Insights & Commentary

If you've ever bought a book because a friend wouldn't stop talking about it, you already understand influencer marketing. And you already know why it works better than any ad ever could. So what is influencer marketing exactly?  At its core, influencer marketing is real people with engaged, loyal audiences recommending things they genuinely love. Not polished ads. Not publisher announcements. Just trusted voices talking to communities that actually listen. The numbers back t

A friend sent me an article last week about AI taking voice acting jobs. He's worried. And he should be — but not for the reasons he thinks. (And, no, this isn't AI because of the m-dash — I've been using m-dashes since high school. Thank you, Lawrence Township Public Schools.) Anyway, he's a professional voice actor. Great at what he does. When he shared that article, I could hear the anxiety between the lines: Is my career disappearing?  It's the same worry I'm hearing fro

Disclosure: Jeremy Ryan and Metamorphosis Agency are not affiliated with or compensated by any business mentioned in this article, including Libro.fm, Amazon, or Labyrinth Books. These are personal recommendations based solely on my experience as a consumer and human who cares. Post by Jeremy Ryan Founder of Metamorphosis and ThePlaybook.io I've been saying this since high school: Vote with your wallet! I remember a conversation in High School with my lifelong friend, Bill Co

Listen to this post on our podcast: You've spent years writing your book. Every word is deliberate. Every chapter serves a purpose. You've poured your heart into creating something meaningful. Now comes the marketing part. We've heard nearly every author say ... "After writing my first book, I didn't realize that more than 50% of my effort would go to marketing the book." So you do what any smart author does: you research. You read blog posts about book marketing. You join Fa

The Two Words on My Desk That Change Everything Listen to this on our podcast: Last June, I was sitting at my desk talking with Jonathan Eig—Pulitzer Prize winner, bestselling author, friend—about The Playbook. He was generously sharing insights from his career to help build the knowledge base that would power our AI marketing platform for authors. Mid-conversation, I grabbed a post-it note and wrote two words: Be Helpful . I stuck it on my desk. It's still there. Not because

Remember the early internet? Websites looked wild, checkout pages broke, and everyone’s experience was different. Then standards showed up—common ways of doing things—and suddenly e‑commerce took off, sites loaded faster, and customers trusted what they saw. That wasn’t the end of creativity; it was the beginning of scale. AI is at that same turning point. Right now, every tool has its own way of talking, tracking, and connecting. That means your team spends too much time sti

Today's post is inspired by an article about Voyager 1 and a conversation with my wife about persistence. Most of my professional achievements come from the simple expression, "persistence over resistance." In a world that often glorifies overnight success stories, the concept of quiet progress stands as a beacon of sustainable achievement. This method of steady persistence and incremental growth, though less glitzy, proves to be more enduring and resilient than the "flash in

A great tagline connects us to emotion. And by defining the product or service emotionally, it helps us define ourselves. For many, a tagline like “Think Different,” as simple as it is, connects independent thinkers to that product in deep, meaningful, and personal ways. A good one-liner is clever and relatable. It resonates with common experience and still offers an intelligent new thought perspective. It entertains the brain and elicits an emotional response. There is nothi

A compelling logo is simple and easily recreated. Logos with too many elements are hard to remember. Was that a unicorn and a lion on the crest? Symbols are as old as human civilization, they are wordless storytellers. Ancient Handprints on cave walls and hand-painted images of animals, hieroglyphs and religious symbols, mathematical symbols. They transcend all languages. They transcend words themselves. Those simple shapes each tell us a wordless story, we listen with our ey

So speak like a human. That’s what sets you apart from a bot. Relate to the audience and the audience will relate to you. Really listen and react like a human. It will work wonders for your business. You know that person that comes to the dinner party with all of their jokes and stories pre-planned? They don’t care what is going to happen at the dinner, they have their witticisms queued and ready to go. Most of us have come in contact with people who look right at you with a

Expecting that volume-of-posts in social will somehow grow the top of your business's funnel could be a waste of time. But, it depends on the nature of the business and how leads are generated. Keeping a cool head in business requires the heart and mind of a stoic. Being able to look at the big picture and hone in on the tiniest details and foresee opportunity with clarity and discipline is the job of a strategist. Only with an honest and appraising eye can an effective strat