling.
I’ve sold everything from financial services, to medical devices, to payroll and tax filing, to myself.
Then I wrote a business book called The Salesperson Paradox, and it was in conjunction with my sales consulting company at the time, and that was how I started into my creative career. So it was totally, totally orthogonal to where I ended up.
Joanna: Well, or not. We’re going to come back to that because I love this. I love that you have a sales person background.
Just so you know, I’m actually the eldest of five children. Obviously, not all boys. So being of five siblings, I completely get, which is very cool.
Let’s get into the book itself. In case people don’t know—
Who was Aristotle? Why write a book based on his work?
Douglas: So I think in modern day, we throw around the name Aristotle quite a bit because it’s referenced a lot in pop culture. I think it’s one of those things where you hear the name and you assume—I don’t know what you assume. You assume smart, you assume historic, you assume legendary.
People probably don’t know who he is, and that’s always an interesting thing. The fact that he’s lasted over 2300 years is something of a testament to itself. So he was a philosopher and a polymath, really. I think his life, it was 384 BC to 322 BC. He studied under Plato, and Plato studied under Socrates before him.
When I said he was a polymath, that’s really essential to understanding who he is, because he wrote over 200 works that spanned across a plethora of topics.
From politics, to economics, to poetics, and all of these different subject matters that ended up becoming, in some cases, the foundational material for many of these disciplines in universities across the world.
So the fact that his ideas and his philosophies and concepts have stood the test of time is sort of a testament in itself, as I alluded to. One of the interesting things about those 200 works is that many of them, call it 80%, so I think we’ve only recovered 30-something of his works.
I mean, the number is kind of debated. I don’t know how they quantify this, because if they’re lost, how do we know how many we recovered? But they’ve only recovered 30-something of his works.
One of those is Poetics. So that is actually the nature of tragedies, but more broadly, storytelling. It’s one of the major reasons why I ended up writing this book, obviously.
Joanna: You didn’t say there that we’re talking about Ancient Greece. So we’re in Europe. I often think Americans forget that it all started over here in Europe.
Douglas: Sorry, I tend to skip over things sometimes, but you are correct. Ancient Greece.
Joanna: It’s funny because we seem to be at this period in history, in literature, when people just refer a lot to, obviously, the Stoic Movement and a lot about Marcus Aurelius. Obviously, Roman emperor, but the empire that came after the Greeks. A lot of this is resurfacing, isn’t it, in culture?
Do you think there’s some kind of zeitgeist where this is all coming back?
Douglas: So in a general sense, or in a broad sense, I think it’s more comfortable for people to reference people who are already gone, so to speak. I don’t think it’s as easy for people to credit living legends or living thinkers as it is to credit people who are gone. So I think there’s something to that.
I also think that there’s something to the idea of grabbing onto something that gives people a framework to think that they know, even though they might not really know. Like foundational philosophical thinkers, they were at some of these topics first, so they have some really strong ideas around a plethora of things.
So I think when we bring them to life, to this day and age, we realize, wow, there’s really—and I’m going to use a biblical quote here, not to be religious—but it’s nothing new under the sun.
We are living these same issues over and over and over again, and I just think that there’s a lot of resonance for that.
Look, I think there’s a certain thing to nostalgia that we have as a society. It’s a saleable commodity.
I didn’t write this book because I was trying to fill a void with Aristotle and his ideas and storytelling. To me, when I started to research story as a concept, everything started funneling back to Aristotle. Then I realized, wow, everything is there. You know, it was how I learned about story.
So the fact that Aristotle, his ideas in this book came to fruition, was more of a function of me realizing that all the theorists in modern day, or practitioners for that matter—so people in the dramatic world, like Aaron Sorkin or David Mamet or a lot of these people, they’ll often reference Aristotle.
Or if you read theorists like Robert McKee, they’ll often reference Aristotle. So for me, it was only natural to then double down on Aristotle, and read Poetics, and read multiple translations of Poetics, and really understand the text.
Then what I quickly realized was how resonant these ideas were in modern storytelling, on both the screen, the page, and in our lives. I think that that’s one of the big things that drew Aristotle to storytelling in general was how intrinsically linked it is to living, because we live stories.
