#38 - Sell Sheets (Industry Talk)

Music. Hello and welcome to fun problems the problems of fun i'm peter c hayward i'm aj brandon and this is a board game design podcast primarily but today we're branching out a little bit we're doing something that i don't normally like to do and that is hardcore pornography, we've really changed our demographic this has to be in the mood what are we doing today aj that's a little bit out of scope for us today we hope our listeners will be okay with we're not selling our

bodies we're talking about selling our games so normally we try to stick to like design principles design philosophy but obviously there is more to game design than literally designing games and that's something we're going to address today yeah it was interesting you did a poll a little while ago and i was expecting most of our listeners to not really care one way or another but it was actually quite controversial and a lot of our listeners really wanted us to stick to

just the craft which i get like i feel like most that's why we started the podcast literally.

And most other game design podcasts have so much focus on industry and so little on craft it's a very poor ratio that i think a lot of people from what they said is that that's something they like about ours so don't worry this isn't going to be something where we're shifting our focus hugely but every now and then if there's something that we feel like we need to talk about we'd like to be able to at least cover these topics on our podcast so the people who want to hear our opinions on

these things can't hear them so without a lot of further ado it's it's really important to make sure that we cover these topics and today we're going on sell sheets do you want to yes well this is this has actually taught me a very valuable lesson and i'm curious if you know what that is it's a lesson that we've learned before and then we unlearned for this episode i'm sure you did do not foreshadow the next episode because you're

gonna be wrong so the context to this is that we actually started recording an episode where i go through aj's sell sheets and you'll you'll hear on that episode when it comes out next uh on youtube only that's right our podcast is now on youtube that one of the most frustrating things about i think working with me is that i can't answer a simple question so before i could give feedback on a sell sheet i need to answer the question what is

a sell sheet what is the purpose of a sell sheet why do you do a sell sheet what is life is god real so that's what we're going to be tackling today in the show between the hardcore pornography and Is God Real.

We've really gone out of scope here. It's a wild episode. And this is, for the first time in 11 months, not a Peter-led episode. Instead, this is just an open discussion between me and AJ, because we don't have the answer pre-prepared. AJ, I don't think you have notes. I don't have notes. So, on a very literal level, what does a sell sheet mean?

A sell sheet is something that you can either email to a publisher when they ask for if they have a submission window, or you can hand them at a convention if you're pitching to them. Something where it goes through all the basic information that a publisher would need to tell whether or not they'd be interested in seeing more of the game. So this is going to have component lists. This is going to have the basic premise of the game.

Ideally, it will have some visual indication of what it looks like. It's going to have the name of it. Contact information. Contact information.

The most important thing please don't forget that people do forget it is the most important thing more important than anything else on the sell sheet if they don't know how to contact you it's all for nothing a little little bit of history of the sell sheet i don't know if you know this this is obviously based off the idea of like a pitch deck or a sales sheet which in other industries so in other industries if you're at a trade show let's say

i make lighting fixtures and i want to sell my lighting fixtures to a store that sells lighting fixtures i might have a sell sheet that has the price, it has the information, it has all this kind of stuff. This is very standard. This has been in industries for decades and decades and decades, more so since the rise of desktop publishing in the 80s. We're really going back here. And then it was brought to board games specifically by Sen and Che.

I don't know if you know that. I don't know what they brought it. They essentially invented the modern designer sell sheet, which is now such an industry staple. I suspect that that's one of the most lasting impacts they or anyone will have on the industry. And I believe, this is from memory, I believe they invented it when they started going to Gamma. Do you know what Gamma is? You've never been to Gamma, but are you familiar with it?

Yeah, it's basically like a convention, but more for retailers than for public or for game designers or anything like that. Yeah. At Gamma, the booths are publishers and the customers are retailers. So if you own a friendly local board game store, you might go to Gamma to decide which games to stock and to learn about how the industry is going. Gamma is also the name of the regulatory board or the CPA equivalent for board

game manufacturers. Yeah. And so Gamma is a convention that's in, I think, Louisville this year. It was in Reno for a long time. And Sen and Jay started going, and they were the only designers there. So they had free access to every publisher. And so they came up with, I believe, for Gamma, this idea of a sell sheet so that they could be like, hey, here's the five games I'm working on.

