After years of struggling to start my own business, I had a revelation that changed everything for me. The best marketers weren’t marketers—they were resourceful punks, propagandists, cult leaders, and other assorted riff-raff. I began to adopt their tactics, and I started having some success—first as a freelance copywriter and then as a marketing agency owner. Ever since, I’ve been obsessed by the weird psychology we fall into when we’re with other humans and how people can hack that psychology to make others do what they want.
I wrote...
The Hype Handbook: 12 Indispensable Success Secrets From the World's Greatest Propagandists, Self-Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers, and Boundary Breakers
Never in history have people been so susceptible to propaganda and persuasion as they are now. Hype truly runs our world. Imagine if you could generate and leverage hype for positive purposes―like legitimate business success, helping people, or effecting positive change in your community.
Citing the latest research in psychology, sociology, and neuroscience, this book breaks the concept of hype down into a simple set of strategies, skills, and techniques―drawn from the world’s most effective hype artists, including American propagandist Edward Bernays, original Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, celebrity preacher Aimee Semple McPherson, and Spartan Race founder Joe De Sena. Whatever your temperament, education, budget, background, or natural ability, The Hype Handbook delivers everything you need to apply the most powerful tools of persuasion.
This was the book that kicked off my obsession with mind control, social psychology, and media hacking. Ryan Holiday is one of the modern era's best marketers, and he's a pretty great writer as well. When he ran the marketing at American Apparel (at twenty-something), he took hype to new heights.
A small list of some of his stunts: Hiring a porn star to pose in nothing but socks in an ad for a clothing company, secretly defacing his own clients' billboards to generate publicity, and provoking a famous Internet media startup legend to threaten to punch him in the face in order to drive up book sales.
In this book, he reveals all his tricks while delivering a scathing critique of the broken system that let him do what he did.
You've seen it all before. A malicious online rumor costs a company millions. A political sideshow derails the national news cycle and destroys a candidate. Some product or celebrity zooms from total obscurity to viral sensation. What you don't know is that someone is responsible for all this. Usually, someone like me.
I'm a media manipulator. In a world where blogs control and distort the news, my job is to control blogs-as much as any one person can.
IN TODAY'S CULTURE... Blogs like Gawker, BuzzFeed, and The Huffington Post drive the media agenda. Bloggers are slaves to money, technology, and…
It was during the earliest days of the first Trump campaign, and I was reading this one-hundred-plus-year-old book with one of the first debates playing in the background. It felt like he had used this book as his operating manual (although I'm almost positive he never read it). When I got home, I started telling my friends, "I think this guy could win." They thought I was crazy. The rest was history.
This book is the definition of timeless. Le Bon was remarkably perceptive about what makes groups of people react in certain ways and how leaders can get them to do their bidding.
One of the most influential works of social psychology in history, The Crowd was highly instrumental in creating this field of study by analyzing, in detail, mass behavior. The book had a profound impact not only on Freud but also on such twentieth-century masters of crowd control as Hitler and Mussolini — both of whom may have used its observations as a guide to stirring up popular passions. In the author's words, "The masses have never thirsted after the truth. Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim."…
I have to admit it: I’m pretty sure I bought this book in my early twenties with less-than-pure intentions. It didn’t end up doing much for my romantic life, but it changed the way I think forever after.
In writing about how to get attractive people to fall into your arms (and into your bed), Robert Greene makes no distinction between seducing an individual and seducing an audience of millions. It’s one of those books that makes you feel like you want to take a shower. Then again, most of my favorite books make me feel that way.
A fascinating inside look at the nature of seduction uses a vast array of sources, from Freud and Nietzsche to Cleopatra and Josephine Bonaparte, to uncover the truth about this important feature of the human animal.
If you want to read about how to make hype happen while making people happy, check out Shep Gordon’s autobiography. This book played a big part in making me realize that hype can be used as a force for good as well as evil. At the very least, it can add a whole lot of color to the world.
Shep Gordon had no connections and no money when he started out as a manager in the entertainment industry. But somehow, he managed to turn Alice Cooper into an international superstar, resurrect the career of a Vaudeville legend, and singlehandedly create the celebrity chef movement. This guy continues to inspire me.
This one is a pure a page turner. It’s about a man named “Dr.” John R. Brinkley who became one of the richest people in the country by selling a procedure in which he transplanted goat testicles into healthy adult males. He was responsible for the deaths of nearly fifty people, came a few votes shy of becoming governor of Arkansas, and more or less invented modern marketing. What’s not to like?
I grew up on a family farm surrounded by larger vegetable and dairy operations that used migrant labor. From an early age, my siblings and I were acquainted with the children of these workers, children whom we shared a school desk with one day and were gone the next. On summer vacations, our parents hauled us around in a station wagon with a popup camper, which they parked in out-of-the-way hayfields and on mountainous plateaus, shunning, much to our chagrin, normal campgrounds, and swimming pools. Thus, I grew up exposed to different cultures and environments. My writing reflects my parents’ curiosity, love of books and travel, and devotion to the natural world.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie’s aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program.
Stefan promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his story, has grown sympathetic to his cause and complicit in his pushback against prejudiced accusations. Their mutual attraction is stymied when Stefan’s older brother, Joachim, who stayed behind, becomes embroiled in the resistance, and Stefan is compelled to return to Canada. Sadie, concerned for his safety, impulsively follows on a trajectory doomed by cultural misunderstanding and oncoming winter.
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through the pitfalls of young adulthood. Hundreds of miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are forced off their land by multinational energy companies and flawed treaties. They are taken in temporarily by Sadie's aunt, a human rights activist who heads a cultural exchange program. Stefan, whose own father died in prison while on a hunger strike, promptly runs afoul of local authority, but Sadie, intrigued by him and captivated by his…
Interested in
the film industry,
Hollywood,
and
Los Angeles?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
the film industry,
Hollywood,
and
Los Angeles.