So I think that the principles that we’ll talk about, or some of these ideas that we’ll talk about, they are applicable to our life, as well as they are applicable on the page and on the screen.
Joanna: Yes, and of course that quote you mentioned is from the book of Ecclesiastes. I quote that in a number of my novels, actually. It’s probably my favorite book of the Bible, Ecclesiastes.
I think part of that is what you’re talking about, is that —
There are principles in human nature, as well as principles in story, that don’t change, regardless of how many millennia go past.
I was thinking as you were talking, like maybe part of the reason we’re re-latching onto this now is because there’s so much change in the world. With AI, and technology, and social media, and all this constant stream of stuff that there is—
Maybe we’re sort of harking back to things that don’t change, and that perhaps helps a little.
Douglas: I totally agree with you. I think when we’re talking about stories specifically, there are a couple fundamental elements that are there in almost every story that we tell, at least in Western society.
In Western society, the stories we tell, almost all of them, even in sprawling epics or multiple storyline plots and all this stuff, they have three characteristics that are always there.
That’s a protagonist who wants something, and there’s obstacles standing in their way. Those obstacles come both externally and internally.
I think if we zoom out and we look at our lives, Joanna Penn’s life, Douglas Vigliotti’s life, I’m a protagonist who wants something, and I have obstacles standing in my way that are both internal and external.
Do I overcome those obstacles?
Well, then we end up with an Aristotelian comedy. I end up better off at the end, even if it’s only temporarily.
Do I succumb to those obstacles, both internal and external? Well, then we have an Aristotelian tragedy because I end up worse off.
So these ideas are baked right into our lives. You can see the framework for story everywhere as you walk through life if you understand these core components of what makes up a story. Again, like I said, at least in a Western sense.
Joanna: Yes, well, since we’re on characters then. A quote from the book, you say —
“Novels should contain true characters.”
Now, I find this word ‘true’ extremely difficult because fiction, you know, it’s fiction. True, in general, is very hard. So what do you mean by this?
How can we create characters that resonate?
Douglas: I think that you hit the nail on the head. True has multiple meanings to multiple people. I’m speaking specifically in the sense of what would Aristotle say would be true.
To Aristotle, there’s four elements to characters, in general. They are goodness, so it’s your characters are good if their choices are good. Appropriateness would be, are they acting appropriately? Not right or wrong, but based on who they are, are they acting truly to who they are? So are they acting appropriately?
So that directly links to this trueness of character in, are you writing characters that are true to who that character is? Not true to real life, true to who that character is. There’s a big difference there. It’s not about fact and fiction.
The third element is relatability. That has more to do with, are you making the character relatable? So are you giving them characteristics that embody human characteristics? The best way to do that is through imperfection.
Despite what our world wants to try to convince us every day —
We are relatable because of our imperfections —
not because of our perfections. So there’s this big chasm between what we see every day and what we should be depicting in our stories or on the page, and what we actually relate to.
If we sat down and had a conversation, we’re probably going to relate based on some of our struggles more than we’re going to relate on some of our successes.
Then the fourth piece is consistency. Even if you were to write a character, a true character, who is inconsistent, Aristotle would say, by nature, they should be consistently inconsistent.
We see this all the time in storytelling with unreliable narrators. They are consistently inconsistent. What ends up happening with those unreliable narrators is this ties into something else that Aristotle talks about or that you can observe in stories, but eventually what they say doesn’t line up with what they do.
It’s always what a character does, it’s always what we show, it’s always about action. That is the more important piece. So we can get into trouble in life or in stories if we’re only listening to what characters are saying. I could say one thing and do another, and doing is more important than saying.
So to answer that question and peel back to it, those are the four characteristics that would make up a true character in an Aristotelian sense.
Joanna: Yes, I think it’s an interesting way forward. I like the relatability because if you’re writing, let’s say sci fi, and you have aliens there, or you’re writing something literary and writing from the perspective of like a plant or an animal or something—
You still have to have relatability to the human who is reading the book.
That kind of comes across whatever type of character you’re writing, essentially.
Douglas: 100%. Aristotle is very specific in Poetic, saying that he believes that the two reasons why storytelling began for us humans, one is because of imitation. So we learn how to imitate to live. So as young kids, we imitate the world around us, the people around us, our parents, and that’s how we learn how to actually live.
