Nobody Buys Book #12 For The Plot

OK, well… it is Tuesday. And I usually send out this newsletter on Mondays. Oops. 🤪

Actually, it wasn’t a mistake. It was a decision. I was in Maine visiting family all last week. Ended up feeling like crap the last day I was there, but that was short-lived. Then, our travel back home (which began at 3AM) was quite prolonged by flight delays and every other inconvenience you could have. Reminder why I hate flying. 🤪

So, rather than attempt to prepare a good issue of this newsletter while sitting on a nasty floor in an airport and coasting on 4 hours of sleep, I figured… I doubt you’d mind if I was a date late. 😇

But, I’m back. Quite happy to be, actually. And, let’s roll straight into it!…

You’re Not Selling Content. You’re Selling Yourself.

Was digging through some old stuff this week and found a tweet I’d bookmarked a while back… somebody quoting old-school Dan Kennedy material called Personality In Copy. You can’t even buy it anymore, near as I can tell.

The core claim, from 2006: your content is not what keeps people around. You are.

In other words, people don’t buy (or really care) about content. They care about the character. And that character in the story is YOU.

Kennedy’s frame was that an audience business is basically a never-ending novel, delivered in installments. Same thing as series fiction… Harry Potter, Spenser, Travis McGee. Nobody rushes out to buy book #12 because they’re dying to know the plot. They rush out because of their relationship with the character. We see this in entertainment circles all the time.

But, it is the same for people with online businesses that rely on building audiences. Bloggers, video creators, course creators even… people don’t come back to us over and over again to see the next post because it is useful. No… they do it because they LIKE you. You’re the character in the ongoing story.

Kennedy broke it down into 7 things every durable personality-driven business has. I’ll summarize them below, because it’s pretty interesting…

• The Guru — there has to be a character people are invested in. That’s you. You need to have an origin story, something interesting. Can’t be boring.
• The Parables — stories you tell over and over that teach lessons or make points. Sometimes, the truths are even exaggerated to drive a point home, but never lie.
• The Miracles — the impossible thing you’re known for pulling off. A financial turnaround, a big weight loss journey… whatever it is for your niche, it should be something really hard to do that you managed to do.
• Insider Language — words your people use that outsiders don’t. The vocabulary isn’t the point. Being “an insider” is the point. It is like the secret handshake. Think of how Taylor Swift fans are called “swifties”.
• The Dogma — your beliefs, stated as law. What do you stand for? What are your core principles?
• The Enemies — the one everyone skips. Standing for something isn’t enough. You have to stand against something too. People unite faster around a shared enemy than a shared value.
• The Testimony — not reviews. Other people telling the story of what you did for them.

And then the layer underneath all of it, which is the part that actually stuck with me: flaws, complexity, and evolution. You sustain interest to the exact degree you’re willing to let people see the real, messy version of you. Don’t try to be perfect. Don’t be predictable. We’re all kinda complicated. We all have flaws. Don’t hide that stuff.

I know this all seems very “big picture” at times. But, this kind of thing is also the GLUE which keeps people coming back. Keeps them reading your emails and the other content you create.

Now, in the next article (below), let’s talk about some practical takes on all of that…

WordPress News & Updates

A supply-chain backdoor got caught before it ever shipped. Someone slipped a hardcoded backdoor into a plugin with 20,000 active installs… and Wordfence’s AI scanner caught it within two hours, before the tampered version ever reached a live site. First real win for their “cooldown” system that holds new plugin releases for six hours before distribution. Full story here.

Turns out your host probably isn’t catching what you think it’s catching. Patchstack ran real attacks against a bunch of hosting providers and found only 26% got blocked at the host level. The rest sailed right through. If “my host handles security” is part of your peace of mind… might be worth a gut check. Here’s the data.

WooCommerce is putting new features on ice for 3 months. They’re sitting on 2,300+ open issues and 500 open pull requests, and instead of shipping more shiny stuff, the team is going heads-down on cleanup. Frankly, I’d rather have a stable cart than a new feature I didn’t ask for. Details here.