What interests you? Or they could be like, cool, I can't give out a copy of my game to everyone, but here's a sell sheet, et cetera, et cetera.

Now, have you done speed pitching? we might as well fold that in here because that's quite relevant to sell sheets i hope not okay so speed pitching is is a phenomenon it's it's an event that happens at a lot of board game conventions where designers each have a table with their game setup and the publisher goes you know 20 publishers rotate between all the tables this is the primary place that i see sell sheets obviously they use elsewhere but like you

kind of want to have a great sell sheet so that when the publisher's like oh that one they can take it because when you see 20 games in an hour it's really not literally 20 games now but like 20 games in a single event you're really going to run into them okay so that's that's the history of a sell sheet that's the basics of a sheet where would a sell sheet be used a to the j you mean in terms of like what's the context that i'd be giving it to a publisher yes yes yes the main

things would be if you're at a convention and you go up to a booth and you're talking to publisher you could show them a sell sheet so you could run through the game quickly or leave it with them if they want to take a look at it later you would email it to them if they have a submission portal on their website or if they just have an email you can send an email with the sell sheet on it and i think those would be the

main two uses of a sell sheet the main two places that you would be giving them out did i miss that yeah uh a lot no no i i would i'd say that's right i mean speed dating but that's sort of yeah as it's entitled to conventions the. What was I going to say? A lot of publishers will now have a requirement. Like, in order to pitch to us, you must put together a sell sheet. I hate making sell sheets. I hate them.

It's actually the type of thing where it's so standard that if you give a pitch to a publisher and you don't have a sell sheet, you're going to look like an amateur. Like, that's immediately going to be a big red flag for them, I think. Or you're going to look like a consummate professional, because I don't make sell sheets. So I've never had a publisher be like, no sell sheet, what an amateur. So I feel like it's the other end of the scale.

If you're on a first name basis with all the big publishers, then maybe you don't need a sell sheet. Sorry, that was such a braggy comment. It wasn't meant to be a brag. Yeah, I think a sell sheet is a good idea generally. And in fact, for a game, the game Mighty of the Sword I've talked about before with a local designer called Matt, we made a sell sheet for that. We made a pitch video for that.

And pitch videos, we will probably not do an episode on, but they are sort of like sell sheet plus a sizzle reel, a pitch video, et cetera. That's a whole different matter of that. you can listen to many other game design podcasts talk about i don't want to but i do want to talk about sell sheets because we started recording an episode where i critiqued your sell sheets.

And i realized i can't i can't do it without breaking down what is a sell sheet so we've gone through i think all of the like basic logistical like here's what they have here's what they are here's what they do but now aj i'm gonna ask you what are they for realistically what a sell sheet is for is to get a publisher interested in your game you want to hand it to a publisher and they say that looks really cool let's talk more about this maybe it's

on the spot if they have time maybe it's that they'll email you later and you can go back and forth maybe they'll ask you to give them a prototype or play test prototype with them directly or get you to mail it to them or they'll get you to play test on tts but either way it's the first step you hand than a sell sheet they are now looking for the second step to be able to assess whether or not this game would be a good fit for them so this very

much ties into something we do talk a lot about we do talk a lot about on the podcast which is product a sell sheet should cover mechanics only in that mechanics are a part of product now depending on the kind of game you're making mechanics might be the key part of the product so i say only but that might be the very center So for example, if you're making a party game, the mechanics are going to be the main thing that differentiates you from every other party game.

I'm going to make a slightly weird statement here. Every published game has a sell sheet. It's called the back of the box. Yeah, I forgot to get any examples, but I happen to have a game right next to me. So I'm going to pick up this very heavy game. And this is, oh, sorry, I've turned away from the microphone. fine. But if you're on YouTube, you'll be able to see that I'm holding up the back of Isle of Cats, and we'll get a scan of this into the show notes if you're not on YouTube.

And this is obviously a very, very wordy example. I did not realize that until picking it up. Except for contact details, which is relevant, it has everything else that AJ listed. It has visuals, it has component list, it has a summary of the game. This one has apparently the entire rulebook. It has the basic stats of like number of players.

