The first day of training on Wall Street we all sat
dutifully waiting for the instructor, Esther Borne, to tell us how to
make millions. It surprised us when she opened with a question.
"What do companies do?" she asked.
Trying to make an impression on the instructor, we all
raised our hands with varying answers. She shook her head as if she knew
on that first day that we were all hopeless.
"All companies in the world," she began with
great authority, "do exactly one thing. They sell a product."
We were silently baffled. Don't companies do different
things? Gas companies, drug labs, oil firms, technology think tanks,
consulting services, didn't they all do different things?
After we'd had a minute to stew she repeated, "All
companies do exactly one thing. They sell. And as soon as you
learn that you will know the secret to earning millions." She told
us one more thing before she left for the day. She said, "Each of
you is a company. You must remember that. And to make money you will
have to go into the world and sell your services to the top bidder. Run
your career, whatever it is, like a company. Sell constantly. And you
will be rich."
Being a successful writer is no different from being a
successful anything else. By the Esther Borne definition: A writer is a
small company that sells articles, stories, books, and copy. You may see
yourself as an artist. But in the end it isn't creating great works of
literature that pays our bills. It is selling our work that keeps us fed
and clothed.
On Wall Street we used the expression, "Ask for the
order." You have to ask people to buy. You can't just sit there,
indifferent, like a sleepy merchant, letting the world pass by your
shop. You must be like the carnival barker who stands on a soapbox with
a microphone enticing people to enter and buy.
You have to query. You have to submit. You have to call,
remind, nudge, and harass. Whatever it takes, you can't let editors
forget who you are. They have to publish someone's work, it might as
well be yours. Talent is not even an issue. If it were there would be no
bad books and no bad movies. The thing that matters is your
salesmanship. You have to sell your work.
Time is money. You must work efficiently. How long it
takes you to write a piece is up to you. But think about the amount of
money you will get for a given piece and decide if it is worth spending
weeks, months or days on. Use every second of every day to your
advantage.
Most people work about ten percent of the time and talk
or worry about work the rest of the time. Set a realistic writing goal
for yourself each day. Make a schedule and stick to it. Hemingway
wrote four pages a day. Jack London wrote 1,000 words a day. J. K.
Rowling mapped out the seven-book Harry Potter series and set a time
frame to finish the whole series.
Hemingway gave us nearly 70 short stories and about
fifteen books. Jack London wrote fifty books, 400 articles, and 200
short stories. Shakespeare wrote countless plays. If they had taken ten
years to complete a book we would never have heard of them.
And, of course, if they didn't sell they would have
starved.
If you are lucky enough to be able to write full time
then you have to imagine that you still have a boss. You have to set the
alarm, get up every day, and work. If you are still working a day job
and writing at night then you have to pretend you have two bosses, and
satisfy them both.
Wall Streeters are taught that the products are
secondary. It is the clients that make the business. Without clients you
can't sell. Selling is the most important task in a business. Eighty
percent of your time should be spent looking for new clients. This
leaves only twenty percent of your time for production.
How this breaks down for me as a writer is this. I write
an average of six pages a day. That requires around two to three hours
of writing. The entire rest of my day is spent between marketing my work
to existing contacts and looking for new contacts. But remember, a day
doesn't have eight hours. You lost that luxury when you quit your
salary job. A day has twenty-four hours. And a week has seven days, not
five.
Thomas Edison holds more patents than any person who
ever lived. He used to work to exhaustion each and every day. He often
collapsed in his workshop and had to be carried out. He became wealthy,
not just because of the brilliance of his inventions, but because of his
constant hard work and self-promotion. He sold constantly. And he used
brilliant business strategies like staggering the release of his various
inventions so as not to cannibalize on the success of his previous work.
He also dubbed himself The Wizard of Menlo Park. The papers picked it up
and soon he was seen as the greatest expert in the world. It wasn't
because he was the greatest mind in the country. It was because he said
he was the greatest mind in the country.
Since most people will write better when they are fresh,
base your workday around your writing. For example, I can get up very
early and function on only a few hours of sleep. But my body seems to
function best at about 11:00 AM. So I get up anywhere from 5:00 to
7:00 AM and return email. This is something I can do while I am still
bleary eyed and groggy. I eat breakfast at my computer.
This is the time when I read the responses to the
previous day's queries. Since I am an adventure writer this is also when
I answer requests for photos. If an editor sends me a piece and says,
"Please make the following changes," I make the changes right
online and resubmit it instantly. If I get a rejection for cause I
rewrite the piece right online and resubmit. If I get a rejection
with no explanation I immediately submit the next piece I have waiting
in my cue of finished work. Always respond instantly to editors'
questions and rejections. Never leave work to be done later.
Believe it or not, the editor who just rejected you is your best
prospect for publishing your next piece because your name is fresh on
his or her mind.
At 11:00 I start writing, I write until about
2:00. Then I watch TV while I eat lunch. I take a nap for about a
half hour to an hour. When I wake up I have coffee while I surf the net
looking for new markets.
The best way to find markets on the web is by doing
keyword searches. Start with some topic closely related to your work.
For me, the first one was "adventure." I tracked down the
contact information for every publication in this genre. Don't miss any
media. Newspapers and magazines are the most obvious ones. But there are
also newsletters, quarterlies, monthlies, mixed media, and don't rule
out the web.
Websites are paying as much as print media now. But the
good thing about websites is that they use a lot more content as they
are changing constantly. They are also easier to do business with since
most prefer to do business by email.
Wire services and content providers are other places to
submit your work. These companies buy work, usually cheaply, and
provide it to news magazines and websites for a monthly subscription
fee. They may not pay a lot, but they need a nearly unlimited amount of
material. So they can be a good financial base for your writing
business.
When I am finished searching for the day, I don't shut
down my computer until I have sent a query to every single periodical I
found that day. Then I record all of the periodicals, and the work I
sent them, in a database. I submit to the periodicals in my database on
a regular schedule. Now these new entries will become part of my normal
rotation.
How many hours should you spend looking for new markets
each day? That depends on how much money you want to make. If you
assume that you only have a one percent success rate on queries, then
you need a data base which is one hundred times the number of markets
you need to make a living. In other words, if you need to sell five
pieces a month you may need to send out 500 queries per month.
I search for new markets usually until about 9:00 PM.
All day I carry a notebook with me, jotting down the loose ends I need
to tie up. Before I go to sleep I write out a very neat itemized list of
what I need to do the next day. This list would include who I need to
call, who I need to follow up with, what pieces have to go out, who they
have to go to, and what piece is next in my query queue. Also, I write
down any new keywords that I have thought of to use for my market search
the next day. I sleep and it begins all over again the next day.
So why not get out there and follow Esther Borne's
advice and sell, sell, sell yourself? You have everything to gain.
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