Less Is More

A key secret to successful promotion is to not give the world too great a glimpse at yourself and your product until you or it is established. Mystery over familiarity. (Being offstage has worked for God, for example, for the past few millennia!)

It's a difficult trick to pull off.

Much of the Beatles fantastic initial explosion in the U.S. was because they were offstage, inaccessible, in England. Americans were hearing about them, reading about them, but not seeing them. Demand built, under the surface, until the lid blew off.

Much of the ULA's initial buzz was because we were a mystery. We'd hit and run events. We'd mail out short crazy broadsides. "Who are these guys?" people were asking.

Getting a website up in January 2002 ended the mystery, and in many ways ended the ULA.

I may close off "Demi-Puppets" simply because I gave there too much of myself and my ideas. They became familiar. It's a law of nature, that when you limit supply, value of what you're selling increases. It makes no sense to give too much away free, or making accessing it too easy.

In the early stages of a promotion, this is the ballgame.