MARKETING: A BUSINESS - PART 2

Before we get into the actual details of how to sell your writing, lets go back for a minute and look more closely at how selling your writing compares to selling anything else. For example, let’s assume that rather than selling manuscripts, you were going to sell cookies. Before you opened up your cookie shop at the local mall, you would need to not only develop some great cookies, you’ll need to know who your customers are and what they want. You are not going to open a recipe book and start making any old cookies. You’re going to find the best recipes—the ones people love and are most likely to buy.

It is going to be the same with your manuscripts. It doesn’t make sense to start cranking out manuscripts if you don’t know who your customers are and what they are in the market for. That is a very basic marketing concept, but the one most writers miss or tend to ignore. You must have a clear concept of who your customers or potential customers are. It would be like going home and making a dress and then going door-to-door looking for someone to buy it. You would have to find a woman who was the right size, who liked the style and the color, who needed or wanted a dress, and who had the money to buy it. The odds of finding such a person would be pretty slim, and no one would be so foolish as to approach marketing in such a haphazard way, yet we do exactly the same thing every time we write a manuscript with no particular market in mind. There is a better way. Learning this process will make the difference between selling your manuscripts and dooming them to the rejection pile.