Winning ecstatic sales

I’ve heard that there are three types of sales:

1)      Soft sales: where the person might pay for the product after they’ve seen it and know that it meets their needs.

2)      Hard sales: where the person will pay up front for the product because their fairly certain in advance that it’s probably alright and worth the risk.

3)      Ecstatic sales: where the person loves everything you’ve ever done and wants everything you can sale them and is clamoring for more.

I figure that there is nothing that exemplifies this ideal of the “ecstatic sale” more than with writing. Whether you call it brand name recognition or the “Harry Potter” phenomenon, it’s an elusive ideal worthy of all the effort it takes to reach that lofty goal.

I recently went to a writing convention where one of the authors that spoke talked about how you can’t think of being an author as a hobby. He joked that when people say to him that they want to take off for the summer and write a book he’d respond with, “Yeah, I was thinking of taking the summer off to become a neural surgeon.” The point being, that when you create a book that you want others to read, it’s got to be professionally done. If the author bypasses traditionally publishing because it’s too much work to go through all of the editing and revision stages, then the book is really just good for one reader alone, and that’s the author.

On the flip side of this however, of the approximately 1% of people that get accepted by a publisher and get a book published, the average income is about $3,000. This means that even for those that are published it’s not likely that being an author is more than just a hobby. Perhaps this is the fault of the publishing industry. Perhaps the reason for so many inadequate books that get published is because of an inadequate model.

I’ve realized that before I want to do anymore marketing of my book, I still have to improve the writing inside – which means for me paying for copy editing. Having come from a science/engineering background where my communication skills and knowledge of the English language is still quite limited, in order to give my book a more professional feel I have to pay someone that knows what they’re doing. Even as I learn more spelling and grammar rules, I imagine I’ll still need someone who can professionally look through my work and make sure I didn’t mess up. My brain is just too amazingly good at filling in details that it wants to see as opposed to what is actually there.

I think the path to getting ecstatic sales also includes holding back on other promotional methods until the quality of the product does match the standard that you want to reach. Once a bad review is out there it will limit the potential audience. On the other hand each critical review offers the potential for improvements that can be made to insure that people are ecstatic about what you have to offer.

Hopefully someday I’ll be able to make a career out of this, it’s certainly exciting enough that I can imagine enjoying creating entire universes and tour guides through them on a full time basis.  And hopefully I eventually learn how to better encourage others to share more of their ideas with me on how we can accomplish such lofty goals.