4. Sell yourself, not your content.
Twain always sold himself first. His public personality
developed quickly after his first publications. He got a big
advance to write a series of letters from his first extended
trip abroad, and they were pure Twain: wry, musing,
scolding, gossipy—and stamped with his personality. His
burgeoning reputation filled lecture halls and greatly helped
to promote his books, which he ever used to advantage.
He even trademarked his name after incorporating himself
as an enterprise, since he was getting paid to endorse
products (and many scoundrels were using his image
without permission). With Twain, there was never a New
Coke. There was only Old Twain.
5. I have been through some terrible things in my
life, some of which actually happened.
Part of Twain’s brand was that he was fascinated with
gadgets, science, and inventions, and willing to spend
his money on them. He invested and lost a fortune on
an early prototype of a typesetting machine. His own
publishing house foundered after some early success. He
had moderate success selling a self-pasting scrapbook
dubbed, naturally, “Mark Twain’s Scrap Book,” and
patented a peculiar replacement for suspenders. The first
licensed Parker Brothers (of Monopoly fame) game was
based on Twain’s Innocents Abroad book of travel essays.
But he kept taking risks, and kept his name in the public
eye by doing so. His failures (and his writing about them)
became a part of his brand.
6. I have never let my schooling interfere with my
education.
Twain made it as far as age 12 for his formal schooling.
Then he worked as a printer’s devil, setting type in a print
shop, where he learned more than a lead slug’s worth
of editing and the play of words. He was a restless sort,
traveling early on with his brother Orion by stagecoach to
the Nevada territory, and on to mining camps in California.
All became fodder for his observations. That early travel,
and his ability to see new things—and to seeing things
anew—became a trademark for Twain. He lived and
traveled extensively abroad and stateside, often pushed by
debt but prodded by curiosity as well. His education was
prompted by an overarching interest in events, people,
and things of his day, and he regularly got out among
his readers and his fans to glean ideas and to spread the
gospel of Twain.
7. All you need is ignorance and confidence and
the success is sure.
Twain tried many forms of writing, just to see what would
stick. He was alternately and sometimes simultaneously
an essayist, travel writer, short story writer, speechwriter,
journalist, sketch writer, correspondent, playwright, literary
critic, and occasional poet. He published in some of the
most celebrated magazines of his day and in some of the
most obscure newspapers. He was ignorant enough to
not settle for being a celebrated novelist or lecturer, but
confident in the persuasion of his writing across all genres.
He was both calculated and naive in perpetually putting
his work out in public, always cultivating and extending his
marketing. And as he put it, “I am not one of those who in
expressing opinions confine themselves to facts.”
8. We are always more anxious to be distinguished
for a talent which we do not possess than to be
praised for the fifteen which we do possess.
Twain might have chosen to be an inventor rather than
a writer. He had a long friendship with Nikola Tesla and
spent a lot of time in Tesla’s lab. He was fascinated by
Thomas Edison’s work with film, indeed being the subject
of one of Edison’s early film clips. Besides the underwriting
of the failed typesetting machine, his work on his selfpasting scrapbook and his suspender substitution, he also
patented a history trivia game and funded the work of
other inventors.
But Twain recognized where his greatest talents and
impacts would lie. In an 1865 letter to his brother, not long
before the publication of his “The Celebrated Jumping
Frog of Calaveras County,” he said, “I have had a ‘call’ to
literature, of a low order—i.e., humorous. It is nothing to
be proud of, but it is my strongest suit.” He enthusiastically
marketed his inventions, but he knew his real brand—as
low of an order as it might be—was his writing.
9. The difference between the right word and the
nearly right word is the same as the difference
between lightning and the lightning bug.
Twain was the first to use vernacular speech in writing
to good effect. As with his timing in his lectures, he was
painstakingly particular on word choice, syntax, and even
punctuation. There is a passage of his where he rails
about an editor that changed his punctuation; this quote
underscores that: “How often we recall, with regret, that
Napoleon once shot at a magazine editor and missed him
and killed a publisher. But we remember with charity, that
his intentions were good.” He sustained his brand, and his
marketing, by consistent content: the precisely right words.
10. Robert Louis Stevenson and I, sitting in Union
Square and Washington Square a great many years ago,
tried to find a name for the submerged fame, that fame
that permeates the great crowd of people you never see
and never mingle with; people with whom you have no
speech, but who read your books and become admirers
of your work and have an affection for you ....It is the
faithfulness of the friendship, of the homage of those men,
never criticizing, that began when they were children...
and you will remain in the home of their hearts’ affection
forever and ever. And Louis Stevenson and I decided that
of all fame, that was the best, the very best.
To borrow from Seth Godin again, this is Twain talking
about building a tribe, the base of true fans, who become
your living marketing. This article, more than 100 years
after Twain’s death, is testimony to the concept.
Twain had some advantage over most content marketers.
He produced high-quality work, he produced lots of it,
and he produced it over his entire lifetime. Leave ‘em
laughing, and they will never leave you.