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Crush It: why now is the time to cash in on your passion – a book review
K Sawyer Paul of Gredunza Press reviewed Crush It: why now is the time to cash in on your passion. He had this to say about it:
First things first: If you’re going to be swayed by this review of Crush It, buy the ebook, or the pdf, or however it’s being sold digitally. The book is 118 pages as a digital document, and a few pages less than that in hardcover. You don’t even need an ereader, because it will take less than two hours to read front to back. I’ve seen people play WOW without blinking for that long. Your eyes will survive reading like that. I purchased it as an epub and loaded it on the Sony Reader, and definitely got my $9 worth. $25 for hardcover is a rip off.
Okay, now onto the actual content. Crush It is a self-business-related self-help book, and its greatest audience are the people with a passionate hobby who don’t know how to monetize. To summarize 118 pages: there is money in eyeballs, and doing enough things online will bring them to you.
How do you do things online? Well, use Twitter. And Facebook. And Flickr. And Ustream. Use all the free websites that allow you to share and distribute content. Don’t worry about being really good at these things. Don’t worry about lighting, or sound, or even being that great a writer. Just blog. And Tweet. And if you know what you’re talking about and talk about it long enough, you will become rich.
This is advice from a guy who yells at a low-budget camera and tells people that wine is either awesome or garbage.
Gary Vaynerchuck is an annoying ass, but he might actually be onto something, because his advice does yield results. These results may vary, but you can’t argue with success. There are lots of success stories about people with insatiable passion projects who dig at them for years and finally break through. And you can’t argue with Gary’s advice in the book, not really, anyway. He doesn’t give away any secrets, and much of what he says in the book’s short narrative is common sense and obvious to anyone who’s seen the internet in the last five years. But being obvious doesn’t mean he’s wrong.
It also doesn’t mean he has much to say that isn’t said in a million other places. While the narrative (Vaynerchuck didn’t write anything. He emoted into a microphone for a couple of days and handed it off to an editor) is brisk and witty, the nuggets of advice are actually pretty sparse. Things pick up once he’s done with his life story, and the pieces on authenticity and availability are truly important for anyone’s brand image. For this, Crush It works. I also like that, figuratively, every fourth sentence is work your ass off. People need to hear that more.
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K Sawyer Paul and Éisee Sylvester are co-owners of Gredunza Press. They assist new authors in finding information, advice, and the best routes to modern publishing and provide publishing services that will improve the marketability of their books.
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