Excerpted from Tell To Win: Connect, Persuade, and Triumph with the Hidden Power of Story Copyright @ 2011 by Peter Guber. Reprinted by Permission of Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
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N 2009, GAREB SHAMUS, founder of Wizard Entertainment, came with his partner Peter Levin to talk me into investing in their online venture Geek Chic Daily, a daily online newsletter for pop culture fans that highlighted the latest in cool yet geeky comics, toys, games, movies, technology, and gear. Little did I know that I would be on the receiving end of a story tailored with masterful care to appeal to my personal interests. Shamus’s publications include Wizard magazine, considered the most influential in the comic book, toy, and characterbased genre, as well as ToyFare and FunFare magazines. He also owns and operates the Big Apple, Chicago, Philadelphia, Toronto, and Anaheim Comic-Con festivals, which are like Woodstocks for comic fans. Gareb, in other words, is a guru of geeks. Since Peter Levin had first introduced me to him a few months earlier, Gareb had observed that I, too, was making products that were very youth-centric. He’d also noticed that I was a few decades past my twenties and had no direct voice in the conversation of my youthful audience. Sensing that these vulnerabilities concerned me, Gareb used them with great precision to interest me in his digital newsletter and website for popular culture enthusiasts. At the outset of our meeting he literally laid my concerns on the table by presenting physical evidence that I was out of touch with a vast new realm of business opportunity. He showed me some of the comics and graphic novels that
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