…because in this context, that’s exactly what you are!
My father was a salesman and he used to tell me—pretty much over and over again—that everyone is a salesman, that in most situations in your life, you’re selling something, and usually what you’re selling is yourself.
You can imagine the deaf ears this fell on when delivered to 1985 post-punk artiste Phil.
Firmly rejected.
But now I’m post-post-punk post-artiste Phil, so am I about to say he was right?
No, but he was kinda right.
He was right in certain contexts.
Most of the hours of my days are spent not selling, myself or anything else, but there are hours where that’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m selling my services as an editor, ghostwriter, and writing coach. I’m selling my books. I’m selling you on my new YouTube channel or my new GoodReads group. Each weekly post here ends with a list of links designed to get you to, one way or another, buy something from me—even if, like this blog, the YouTube version of it, and the GoodReads group, I make no actual money directly from it. But still I want you to see what I’m writing, read what I have to say, etc.
When you’re ready to submit a story to the editor of a magazine—which in the 21st century almost always means a website, but you know what I mean—or send a query email to a prospective agent, you are trying to sell them your story, your book, and just as my father would have it, yourself.
I will not go so far as to reduce what you’re selling to the corporate nomenclature: product. It used to drive me crazy when the MBAs at Wizards of the Coast used that term and more than once I sternly corrected them, making sure they heard from me, if no one else, that we were not in the business of manufacturing product, but publishing books—an old and honorable profession well deserving of the respect that specificity might demonstrate.
If you have written a short story or poem, you submit (not a term I love, speaking of traditional terminology) that piece to an editor in more or less precisely the way a salesman (I can’t get past what my father always called himself, so please read that as gender-nonspecific) might “submit” any <cringe> product to a prospective buyer. A query to an agent is the same thing—a question that can be drilled down to, “Hey, wanna buy this?”
I know that sounds… icky when we’re talking about art.
The novel you (hopefully figuratively) bled for isn’t a product, a commodity, a manufactured thing, it’s a work of art, and art should be treated with more respect than to have it traded on the open marketplace like…
Hold on.
Yeah?
That’s exactly what’s happening to books, paintings, sculpture, plays… all day every day.
Write the thing with your whole heart, then take a deep breath and sell it with your whole brain.
And any salesman will tell you that a career in sales is all about leads, sits, touches… there are loads of names for this process but it boils down to this:
Don’t expect to sell the thing to the first person you talk to.
Write lots of stuff. This is where short stories come in. Write them. As many as you can, and submit them for sale to whoever might be buying. Out there querying (read: trying to sell) your novel? Be working on the next one at the same time. Why? Because…
You can’t expect to make a living if you only have one piece in inventory.
Writing one thing then selling it is like opening a jewelry store with one necklace in it. How many customers have to walk in before someone buys that, then you go out of business? Okay, then once you have a few things in “inventory”…
Gather leads.
My jewelry store analogy aside, writing isn’t a retail business. Customers aren’t coming to you. You have to go out and find them. Submitting short stories and/or poems? There are a bunch of web sites out there that consolidate paying and non-paying markets: genre magazines and literary magazines, that are your potential customers. And I think PublishersMarketplace is worth at least a few months of the $25 subscription fee to find agents. This is the legwork of the working salesman: the cold call, the gathering of leads, the search for paying customers. Once you have those leads…
Get out on sits.
That means actually talk to your potential customer. Present what you have to sell, its features and benefits, the needs or wants it will satisfy in that customer. For the novelist, this is the query package (query letter/email, synopsis, opening chapters… whatever the customer asks for). Make it good, and be open to revising it when you start to get any feedback—especially if you get no feedback at all. If it isn’t working as is, might it work better in version 1.1? 2.0? There’s only one way to find out, but in the meantime…
Don’t suffer over the walk-outs—there will be lots of them.
Not everybody is a buyer. Some of them don’t have the money, the credit score, the need, the desire, the imagination necessary to see how badly they need this thing. I used to run retail record stores. If I’d had an existential crisis every time a customer walked in, looked around, then left empty handed I’d be muttering this post into bowl of oatmeal at an insane asylum. This agent passed? Next lead!
If I recommended you watch the movie version or read the play Gengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet that would probably work against me. It does not glamorize this profession. But if you’re in the submitting/querying zone, this is your life—at least for a few hours here and there between continuing to write.
Find the best leads you can—the good leads, the Glengarry leads—and get your hands on lots of them.
Then go out on sits.
And like the man said…
Now, go buy some of my stuff…
—Philip Athans
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Absolutely not one word of this post was in any way generated by any version of an “AI” or Large Language Model.
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