Why sequels fail (and how writers can avoid repeating their mistakes)

Discover how entrepreneurs can uncover the emotional drivers behind customer requests and deliver what people really want, not just what they say they need.

Hi,

I run into writers all the time who say some version of “I’m giving people what they say they want,” or “I’m writing more about my most popular topics, but I can’t replicate my success.” Basically, even when they follow the data and give people what people “want”, they still can’t make anything new pop with thier audience.

Combating this is one of the toughest bits about building a thriving creative career. Customers will confidently tell you what they think they want…except that what they say and what they will actually buy are two very different things.

It turns out that while people know how they want to feel when they interact with your product or service, they struggle to articulate exactly how to get there again. They’ll ask for more features, more options, or more of what they’ve already experienced, but what they’re really asking for is a way to recapture an emotional high. To truly succeed, we need to decode these requests and focus on delivering the emotional experience that keeps people coming back.

It’s the reason sequels fail (or succeed). Failed sequels come from creators listening when the audience says “more more more”, but failing to hear the “…of this feeling please” between the chanting. Successful sequels deliver on giving audiences the same feelings as the original, instead of just the same structure and characters.

Like children (and most adults, honestly), customers rarely articulate their emotional needs directly. Often, they don’t even understand their emotional needs enough to articulate them.

They focus on tangible requests like "I want more sex" or "Give me more of this relationship” but that’s not really what they want. Readers don’t have the language to express what they really want, so they instead fall back on the language they do have, even if it is imperfect at best and wildly incorrect at worst.

What they’re really expressing is a desire to feel something specific. Maybe it’s the thrill of discovery, the satisfaction of efficiency, or the comfort of feeling understood.

The key is to listen beyond the words. Instead of taking requests at face value, dig into the emotions behind them. What made the customer satisfied in the first place? What are they trying to replicate?

A customer might ask for more articles on a specific topic, but the deeper emotional need could be a desire to feel that same emotional catharsis again. Simply adding more articles likely won’t fulfill that desire within them unless you can replicate the same feeling again.

It’s important to ask what emotional outcome your customers are chasing? Once you understand that, you can design solutions that meet the deeper need, even if they don’t look exactly like what was requested.

This is the counterintuitive part about listening to your audience, because hearing them is really about translating what they are saying into what they really want, which might not seem like listening to them at all in the moment.

When customers give feedback, it’s important not to stop at their first answer. Instead, dig deeper to uncover the emotional motivation behind their request. The first thing they mention is usually a surface-level solution, not the root of the problem.

Getting to the heart of what people really want requires not only asking the right questions, but also the right follow-up questions. Instead of asking, “What characters would you like to see?” ask, “What relationship resonated most deeply with you?” or “How did you feel when you finished reading?”

Asking deeper questions help you move away from simply delivering what’s been requested to designing an experience that taps into what people actually care about.

A really great game to play is the five whys, which involves asking somebody “why is that important?” or some variation five times about the same topic to draw out their true feelings.

• Why do you feel that way?

• Why is that important?

• Why did you like that?

• Why does that matter to you?

• Why do you think that is?

Even better, if you know your audience well and understand their problems on a deep level, then you can predict which problem you’re solving with anything you launch, and how to deliver something that will resonate with them.

Remember, you are the expert delivering what your customer needs, even if it is buried under a mountain of false beliefs of what they say they want. It’s your job to uncover what they want, both through their words and their actions.

Customers say one thing, but their actions often tell a different story. By observing how people engage with your work, you can get a clearer picture of what they really value. Behavior is often a more reliable indicator of needs than verbal feedback.

If you see people reading a particular type of article from you or spending more time in one part of your catalog, that’s a signal to dig deeper. Look for patterns in behavior that reveal what’s resonating emotionally. What do they keep coming back to? What sparks engagement?

Don’t rely too much on using engagement as a metric unless that was the point of your article. Everything you write should have a clear objective, from writing a comment to subscribing to becoming a paid member of your community. Yes, everything you write will lead to a bevy of different outcomes depending on the reader, but it’s important to know what your intention is before you decide if it aligns with your reader’s actions.

If you write a sales post that doesn’t get any sales, but gets tons of engagement, that’s probably pretty terrible alignment. It’s also going to severely affect your bottom line. Engagement don’t pay the soup man, as they say.

By observing how customers behave, you can align your future offerings to enhance the emotional aspects they’re most drawn to, even if it’s not something they’ve explicitly requested.

That said, when you enter another community, people there might behave a lot differently to you than in your own community. This is often because this new audience:

• Doesn’t know who you are, so they don’t trust you yet.

• Don’t have the language to talk about or even understand what you’re talking about.

Integrating into a community usually involves both building trust and disseminating the language needed to understand, explore, and be transformed by what you’re trying to talk about with them.

