When aspiring authors come to me for career advice, the first question I ask them is why they’re writing.
Making a decent supplemental income is one thing. Making a living is a related, but different ballgame. Publishing a book just to scratch it off your bucket list and impress your family and friends is a whole other sport.
An amateur sport.
That question catches most of them off guard. The number of aspiring authors out there who’ve never stopped to consider why they want to write is staggering.
If you want to write a novel as a personal challenge or an essay in the craft, that’s great. Don’t pay for pro editing or a cover. Enjoy the pleasure of writing “The End” on the last page and file the MS in a shoe box in your closet. Or send a few copies to friends and family. Congratulations. You’ve achieved what very few people ever accomplish.
If you have more than one book in you. If, in fact, you can’t stop writing. I mean, if they locked you away, you’d swallow a pencil nub, regurgitate it in your cell, and cover the padded walls with fever dreams. That kind of obsession.
If you need to write like you need to breathe and you want your writing to reach as wide an audience as possible, then you need to learn sales. It serves no one to be good at the art and bad at the business.
On a personal note, I used to hate sales, too. I did my tours in the Christmas retail trenches trying to convince people that they wanted useless junk they couldn’t afford. I’m not talking cool toys for grownups with some entertainment value. I’m talking extended warranties on CDs and store credit lines. It was miserable.
In the middle of that drudgery, I sold my first short story. Suddenly I learned that people wanted to read my writing, and what’s more, they’d pay me for it.
Now I’ve come to appreciate sales. I even love sales. Because there are people out there who want to read my stories, but they won’t know it until I tell them that my stories exist.
I’ll let you in on a big secret: everything is sales. Life is sales. If you think about it, you use salesmanship in your day job, whatever it is. In the hypothetical case that you don’t, your job depends on someone who does.
But it goes beyond that. Your interactions with co-workers, friends; even your spouse and kids involve salesmanship principles. So it’s not a matter of biting the bullet and suffering the unpleasant necessity of sales. It’s about having something you’re so passionate about that you find joy in doing everything you can to share it.
People who find their dream jobs always say it doesn’t feel like work. For me, selling my stories doesn’t feel like sales.
So reading them will feel fun for you.
Sales gets a bad wrap because it’s presented so one sided: the annoying talkative won’t take no for an answer until you sign kind of thing. However, there are multiple forms of selling. Some people are good at door to door sales, building relationships immediately, but others (like myself) play the long game, taking time to build relationships over the long term before a sale is made. It’s why I’m building up my audience now and showing what I’m working on so when I have something worth selling, people already know me and see me as a worthwhile person to buy from. It’s not so much about the product sometimes as it is WHO you’re buying from.
Having gotten an insider view on sales and marketing the past few years, I suspect the trope of the sleazy, pushy salesman is a zombie meme pushed by folks in marketing.
In sales, your livelihood depends on effective human interaction. And you get real-time feedback. Slimeballs and liars don’t last long.
Marketing is more insulated from the consequences of failure (“Half of all marketing dollars are wasted, but nobody knows which half”). And they have the reach and resources to shift the blame onto sales.
It’s not all memes. I’ve been on the receiving end of such sleazy sales tactics from door to door sales men, online, and even CSRs from big time corporations (namely in insurance). I’ve also been on the receiving end of people’s rage who got duped by the sleazy sales force, my employer at the time (insurance), employed.
The best sales comes down to knowing your audience and finding the people who will not only listen to you but will without hesitation, take action by buying what you have to offer. Can’t tell you how many qualified potential clients I approached with a solution to their problems only for them to do nothing because they’d rather complain. Others didn’t have the attention span to hear an elevator pitch. That’s just the tip of the iceberg for lessons I learned through an endless string of failures.
I speak from having spent years, money, and time getting into various sales and marketing circles as well as hitting the pavement, getting online, and doing the work.
I haven’t given up hope at becoming good at sales, but I’ve had to accept, I can’t waste time doing it in such a way that isn’t effective for me.
It’s one thing to sell credit lines at a kohl’s. It’s quite different to pitch something you know to be good because you made it. It has all the pleasures of recommending a good book or movie to friends. Plus you get paid.
Brian,
Why I write. I have observations about the human condition, I can’t get out of my head.my trope is the variation of per ardua ad astra
Also to write to fill in gaps instead of complaining about it.
xavier
Every scene in Glengarry Glen Ross features a sale of some sorts.
Despite his IRL conduct, the Alec Baldwin scene remains the best sales speech ever put to film.
The modern day “Once more into the breach…”