Elementor’s AI can now build a full page from one prompt. Type what you want, get real editable Elementor structure back, not some locked template. Cool tech, no doubt. But between you and me… Elementor’s been chasing “do everything” for a while now, and it’s drifting further from being just a good page builder. It’s not one I’d point people toward these days. See it here.

FluentBoards 2.0 is out… full rebuild, dark mode included. New UI across the board, a dashboard that actually shows you what needs attention, and AI help baked into task descriptions and summaries. Take the tour.

FluentCart just shipped something I’ve been waiting for. Version 1.6.0 adds a Subscriptions Engine, meaning your store can now manage recurring billing on its own instead of depending entirely on your payment gateway to handle it. That matters more than it sounds like… it’s the foundation piece they need in place before they can build a real migration path off WooCommerce Subscriptions. Once that migration tool ships, I’m planning to test it myself as a possible move away from Woo. Read the release notes.

FluentCRM got noticeably faster. Big sends are quicker now thanks to a rebuilt pipeline, and it recovers on its own if a send stalls instead of just getting stuck. They also beefed up the AI assistant… it actually knows your tags, lists, and segments now. Release notes here.

Heads up if you’re still on PHP 8.1: security patches stopped in December. Any new vulnerability found in 8.1 from here on out just… doesn’t get fixed. If you don’t know what PHP version your site runs, now’s a good week to check. More on the timeline.

Stop Discounting Your Own Story

Here’s the trap people fall into with something like this: they read “you need an origin story” and think “mine’s boring, I just… started a business one day.” The Guru concept sounds like it’s for somebody else. Somebody more interesting than them. Plus, we hate even thinking of ourselves as a “guru”. 🤪

That reaction is exactly backwards. So let’s go through each piece and ask better questions.

• The Guru. Don’t look for a dramatic story. Look for the ordinary decision point you walked past without noticing. What did you quit? What did you almost not do? What would a friend have had to talk you into? The story isn’t missing… you’re just not counting it as one.
• The Parables. You already tell the same 3 or 4 stories over and over, probably. A lot of the times, we don’t even notice. In client calls, in emails, at dinner when somebody asks what you do. You’ve probably dismissed them as “oh, that old thing.” Those are your parables. Write down the last story you told somebody this week without thinking twice about it.
• The Miracles. This one trips people up because they picture Olympic-level stuff. Lower the bar. What’s something true about how you operate that would genuinely surprise a stranger? “Runs the whole business solo.” “Never taken outside funding.” “Still does support emails personally.” Ordinary to you. Rare to them.
• Insider Language. What do you and your regulars call things that a new person wouldn’t get? You probably use it so naturally you don’t notice it’s a dialect. That’s not a gimmick to invent… it’s already there. Just start saying it on purpose instead of by accident.
• The Dogma. Ask yourself what you’d argue about at a dinner party full of people in your industry. Not what you’d nod along to… what you’d actually push back on. That’s dogma. If you can’t think of anything, that’s worth brainstorming. What do you believe?
• The Enemies. This is the one people avoid because it feels like picking a fight. But think about what genuinely annoys you about how your industry operates. What do you roll your eyes at? That eye-roll is usually your enemy, and you’ve been keeping it to yourself.
• The Testimony. Look back at messages people have sent you that you filed away instead of using. “This changed how I think about X” buried in an email thread somewhere. That’s testimony you already have and haven’t collected.

Notice the pattern? None of this is about inventing anything. It’s about noticing what’s already sitting there and deciding it counts. It is about looking at the things you’re already doing, the things you’ve done and experienced in the past… but looking at it from a fresh set of eyes. As if you’re the character in your own novel.

And you may think… am I making things up? Absolutely not. Don’t ever lie. But, keep these 4 words in mind: accentuate, exaggerate, sharpen, embellish.

That’s not permission to lie. Nobody’s saying make things up. What it’s saying is… most of us undersell the true version of our own story out of habit. We flatten it down to sound modest or normal. Nobody likes to brag. The instruction is to stop doing that. Tell the true thing with the weight it actually deserves instead of shrinking it down to fit in.

You don’t need a better story. You need to stop discounting the one you’ve already got.

And remember…

The information and knowledge is something they buy once. But, the character – YOU! – is what they come back for.