So storytelling is a derivative of that. So we should be imitating what is happening in the real world. Not writing realist fiction or realist work, but we should be embracing all of human nature has to offer, because that is why, according to Aristotle, storytelling actually began.
It’s what’s relatable to humans, so we should be reflecting all of those qualities in our work.
For anyone who’s interested, the second reason is rhythm. So he thinks we have a natural rhythm, and I tend to agree with him because even if you are writing, all writers know voice, they know pacing, they know tone.
Rhythm to your prose, just like rhythm in music, is really, really important.
I think this is one of the big reasons why, as a writer, you don’t even need to know grammar to be able to write. If you have rhythm, it’s going to work on the page. You have editors for that stuff.
I think musicians are great examples of this because so many of them don’t learn how to—you know, top level musicians, I mean, people who are iconic. In the book I talk about some examples of Billy Joel, and Bruce Springsteen, and American musicians who didn’t know how to read music, and things turned out pretty well for them.
Not to say that that’s the benchmark, but it’s countless, the amount of “I don’t know how to read music, I learned how to play the guitar.” All of that’s based off of rhythm. Writing and voice on the page is no different, really. Aristotle would call that your meter, your poetic meter.
Joanna: Yes, that’s interesting. Actually, you do say this in the introduction,
“Writing is not story.”
I guess there you mentioned you don’t have to know grammar to write story, and this is a tension. Of course, you’re a poet as well, and writers often prioritize the intricacies of language before the story.
Especially in this sort of age of AI, when word generation, however you generate words, whether you’re writing them by hand or you’re generating them with AI, that doesn’t matter so much.
How can we prioritize story over the intricacies of writing?
Douglas: So, for me, this is a really important distinction. I think oftentimes writers, at least through conversations that I have with them, we confuse writing and story.
To me, there’s a very, very clear distinction, in that story is governed by what I would call principles, whereas writing is governed by style.
I really have no interest in telling someone how I think they should write their story. I don’t even believe that you can. Even the best prose—and I’m using air quotes because best is so subjective—it could take me 15, 20 pages to get used to that writing or I could never get used to that writing.
Writing is that different from person to person, writer to writer. I have this funny saying, where it’s, “Story is why they come, writing is why they stay.”
Writing is the tool that writers utilize to tell their story. Story is the foundational component of what you are trying to achieve.
That’s why you can watch movies, you can listen to audiobooks, you can engage with all these other forms of media and learn how to tell story. That doesn’t mean you’re going to learn how to write because writing is a different thing.
Aristotle does have some ideas on what he thinks around style, of course, and I have my own opinions on that as well.
Ultimately, what I’m trying to achieve with Aristotle for Novelists, let’s say, is more of a foundational education on the principles of what makes up a story. So there is a difference between the two, at least in my view.
Joanna: So I guess one of the other things, we talked a bit about character there, but we should also talk about plot. You say,
“Novels have a complication and a resolution.”
What are complications, and how can we create those that fascinate readers and make them want to read on?
Even though they may, or sometimes we feel like, maybe they’ve heard this before or read this before?
Douglas: So my favorite Aristotle quote is, “Many poets tie the knot well, but unravel it ill.” What he’s talking about there—and when he says poets, he’s talking about something much wider in scope than literally poets. The same could be said, by the way, for poetics in general.
What he meant by poetics is something much larger in scope than poetry, so for anybody who’s wondering that.
What he’s talking about there is the difference between a complication and a resolution. So we all know that when we come to our stories, we come because we have an idea for the complication of that story. We have a character who is put in a situation and we wind that up.
What he’s saying is that it takes the truly great writers the ability to unwind that, to unravel that knot. There’s so many ways that we could go wrong when we’re doing that. Whether it’s lack of believability, lack of cohesion, illogical, impossibility, irrationality.
There’s so many different ways that we could falter as we try to resolve the complication that we depicted in the early part of our story. I find it helpful when I read books and when I watch movies—I’m a bit of a story junkie, so I do both quite a bit.
I look particularly for, when does that writer or when does that story begin to unravel the knot? Some would say, in a traditional three-act structure sense, you begin to unravel the knot—and Aristotle would say this—when that change of fortune actually happens.
