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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 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 next sale and 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 sort.

Give yourself a deadline to make your first sale. You'll know how long 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 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 sale!

When I face desolate impossibility of writing 500 pages, a sick sense of failure falls on me, and I know I can never do it. Then gradually, I write one page and then another. One day’s works is all I can permit myself to contemplate. —John Steinbeck

I know that it seems easier to make that extra pot of coffee, read that good book, that you have had in storage for last ten years, and suddenly decide to make kids that Halloween costume by hand, than it can be to make yourself sit down and write. Believe me, I have been there.

Here are some brainstorming techniques to get your brain pumping again and churning out ideas.

1) If you are having trouble coming up with characters or even a story line, try developing an action scene. One good scene to kick off your book can get rest flowing. Develop characters and story line around that scene.

2) Come up with a problem to solve. Is your main character class clown or brainiest kid in school. What type of problem would your character face in his or her normal life? Write your story around problem and a unique way of solving it.

3)For character development use common sense. Use what is in front of you.