Neil Strauss is best known as a pickup artist.
He wrote a book called The Game which is about him learning how to seduce women.
He’s less well known as a ghostwriter of celebrity autobiographies. Before he wrote his own books, he co-wrote books for Motley Crue, Jenna Jameson, and Marilyn Manson.
He also turned down a chance to do a book with Britney Spears. (Even though it would mean lots of money and lots of exposure.)
Why’d he turn it down? Because Britney’s PR people didn’t want to tell Britney’s dirty little secrets. They wanted the book to make Britney look good.
If you read Strauss’s other autobiographies, they talk about some deep, personal stuff. In the Jenna Jameson biography, she admits to being raped twice when she was a teenager, which she had never talked about publicly before.
And Strauss does this in his own books, too. In The Game he talks about not being able to get an erection.
He knows that if a book is just a bunch of PR fluff, then no one’s gonna buy it, and it’s not gonna be a very good book.
A lot of people write their content that way. They hype themselves up, they only show their wins, and they try to make themselves look crisp and perfect and professional.
The problem with that is that it doesn’t seem human. If you only show your good side, people will know something’s missing.
So you have to talk about your failures. You have to tell embarrassing stories. That’s the stuff people actually want to see.
This will make you very uncomfortable, and you probably won’t want to do it, but that’s okay. There’s strength in showing your human side. There’s strength in showing your vulnerabilities.