So if it’s at a tragedy, it would be when that character is at the ultimate high before they fall. Or if it was in a comedy, it would be at that ultimate low before they rise. You start to unravel that knot a little bit.
I find it helpful to start thinking about and answering little questions that you propose earlier in your novels, somewhere around the midway point. Never actually answering that big question, right?
You want to keep that tension for as long as possible.
Then there’s other people who would suggest you keep that tension as taut as possible all the way through until you get to the very, very end. So what you’ll find is there’s a lot of differences in how people achieve this.
I think one of the things that you will see consistently is there is a complication and there is a resolution. One of the things that Aristotle is really, really insistent about is he calls it avoiding Deus Ex Machina. So things coming from outside of your plot to solve plot problems.
I see this all the time, I’m going to be honest, in stories where it’s like, solve the plot problems within the existing world that you depicted. Now, obviously you can introduce new characters and all of that stuff, but when stuff comes out of left field to solve a plot problem, you’re not unraveling the knot well, so to speak.
He has a great quote, and he says,
“The solution to a plot problem should come from the story itself.”
I find that to be a really informative quote, and also a benchmark to try to hit every time you write a story. Whether that story is short as a poem in five sentences, or whether it’s extrapolated out to an 80,000 word novel.
Joanna: That’s actually great. People are like, oh, but how do I do that? Then I’m like, well, that’s why we do self-editing, because if you get to a point in your book and you finish your book, you just go back and edit in something earlier on in the process.
So I don’t understand how people can’t figure that out later on. As you say, you can just put in things earlier on that will help you resolve it later. That’s why we edit. So I think that’s quite cool.
I want to come back to something you said earlier about your previous career and your book, The Salesperson Paradox. I feel like this is a problem for most authors. So if you’re a poet, you’ve got this book, Aristotle for Novelists, you’ve got other books, and you also come from sales.
So how are you marketing your books? How are you selling your books?
How can authors who care about the craft also care about sales and marketing?
Douglas: I do think that they are driven by two completely different motors. I have this conversation since I have my toe in both worlds, and I have for a long time now. The creative side is run by a different engine than the business side is, at least for me.
I do think one informs the other when you start thinking about what it’s like when your actual work hits the real world and becomes a commercial entity. Just because you’re near and dear to it, and it’s so close to you. Believe me, I write super personal stuff, so I totally, totally get it.
For anybody who’s out there saying, “I’m an artist, and I write from the heart,” —
The intersection of commerce still exists if you want to sell your work to people, if you want your work to be seen.
For sales, there’s one thing that The Salesperson Paradox hits on, and that has been the bedrock for my success in that world. It’s simply helping people get what they already want. We lose sight that there’s people out there that already want what you have. You have to find them and give it to them. That’s it.
It’s that simple. You’re never going to force somebody to want something that they don’t want, but if you find the people who want the thing that you provide, you will be able to sell much more of whatever you’re selling.
It’s a matter of helping, not selling.
You’re helping somebody get what they want, not selling them a good or a service. It’s face to face, over the phone, on a zoom, anywhere. That distinction is critical.
If we look at books in general, I often say that there’s four elements to value, and that value framework is time, status, ease and money. So we all want things that save us time or increase the speed of things.
Apps do that, you mentioned AI before. All of that hits on time value. Time, it’s a value driver, innate value driver for humans.
Ease. Am I making it easy for the person to say yes, or am I making it hard? The easier I make it for someone to say yes, the more likely they’re going to say yes. You can infuse that into when you’re doing outreach via email or outreach via phone.
How easy are you making it for people to say yes? Come have this conversation with me about your book or whatever. There’s multiple ways that you could go about something. Are you making it easy for someone to say yes? That’s a big driver for us. It’s a big driver for me, and it’s a big driver for most people.
Status is another huge innate human driver. We all have people we want to look good toward, and can I help that person look good towards those people? That is a huge, huge value driver.
It happens in a micro-sense when you’re dealing with people on a one-off level, like a one-on-one level. So it’s like, I don’t know, maybe that person wants to look good to their mother. Maybe this person wants to look good to an audience. Maybe this person wants to look good to their boss.
Can you help that person look good to that individual? That’s a huge innate value driver because we are all status creatures, whether we want to admit it or not.