It's got everything that a good sell sheet should have. So my advice is if you're trying to make a sell sheet, rather than looking at other designers' sell sheets exclusively, pick up your favorite games, look at the back of the box, because it's serving the exact same purpose.

It's saying this product will provide this experience is that is that a fair comparison yes i'll also say that i think pandemic has one of the best backup boxes i've seen i remember yeah i absolutely will and i use that in my talk which is sadly no longer on youtube we're gonna redo it at some point and put up on here but what was your talk just for context the talk was why your good game won't sell and it's pure product design it was as much for publishers

or people or self-publishing it as it was for designers talking about the things that can make your game fail that have nothing to do with the game design of the game the quality of the game design yeah right yeah the the game inside could be amazing could be garbage doesn't matter either way the game was sold or not sold for a lot of different reasons that you that you have some amount of control of and even as a designer but yeah for

pandemic the back of the box shows you a quick one two three steps this is what the game looks like here's the goals of the game here's the vibe of the game here's like the theme and does all that very succinctly it was a really good example.

I want to dive into which games will best sell shit no actually let's let's jump back and aj while i find a file can you summarize what we've described as the three hooks this is a bit of a summary so if you've listened before the what sorry three types of hooks the three types of hooks thank you yes yeah so the main types would be mechanical as in this is a you know a mechanic in your game that is so unique and so interesting that will sell the game on its own the key or most go-to

example would be dominion the when dominion came up it was the only deck building game so if you describe the mechanic and you're saying this is the only game that ever does this and it's really cool that's an amazing selling point so that's one type of hook second type would be thematic this is something where the theme of the game is so unique and so interesting so exciting that the game is going to sell just when you

tell people what the game's about so i think scythe is generally speaking one that a lot of people latched on starfish uh flamecraft as well totally i mean there's tons tons of great examples nope there's two yeah. Another one would be component hook. So that would be something where there's some cool element in it, some component that was manufactured.

And it's just so fun or cool that people are like, I'm just buying the game just because even if the game's only okay, I really want to own it for this component. Some great examples of that would be Everdell's adorable and great little components, all the little resources, the squishy berries and stuff. And the tree.

And the tree. and uh cash and guns where you're literally holding foam pistols and you're like yeah i'm gonna shoot my friends do you remember what my number one component uh hook example is i i always think this when we're talking about it i can't think about component hooks without thinking about zolkin oh of course of course because like yes it's a cool component but also like it tickles the game like it it tells you the mechanics at the same time incredible okay so i'm

gonna go out and say something pretty obvious games with a component hook will sell sheet better than games that don't have one in an ideal world let's let's talk about the platonic ideal of of product design you want all three and you want all three to be amazing if you can hit that you will sell your game like i've it's a little bit self-fulfilling because i'm like if you don't sell your game you didn't hit them but i think that as as someone who pitches a lot my games that have those three.

Just immediately sell a lot better okay i'm going to just use two i've only got two sell sheets.

That i actually like i don't make them much anymore but these two i. Put effort into one of them i was dating a graphic designer so she made a. Sell sheet for me and i was like oh i i obviously we broke up for many reasons but i'm like that that was not one of them um so uh these will be in the show notes for youtube i'm just going to share my screen i think that'll work so this is a game that you know and i think have played this is our first time screen sharing

in this app so let me know if you can see this aj crystal clear okay cool can you describe this for the listener he's driving and can't pull up the thing so this is a game called movie night from peter c hayward a cooperative trivia game so this is like the first thing i see it's at the top where our eyes are naturally going to go at the start it's in big letters so it's very easy to tell that's the title and that's from being directed to first this is like the opposite of the next episode where

i'm gonna tear yours apart you're gonna compliment mine yeah just imagine the opposite of all the things i said so the that has the player count on it the age range how long it takes to play weirdly specific time lengths but maybe it's on a timer i assume it has a seven minute timer i i like weirdly specific scythe has this as well scythe has a play time of 108 minutes or something like that because he just took all the play tests averaged and put on them on the box and i think it was genuinely

a funny talking point similarly there's a game that has you've probably seen this zero to two players and you just like zero it i i like it when games do that i think that's fun that's something that cuts your attention if nothing else right. And the poster says, or the sell sheet says, sorry, it's movie night, so I'm thinking posters. To win, name a game that matches all of these conditions. Nope.

