Selling yourself + your writing

I hate how important this is, but it is important!

Here’s a lesson I learned the hard way: There is a big difference between good writing and good selling, and to succeed you must excel at both.

Pitching is selling a product. Most meetings are selling a product (you are the product). No matter how much you try to ignore this, it doesn’t change the truth. Selling your work and yourself is not as important as really good writing — but it very nearly is, and you need to be excited about yourself and your ideas to get others to trust you.

Social media has conditioned us all to perform our identity, whether we acknowledge it or not. We’ve collectively commodified ourselves, and people can invest with their likes, follows, money, etc. This doesn’t mean selling yourself will be easy, for some it will be extremely hard — but there is some collective understanding of it.

What we are less accustomed to, perhaps, is selling our writing as a product, rather than as our passion/art/precious work in progress, however you might think of it.