The fourth piece is money. If you can make someone money or save them money, that’s a huge value driver. So I always look at when I’m trying to sell things on a commercial aspect, how could I fit it into that value equation, whether it’s on a micro sense or a macro sense.
I know that if I’m able to create some kind of value proposition around that, at least I’m going to have a story that I’m going to be able to communicate. So that’s going to put me in a better position to actually sell things. I hope that’s helpful.
Joanna: It’s helpful as a framework. So like if someone has a thriller novel or a sci-fi novel—
How does that fit into that framework when there are lots of other thriller novels and sci-fi novels out there?
Douglas: 100% agree with you. It becomes really hard when you’re talking about fiction.
I have a podcast, it’s called Books for Men, and when I have conversations with other men about books—because the podcast is designed to inspire men to read—the number one thing is that most of them aren’t reading fiction, and they’re reading nonfiction.
The reason why they’re reading nonfiction is because it has a higher value proposition. So when we’re looking at the bigger picture, fiction struggles to sell consistently for a lot of people because it doesn’t fit into the value framework.
The only way that you’re going to be able to get people to consistently buy your products is by developing your own relationship with them and creating things.
Like creating a podcast, having a blog, you have to do that.
If you don’t do that, you’re never going to sell the thing consistently, unless you just want to roll the dice and look hope for luck. I think that in a world of AI, that personal connection as creators, writers, filmmakers, is going to be even more important.
People are going to want to buy from people that they know, like, and trust. So the more you can build that personal connection with people, the better off I think you’re going to be in the long term.
So while people are all concerned about the craft element of writing a thriller novel—believe me, I’m a craft junkie, and I totally empathize with that—but —
You should also be thinking about, how am I going to create a personal connection with my readers?
Do they know what Joanna Penn is about? Do they know what Douglas Vigliiotti is about? If they do, they’re going to be more likely to buy from you. In an art sense, it’s really the only strategy that you have moving forward.
Unless you’re lucky enough where you’re that one in a million shot, where your work just shoots up the charts and everything you become after that becomes saleable.
You hit on something very, very important. Fiction in art doesn’t necessarily fit into that framework, and that’s what makes it such a challenge to sell it.
Joanna: Yes, or you pay a ton for Amazon and Facebook ads. That’s another way.
Douglas: For me, that’s a tactic. It’s not a strategy. Like, so that’s a great tactic, but to me, tactics are endless. Like they’re endless. What works for some people, might not work for somebody else.
Strategically, I think the better bet is to try to create something where people can find you being you.
It goes back to that whole help people get what they already want. Do your best to create the thing and draw people that would like that thing into it. Not try to create the thing for people.
Just create the art, create the thing, and then try to build the framework around your creative career that people come in and they engage with you because they’re interested in you. To me, that’s like the only selling point that we’re going to have as we move forward into this new world, 10, 20, 30 years.
I mean, people have a really myopic view about what is happening with AI right now. It’s not meant to scare people. It’s just how crowded and how cloudy the content and art and creation aspect already is, it’s going to get 10 times worse.
So the only thing that I think is worth investing in, from a sales standpoint, is individuality and building something that is personally who you are, and so people can engage with that.
I know that’s scary for a lot of writers, but to me, it’s inevitable. It’s the only thing that we have, the only selling point we have moving forward.
Joanna: Yes, I often say —
Double down on being human.
Your voice, and your face, and I’d say an author’s note in the back of fiction grounds your story and why you care as a person.
On this, you have a podcast, Books for Men, as you mentioned. Obviously, I have this podcast, I’ve had other podcasts. I think voice is a big thing. As you say, people can get to know you, like you, and trust you. So I’d say podcasting is a great way to do book marketing. Obviously, you think the same thing.
Just as tips for people listening, if people listening want to pitch a podcast, not you or me, obviously, but other podcasts—because I get terrible pitches every single day. Your pitch was very good.
What are your tips for people who want to pitch for podcast interviews around their books?
Douglas: Get to the point. Not you. That’s the tip.
Get to the point. The briefer you can make it, and the more pointed that you could make it, the better off you are. If I could do the email in three sentences, I would do it. If it has to be five, then I’ll do it in five. If it has to be 10, then I’ll do it in 10.