Try again. To win, name a movie that matches all of these conditions. You said game. Oh. Criminal or cop featured, mostly set in city, advanced technology or magic, one word title. But none of these. Scenes set in the USA, mother featured, released in the last 20 years. So to win, you have to name something that matches the core conditions that first listed, none of the ones in the second listed.

I'll read the next bit just to relax your voice a bit. In Movie Night, you have seven minutes to name seven films with increasingly specific conditions. Each time you name a film, reveal a new condition card, find a movie that matches all seven conditions and win. When you're done, take a photo of the final game state and share on social media to see if others can name anything that meets all the criteria. And then it says components, 40 basic condition cards, 15 advanced condition cards.

It has my email address and it has a qr code that says see it in action so like i said we're kind of going to do what we're doing next episode uh thoughts on this little sheet just off the top of your head i'm i'm this game has been signed by two different publishers so i promise you you cannot hurt my feelings here well it's shocking that they did considering how terrible the self it makes sense it lists everything nice and clearly i like that this is one thing that you we'll talk about

a lot in the next one but i am hyper text averse which i think is to my advantage in this case because i think most designers put way too much information on this one is a little text heavy i'm not even going to deny that um but but but peter's saying it's a little text heavy and i agree that it is a little text heavy there's not tons of of information there's a little bit more than you need to get across what it is for that at a glance is this a thematic hook a component hook a mechanical

hook etc etc right so this is where it gets a bit weird because like you said party games are just a mechanic and this is a party game so it has to be mechanical hook because like that's that's all there is i don't like there's no theme to this i mean can you see the component hook that i tried to jam into this sell sheet.

Component hook maybe is not the right word but it's i would call it when when you're going to take a photo of the final game state i see so this is a game that is out right now from all play as apropos of movies and this game i've had more publisher interest than almost anything, because literally at the end of the game i would take a photo i'd put it on social media i would get a hundred plus comments you would remember aj this a few years back like every day i was posting one

of these and every day the comments were just full of people like trying to name stuff that matched it having conversations about exceptions and i think it's not strictly a component hook but you see what i mean when i say like it's directly adjacent right um and this is what i was saying at the start of this is we named three types of hooks realistically like there are a lot of other kinds of hooks which we've talked about on the podcast before girls into our previous episodes but it for

the sake of this discussion we don't need to be pedantic about what kind of hook it is yes yes you're absolutely right it is a good hook because it's showing publishers there is a way to market this and this is a really important thing that we need to touch on here is sell sheets aren't selling your game to the consumer they're selling it to the publisher you're not going to convince anyone to buy this game because you can take a picture on

social media but you are going to convince the publisher to sign it because it has that hook and and there is definitely it's almost nested you sell to a publisher by showing them how they can sell to consumers so i bring this up not just to not just to show off i think this is great i mean.

It literally like i think she works at walmart as like their top three graphic designers so she is very very very good at what she does so this is just a really pretty sell sheet the reason i showed this one specifically is because this does something that if you can do this on a sell sheet.

You're you're going to be in a great position do you know what that is aj i assume it's what we were talking about it's no you can play the game from this sell sheet you could right now and and every publisher i showed it to did they'd be like okay let me solve this puzzle like all my games are disguised puzzle games this one is not even that that disguise the puzzle is can you name a film that matches these but not these and you

can looking at the sell sheet listening is going to be a little harder but looking at the sell sheet you can play this and i deliberately chose stuff that had like several answers like i didn't choose the the impossible edge case i chose a fun interesting one right so so just like playing along here i'm like oh criminal or cop featured mostly sense city advanced technology or magic one will tell i'm thinking oh could be robocop but then i'm like oh but it can't be or it can't

have a scene set in the u.s okay so you know it gets you thinking about it and like you said you you play the game immediately you are literally that's what the game is. You are playing the game. Now, most games you can't do this with. Like, the back of the box of Isle of Cats, you're not playing Isle of Cats. The sell sheet for Wingspan, you couldn't play Wingspan from. But if you can get people to... You know, games are fun problems. What a great term. We should name a podcast after that.

