Get Your First Sale!

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Summary: Learn this easy, three step, guaranteed process to make your first sale --- and it doesn't matter what you're selling.

Category: Writing, Small Business

Words: 800

Get Your First Sale!

Copyright © 2003 by Angela Booth

Nothing beats the joy of your first sale. You can plot, plan,
market and dream all you want, but until you get that first sale,
you're not sure that you have a real business. It's 25 years
since I sold my first book to an international publisher. I
walked on air for days. To my mind, because real writers wrote
books, I was real writer at last.

Your first sale legitimizes what you're doing to others, and not
least to yourself. When you've got that sale, you get a lot more
than money: you get confidence, feedback, and ideas on how you
can make the next sale and the next.

How do you make that first sale? Here's how:

=> One: Give yourself a deadline

Although I'd made writing sales I didn’t sell a book until I gave
myself a deadline. I gave myself a long deadline, ten years. I
didn’t need that long, it took a year. However setting a deadline
turned selling a book from a dream into a goal. If I hadn't given
myself a deadline, I would have fudged for years: making
outlines, doing research, writing a chapter here and there, and
convincing myself that I was trying to sell a book, when I wasn't
doing anything of the sort.

Give yourself a deadline to make your first sale. You'll know how
long the deadline should be. Don’t make it ten years unless it's
something where you need to learn a lot of skills first before
you can produce a product.

Your deadline must be serious. The ten years I gave myself was
the absolute cut-off date. If I hadn’t sold a book by then, I
intended giving up writing book-length material forever.

=> Two: Ask for the sale!

Once I'd set the ten-year deadline, I knew I had to ask for the
sale. This meant submitting partials to publishers. A partial is
a fiction proposal. It consists of a synopsis, a chapter outline,
and the first chapters: around 50 to 100 pages of the novel. I
wrote a partial every two months, and sent them out.

How will you ask for the sale? If you're selling your writing,
then send out novel and non-fiction proposals, or proposals for
magazine articles.

Keep in mind that "Ask for the sale" means ask the person who can
buy your product to buy it. I approached editors at publishing
houses who could buy my work. I didn't approach agents. As handy
as literary agents are, an agent can't buy.

No matter what product you're selling, from apricots to zebras,
you must ask the person and/ or company with the cash to buy your
product.

It's worth mentioning here that you don’t need to follow any
particular rules when you're asking for the sale. For example,
most writing books will tell you that to sell a novel you must
write the complete novel, then write the partial, then get an
agent and then wait while the agent sells the book. You can
follow someone else's rules if you want to. Or you can choose
your own route. Do what you intuitively feel is right for you.

=> Three: If it's not working, get feedback from others

You've set your deadline, you've asked for the sale repeatedly,
but no one's buying.

At this point, I need to tell you that everyone who's ever
followed this process for selling their writing has sold their
writing before the deadline. So from long experience I know that
this process works. If this process hasn’t worked for you it
means that somewhere you've bumped into a wall, but don't see
that is a wall.

You need feedback. Find someone's who's doing what you want to
do, and ask them for help. You may need to pay for it, but it
will be money well spent, because they'll be able to put you on
the right track. Don't ask for help from people who have never
done what you want to do. If they haven’t done it, they may think
they know how it’s done, but they don’t.

After you get your feedback, set yourself another deadline, and
then ask for the sale until you make the sale. Try this simple
process: it works.

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About the Author

Writer, author and journalist Angela Booth has been writing successfully for print and online venues for 25 years. She also writes for business.
On her Web site http://www.digital-e.biz/ she conducts workshops and courses for writers.