I want to make the email as short as I possibly need to make it so you understand why I’m emailing you, where the benefit is, and what I’m asking you to do.
Even when I had my own podcast where I was doing a lot of interviewing, I was reaching out to a lot of really big names in the space and trying to get them to come onto the show because that’s how I thought I was going to be able to drive audience. Even in that sense, I was doing extremely short emails.
So most people when they email somebody, they think that telling them everything they need to know because they don’t want to miss a little possible thing that could spark Joanna, or Doug, or somebody, to say, “Oh, I like that.”
The reality is, is if as soon as you get an email from somebody that is a chunk of text, you don’t read any of it.
The shorter that you can make the email, the more prone that person is to actually reading it and being super, super pointed.
The other rule is, if you wouldn’t say it in real life, don’t say it in an email. I think emails live forever, and we forget that when you press send, that email is going to sit there.
I’ve sent a lot of bad emails over the years to learn this lesson, and me thinking to myself, wow, how did I say that in an email?
Now one of the biggest things that I focus on, aside from brevity, is would I say this to this person face to face? If I wouldn’t say it face to face, then I wouldn’t put it in an email.
It turns out that those two things go hand in hand. How often do you go up to somebody and read them three pages of material about who you are, what you’re doing, what your books are about? Never. What you do is you get right to the point. “Hey, I’m Doug. I’m a writer. X, Y and Z,” blah, blah, blah, whatever.
I mean, that’s not what I would say in an email, but you do it short and brief, and then let the person respond.
Joanna: Just to come back there, you said, “what the benefit is,” and you said that quite quickly.
Just to be clear, it’s the benefit to the podcaster, not the benefit to the author.
I get so many pitches that say, “I’m blah, blah, blah author. I’ve written this book. When can I schedule myself onto your show for my book tour?”
Douglas: Well, here’s the thing, with books specifically—you know this better than anybody, you probably get tons and tons—podcasts have almost become an adjunct of the publishing industry. A new book comes out, and now this is the best way to sell this.
It’s the same method that was utilized forever, where you’d go on radio talk shows, you’d go on Johnny Carson, I don’t know, like all these talk shows.
Now that there’s podcasts, and because of technology there’s so many of them, what the publishing industry realized is the best way to sell books is the same way it’s always been to sell books, which is get people on shows and get people in front of audiences that they don’t already have.
So now, people like yourself and all of these podcast hosts are getting hundreds and hundreds of pitches, especially if the show is popular, getting so many of these. So what could you do to stand out from that? Get it so someone would actually read it.
So how do people read things?
If it’s short and to the point at why it would be beneficial for that person to have you on the show, then in my world, you’re more prone to get through.
Again, this is not something that I’ve just utilized in outreach with podcast pitching. I have 20 years of sales experience where I’ve utilized this in other aspects too, to get in front of prospective buyers and whatnot.
It’s short, and it goes back to what I was saying before. You want good guests. I don’t have guests on my show anymore, but I would want good guests on my show. What I don’t want is a long, extended email about all these different things.
What I do want is a short, polite, direct email of telling me why you’re emailing me and why it would benefit me to have you on the show, in as short as possible. I found that people, in general, they respond well to that strategy over the span of life, not just in the podcast world.
It’s because you’re putting it in their world. I’m having respect for you. I’m having empathy for you.
You’re reading a million emails, so how could I make it easy for you to say yes to me?
Something that I was talking about before, am I saving you time? And status, am I making that person look good if they have me on the show? These are all things that a human would innately consider, even if they’re not consciously considering them.
So you could sell something, yourself in this situation, via email by utilizing that value framework that I was referencing before.
Joanna: Fantastic. So lots of tips there.
Where can people find you, and your books, and everything you do online?
Douglas: So it’s very, very easy. For me, just go to my website, DouglasVigliotti.com. If you want to know more about the podcast, BooksForMen.org is the best place to check that out. Again, that’s a podcast to inspire more men to read. Then for the book, it’s AristotleForNovelists.com.
Joanna: Well, thanks so much for your time, Doug. That was great.
Douglas: Thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
The post Aristotle for Novelists, And A Strategy For Selling More Books With Douglas Vigliotti first appeared on The Creative Penn.
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