If you can have people solving the fun problem during your sell sheet, like that's what a pitch is essentially. It's like, hey, here's a taste of the game. If you can give a taste of that game in the sell sheet, you are on fire, I believe. Not all games apply to this, but if you can get this in your sell sheet, and I really think you'll do better. And even if it's not, you're able to play, like you said, give them a taste of it.

And one of my sell sheets which we'll talk about next episode i've got it where i tried to set up a scenario where you can see the depth of the game and how you would actually be interacting on a turn i don't tell you exactly how you know all the mechanics of the game but i show you like strategically what sorts of things you are going to be able to expect yeah i'm going to show you another one and then we will

do some general philosophy and then we'll be done this is i guess technically a minisode, oh yeah this is the this is unsigned at the moment so maybe this isn't the world's best example of a sell sheet but oh i mean i like this game though it's not signed yet it's crazy you haven't played this have you i haven't but i know enough of it to know that it's pretty cool.

Cool can uh thank you i'm very proud of this sorry i just realized that i've given my co-designer's phone number but i'll just go in and blow that out before it gets uploaded anyway, aj can you describe what you're seeing here and whatever catches your eye first just like you did last time yep so the title mightier than the sword by matt i'm not going to try and pronounce last name and peter c hayward you may have noticed i've been dodging pronounces last game as well because i can't remember

how it works that's my wife everyone and i got a booster juice i love, this episode's my food delivery by booster juice.

Peter don't derail the sponsorship segment my watermelon explosion booster juice is giving me just the boost i need to keep going is it literally just a water bottle no no it's it's like a smoothie oh okay gotcha hey my name is followed by matt and peter what else do you see well so first of all i don't like that your names are so large and prominent and the same font as the title i think that's a little bit distracting yep but my thing i see player count and time on the side what's

the third thing that's missing that doesn't have the age range that's suggested on there which it doesn't i don't think it's like mandatory but i do think it gives them an idea of like the complexity of it i only put an age range when it's like going to be playable by everyone like just looking at this i think it's fairly obviously like a heavy strategy game and i wouldn't expect a kid to be able to play it you know i don't think i've ever seen a cell sheet without it.

So maybe it's just something that I expect to see, but that makes sense. But anyway, not, not hugely important. Can you, can you see why we didn't include it? Yeah. It's because we wanted to put it inside the pages of a book and books have a twofold. I'm not saying that makes it right, but that is what happened. That's such a Peter answer as to why you didn't do it. Aesthetics matter to people, it really does. So what am I looking at here?

Most of the sell sheet is the board of the game in progress. So I can see a bunch of books laid out.

And you see all the tiles they're not actual books just for the listener good catch good catch lots of book titles so they're open the books that are open and then on one side i can see the names of them it's a bunch of public domain things and i see a bunch of meeples so it's suggesting without even having to read anything it's an area control game just due to the distribution everything and so i see yeah the ilia dracula all sorts of different stuff then of

my eyes are going to move down your protagonist whose story was never told explore books recruit beloved characters and claim unique powers in this mid-weight game of exploration and area control and it has three bullet points here that i think are probably ideally like your hooks or something that you're trying to get across here feel the theme book powers are based on their stories.

Explore and learn uncovering books adds new abilities modular setup use three wildly different genres each game then it has the component list which i'm not going to bother reading through and contact it for that you're going to blur yeah i was going to say read out his phone number that i can beep you okay so same questions last time what what hooks do you see here oh sorry which about titular three how many read them all so definitely has a very strong thematic

hook i i I don't quite understand how I, as a player, am fitting into this. Like, why am I putting soldiers onto books doesn't quite make sense to me. But the elements of, like, the books themselves being thematic and, like, feeling like you're going through these different sort of adventures. And the literary, the broader literary theme is, I think, pretty clear.

I can easily imagine this without very much effort at all of this being something like you're able to magically go from book to book and you're living inside these worlds and you're switching between them. So to me, even though I don't think it's super explicit, it's good that it's not super explicit because you're already giving me some strong vibes here. Yeah.