As a Kickstarter expert, I’m often called to talk about crowdfunding with other communities. When I do, I focus mainly on explaining the opportunity Kickstarter provides and giving the new community the language to translate what they know into how this new platform works.

I’m not going to deep into the nitty-gritty of Kickstarter because I don’t want to overwhelm them. Meanwhile, my own audience is very well-versed in Kickstarter, so we can talk about crowdfunding on a much deeper and more nuanced level.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t new things to introduce to my audience, though. I’ve spent a decade laying the groundwork with my most ardent readers about how to thrive in capitalism, mainly by showing them how to use platforms and get in the right mindset to thrive. Now, I’m introducing a book called How to Thrive in a Capitalist Dystopia to them this year, which wouldn’t have been possible back in 2015 because nobody had the language to have this conversation in a nuanced enough level for it to make sense.

Crowdfunding is one factor in that equation, but it’s far from the only one. So, we expanded the message into direct sales, retailers, and mindset and allowed all of that to permeate through our community until they understood the full scopes of the problem. Only now, after disseminating the aspect of the conversation for years, do I feel confident my audience is ready for the next part of the conversation and the transformation that comes with it.

Once you understand the emotional drivers behind your customers' needs, your next step is to innovate around that emotional experience. This doesn’t mean simply adding more features or rerunning the same playbook. It means designing experiences that evoke the right feelings. The goal is to enhance the emotional payoff while surprising your customers with new ways to achieve it.

Instead of writing about a particular topic just because people ask for it, think about how you can amplify the feeling that’s driving their request. People don’t buy books. They buy the feelings that come with them. When communicating the value of your work, focus on the emotional impact it creates rather than just listing topics or technical details.

Customers care about how your product makes their life easier, better, or more enjoyable, so lead with that bit first.

Instead of focusing solely on what your writing does, emphasize how it makes readers feel. Are you giving them peace of mind? Empowering them to do something they couldn’t before? Streamlining a process that causes frustration?

When you position your writing around emotional benefits, you’re speaking directly to the deeper needs of your audience. This helps you connect with them on a more personal level, making it easier for them to see how your offering fits into their life. Apple’s marketing doesn’t just list features. They focus on how their products make people feel creative, inspired, and in control. You should do the same by highlighting the emotional outcomes your product delivers.

Here are some practical ways to apply these insights and start delivering on your customers’ true emotional needs:

• Focus on the emotion behind the request: Don’t just give them what they ask for directly. Instead, figure out the emotional experience they’re trying to achieve, and offer a solution that delivers that feeling.

• Ask “why” multiple times: Keep asking “why?” until you uncover the emotional driver behind a request. The first answer will rarely get you to the core of the problem. That said, it’s important to note that whenever your audience tells you something is wrong they are right, but if they tell you how to fix it they are almost always wrong. It’s your job to translate what they say into what they mean, and implement it.

• Test emotional outcomes, not just features: When launching new products or features, test how they make your customers feel. If the emotional payoff isn’t there, no amount of functionality will save it.

• Create an emotional journey: Design your product experience to guide customers through an emotional arc—from solving a pain point to delivering satisfaction or excitement.

• Triangulate your audience: I like to “plunge the depths” of what my audience wants by offering a lot of different articles with different hooks, and use the successes to guide the fence around which I operate. If you haven’t been doing this for a while, then it takes a while to know the bounds by which your audience will engage with your work, and it’s different for everyone. Once you can triangulate your signal around several different points, you’ll have a stronger relationship with your audience, and what they want.

That said, you could do all this and fail. That’s just part of it and why you need to take a bunch of angles with any launch. Even if you do everything right from design to execution, some things just won’t resonate. These are all just strategies to help you separate the chaff from the wheat so you fail less over time.

At the core of every piece of writing is an emotional experience. Readers might ask for more of what they’ve already had, but what they truly want is to feel the way they did when they first connected with your product. By understanding these emotional drivers and innovating around them, you can deliver more than what people say they want. You can give them what they actually need.

Focus on the feeling, and you’ll build deeper, more lasting connections with your customers.

What do you think?

• Have you ever experienced a disconnect between what your customers said they wanted and what they actually needed? How did you bridge that gap?

• What techniques have you found most effective for uncovering the emotional needs of your audience? Do you rely more on feedback, behavior, or a combination of both?

• When was the last time you made a decision based on customer feedback, only to realize they were chasing a feeling rather than a feature? What did you learn from that experience?

If you found this interesting, then there are over 850 exclusive posts available behind the paywall, including tons of interviews, courses, books, and more to help you on your author growth journey. You can start exploring with a seven-day trial, or even just give us one tip to show your support.

Where to go next:

Platform, audience, and assets

Empower vulnerability with your audience

The bullseye method for growing an audience

Photo by Eduardo Sánchez on Unsplash