A few days back I went live to talk about why Harry's memoirs are such a bad idea for
his 'career'.
And you're about to understand in this summary, why it is going to backfire bad.
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Well, there is no official cover yet, so I decided to be proactive and design one myself.
Harry, feel free to use it.
I know that you will need all the help possible to justify the advance payment of 20 million
dollar from Penguin Random House.
Now, this is not necessarily up front.
It's not like Harry is swimming in dollar bills before publishing the book that is apparently
due for later this year.
It could mean that this is the amount that the publisher guarantees as payment in case
the book is finally published.
But you don't have to be a genius at math to figure out that this must be an awful lot
of books to sell.
Why do I think this is such a bad idea?
well, for starters, the main problem is the nature of the book itself.
It is a memoir.
You might be wondering, what is the difference between a memoir and an autobiography?
And my question is, why would you care about the difference? in either way, it's Harry
writing it.
It makes no difference.
But seriously, the difference is that an autobiography is a recollection of the whole life of the
person up to the point of writing, while a memoir, usually focuses on a specific moment
or specific moments of the person's life, BUT the focus of the book is not the person
themselves but a greater theme or topic.
In that live I mentioned that a great example of a memoir is Matthew McConaughey's Greenlights.
This is not adversising or anything.
I'm just mentioning the book because I really liked it.
Matthew uses certain moments of his life, and some of them are really private, to illustrate
the greater concept of greenlights, which are those small signs that life gives you,
to just keep going.
So basically he's talking about himself, but in a way to showcase a greater topic.
Another examples of good memoirs are When Breath Becomes Air from Paul Kalanithi, which
makes you really value the fact of being alive, and Sharon Stone's The Beauty Of Living Twice.
In a memoir, the person is not really the protagonist.
It's the concept that you want to illustrate, to push to the world in a way that people
can reflect, and think and apply those concepts to themselves.
But we wonder, what would be the overarching concept of Harry's memoir?
well, I sincerely hope that he subverts our expectations and he goes for something interesting
like "How a man struggles to hide the back of his head from cameras".
Because if he mentions mental health again, and you can bet that he will, he's going to
hit a wall.
Because if you're a celebrity, and you write a memoir, is to capitalize on the fact that
you have fans that want to know something new about you.
Something secret, something that you have been struggling with for years.
But Harry has the not so small problem that his life has been documented ever since he
was born.
Both official and unofficial sources have left very little to the imagination.
Harry himself has left very little to the imagination.
So, the only thing we have left is the topic of mental health that Harry has been mentioning
over and over again for years.
Ok, we got the message, you've been struggling with it for decades, but then why did you
pretend in the last 12 months that this was some kind of a 'new topic' in your life?,
when it wasn't?
And the other big problem with any memoir, and in fact, in any book that tells a story,
is that the most important part of any story is the conflict.
What is the conflict that the protagonist has to overcome?
In the case of Greenlights, it was Matthew's journey in finding his own calling.
In the case of Sharon, it was dealing with a catastrophic health problem.
But that was something that we did not know about them, and even if they are celebrities,
they were not born celebrities.
They had to earn that status.
Harry, on the other hand, earned the status of Royal at birth.
That's something that he did not struggle to get.
That's an enormous privilege that he got just by blood.
That makes so much harder for people to relate to him, because 99.99% of this world doesn't
have the opportunities that he had since he was born.
Ok, he had to go through something that we don't wish anyone to go through, but I think
even his most rabid fans think that he had more than enough time to get help and get
over it.
So it's really cynical on his part to try to retcon his whole life and make everyone
think that it was Meghan's issues with the tremendous media pressure that made him think
about his own mental health problems.
Again, Harry, with his own words, said that William had already suggested that he should
look for help.
It's all documented.
So Harry has, tremendous privilege from birth so it's hard to be relatable, AND his struggle
with mental health is very, very old news and even worse, he has lost credibility about
that.
I'm sure Penguin Random House are really shaking in their boots now.
But wait! it gets worse!
Harry had all the privilege in the world, without William's responsibilities... and
he literally turned his back on his family.
And just to be clear, some families can be just plain shit, some families can be a complete
cesspool of narcissists and you have all the right to leave and ghost them for good.
But if that's the case with Harry, why did he complain about being cut off financially?
What is his problem with his father and brother being... trapped? and most importantly, why
does his wife keep using the title conferred by their oppressors?
Nobody can make sense of that.
If Harry publishes his book, it is going to bomb.
Badly.
Because a memoir has three essential requirements.
- One, the public must be able to connect with you as a person.
- Two, you have to tell a good story around a real conflict, and
- Three, you need to give a powerful message.
Harry is stuck at square one.
Connecting with people.
And if he knows what's best for him, he'd better not attack the Royal Family again,
as he did in that Oprah Interview.
Just for the reason that it doesn't hold water anymore.
You can imagine that there is so many people in this world that have overcome situations
ten times, twenty times worse than whatever Harry has been through, and they have done
it with a fraction of his resources, with a tiny fraction of his connections.
It's laughable.
A publishing bomb will only have a domino effect in whatever other projects he could
have signed up for.
And I'm guessing that this is one of the reasons that 'memoir' is taking so long, because his
PR team is desperately trying to avoid any fallout to affect his Spotify and Netflix
contracts.
And there is one final reason Harry publishing a memoir is a really bad idea.
You can imagine that each and every page of that book is going to be scrutinized down
to every word... and Harry's reputation and credibility has already been tarnished by
himself and his wife over and over again.
So any inconsistency with the recollections of the people featured in that book are going
to spark real controversy, and that's the kind of attention the Harkles really don't
want at this point.
I'm just waiting for him to talk about his experience in Afghanistan.
I have my popcorn ready, waiting for the public replies.
In the end, this looks like a regular vanity project.
A book made just to stroke the ego of the protagonist.
That is not bad in itself, but in this case it's going to be a very costly, and I'm sure,
catastrophic mistake, for Harry's career.
Whatever his career is about.
Not that I care much, but I'm the kind of person that never misses the opportunity to
say, at the right time, "I told you so".
If you want to refine your observation skills, all you have to do is download my 100+ body
language tips, right in the description of this video.
My name is Jesús Enrique Rosas and it will always be a pleasure, my body language buddies!
Much Love, and Bliss.