And the explore and learn, uncovering books, ads, and abilities, that indicates to me, again, you're trying to get a lot through a little bit of text. That indicates to me that you're going to be expanding as you play, which tells me the game's going to have a nice arc to it. We probably start with not many locations. And then the players are going to drive the exploration of adding more locations that you're going to be uncovering.

And modular setup, different genre sets, tell me each game you're using different sets of books and there's going to be a lot of replayability to it. So you're telling me in terms of more like emotional driven language, what is going to be happening, but really what I'm picking up on is it has a very strong thematic hook.

I would say this does not have a strong mechanical hook, like no offense, but in terms of like uncovering new books and new abilities and area control, module set, like none of those things are to me like, oh, I have to buy this game.

None of those things are like really unique to me and i but i would say it has a great component hook in that the locations being books is very very cute so this one is god three three years newer than the previous one and i think that's reflected in the fact that and i agree you're completely right i didn't hit it but we were trying to hit all three hooks we we very consciously sat down and said can we hit all three hooks so in the in earlier prototypes

these books were just cards like they were just rectangles and then we said no look this game is going to look so cool on the table let's put the effort in i made it in illustrator if you look carefully it's actually upside down it should be rotated 180 because right now it's like folded the wrong way for an open book obviously that would be fixed before publication but we we put the effort into making the book shape tiles and then laying them out etc etc so mechanic

so component hook we went really hard on. We didn't say it anywhere. You know, the old adage, show, don't tell. It doesn't say anywhere, this looks really cool. We just made it look really cool. And you can look at it and see that it's really cool. And then as you mentioned, thematic hook, we went hard on it. This was originally generic area control as a theme. And I said, no.

I think I've told this story in the podcast before. That's not good enough. So we spent a day just brainstorming ideas until we came up with this that we fell in love with and multiple publishers have fallen in love with like i said it's not signed yet it's currently with like two pretty major publishers and i would be shocked if neither of them makes an offer and if not we've got more looking at it in the next few weeks mechanical hook the game has and i tried to get on the

sell sheet and eventually i gave up and i think that was the right move because it's it's a really interesting mechanical hook which is that it's an area control game where the areas you control give you powers. And that, as a gamer, I'm like, I want to play that. Like, that's super interesting to me. Now, it's not the most mechanical hook ever. You're right. It's still like area control, it's called. But I think that's a super interesting twist on the genre.

I couldn't get that into this. So like you said, we lent on the modular setup, et cetera, et cetera. And then the other product hook is how incredibly expandable this is. That's something that I focus a lot on my designs. I love expansions, expansions, expansions.

You and i have a game with ag that is a core part of the pitch was this game every expansion makes it twice as good as the previous expansion basically and that's the idea here too so this this is very much made to the to the model of our game where it's like you play with any three but each three for a different combinations if you get another five into the box wow that unloads things so i i really hit i tried to hit with a cell sheet the mechanical sorry

the thematic and the component hooks and the other stuff i was like you know what playing the game is going to get that to you i'll hint at them here but that's not my focus whereas the previous one was all mechanical and then a little bit of like component or shareability hook yeah makes a lot of sense yes so so this this is the conversation i would have basically like what is a cell sheet a cell sheet is can you condense your pitch i mean literally your

pitch but like what is a cell sheet is a condensed pitch. What is a pitch?

A pitch is my game is a product. My game is a product that people will buy. That's what a pitch is. And so going down the layers, a lot of especially new designers will be like, my sell sheet needs to explain how the game works. This sell sheet doesn't have a single mechanism on it. If I told you, hey, AJ, set up and play this game, you literally can't from the sell sheet. It has, you know, the word area control on it. It has uncovering new book size, new abilities.

It doesn't tell you how it plays at all. Zero percent. Because that's not what the pitch is. That's what the final game is, but that's not what the pitch is. Does that make sense? Yes. So just to be, just to sort of restate that in a slightly different way, the granularity of your game for a rulebook needs to be extremely high because you need to tell players exactly how every little detail works.

The granularity for the sell sheet needs to be extremely low because you're not trying to hand them a rule book and say, read this whole rule book and assess whether or not this game is for you. You're trying to tell them at the highest possible level what the game is about. And then the next step is them playing the game to understand it. But the publisher's goal is to see whether or not it's for them as quickly and

easily as possible. Yes. I can name so many publishers who would look at this and immediately be like not for me and that's a-okay like i'll use amigo as an example that's the company who makes no thanks and bonanza and six nimit they're never going to sign this game this makes zero sense for them and at a glance they can tell that that's a good thing like it's the classic if you try to please everyone you'll please no one like make sure you make sure you understand like it's easy the goal is

to understand what your game is trying to be as a product and then summarize that so you said in your in your the thing you just said it's the highest level look at the game that's true but there's different angles at which you can look at it and you've got to work out what makes your game unique what makes your game stand apart and what will attract publishers to your game and that's effing hard i'm not saying just do

that like i've been doing this for too many years many many many years and i'm still i'm still learning and getting better at it, but like, it really is a game of, a game of like.

Discovery and learning and like i'm going to be learning this for the rest of my life because, the market changes and publisher taste changes and consumer chase changes and like you your taste changes and so it's yeah a sell sheet requires you to first know thyself which is very very a big ask maybe an overwhelming ask can you can you make this more accessible because i feel like i've i've gone too philosophical i i think i think we're just sort of saying the same stuff

at this point cool so that is a very high look at sell sheets if If you go to a YouTube channel, you will see me diving into some of AJ's sell sheets in the way that he did mine on YouTube this episode.

I'm going to put the sizzle video for this, for my dinner and the sword up, just so you can see what that looks like. I very much doubt we'll ever do an episode on sizzle videos, but who knows, maybe in 20 years time, that'll be as mandatory as sell sheets are now, and we'll feel the need to dive into it. Any closing thoughts, AJ? No, I think we absolutely nailed it. Do you want to have a little bit of fun? I'd love to.

Okay. Okay, what is your favorite beverage that you don't get to drink very often? Oh, what a lovely question. Thank you. Do you have an answer off the top of your head? I do. I didn't when I started asking, but by the end of the sentence, I did. There is a place in Australia called Max Brenner. It's like a chocolate, a chocolatisserie. I don't know what those are called. Chocolatiers. And they, what's that? Chocolatiers. Yeah, it's like a chocolatier, like the three chocolatiers.

And they have a peanut butter smoothie that must be, like, 2,000 calories. It must be insanely bad. But I dream of that thing. Like every time I go to Australia, I have one. The last time I went to Australia, on the last night I was trying to get one and we went to Max Brenner and their machine was broken so they didn't have any. So we drove 40 minutes to a different Max Brenner just so I could have it. If you're ever in Australia, if you live in Australia, Max Brenner's like,

maybe they don't do it anymore. That was seven years, eight years ago now. They're like peanut butter, thick shake, milkshake thing. Oh, it's too good.

I'm glad it's not local because otherwise I would never drink anything else and I would be twice the size I am what about you so my problem is this is a classic Peter answer I'm so good at making things that I can make the best version of most things that I like I make milkshakes I make really good lattes I make really good coffee and everything but the one thing that I'm not great at as much as I you know I've got a nice fancy espresso machine I can make

that everything but i've got a friend who is like really into coffee you know type like my i have a nice espresso machine he has like four espresso.

Machines because he keeps just buying the best one and then you're like that's not good enough and when he makes me a coffee that's a coffee so i would say my the best drink that i don't get to have very often is any coffee he makes no matter what he does with it like he will come out with like the best cup of coffee i've ever had every time should your wife feel threatened yeah get better making coffee i mean she only brought you a smoothie

or whatever it was he makes you the world's best coffee it was good um thanks much for listening uh we have a discord please come join us and chat in our discord we've been having lots of lovely conversations lots of good feedback including oh let's briefly mention that aj is aware that the audio has been a little rough lately he's had a huge office renovation and we are working on it and hopefully this one's been better and

it will continue to improve forever fun yes i i just have a bunch of sound film i'm really hoping that helps because if not then we're gonna have to figure it out thanks so much for listening. Music. Thanks for joining us. You can follow us on Facebook or Twitter at FunProblemsPod or reach us via email at FunProblemsPodcast at gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you. And if you enjoyed the podcast, please tell a friend.