40+FAB Blog

Books don’t sell themselves

I have met many people who have always wanted to write a book, but somehow never get round to doing it. Writing could be a very daunting task for the one who is just starting out, but with a little bit of information about the process and taking it one day at a time, one can achieve massive results.

Having written two books myself, I found that writing and finishing a manuscript was one thing, and then publishing it was another big deal. You would think that after overcoming those two major phases, the third phase of selling the books would drop in your laps, like ripe fruit off a tree, to somehow reward you for all the hard work. Unfortunately, as one accomplished writer once said, “books don’t sell themselves”.

Like with most things in life, if we are going to get other people interested in what we have, we must make them see it, taste it and then persuade them to buy it. I hear so many people say, “it’s a great product, it would sell itself”. That is really not accurate at all. What sells is what people need and your job as a sales person is to point out that what you have satisfy what they need.

No matter who you are, you will need to improve your ability to sell to others, it may be a meal you want a child to eat, an idea you want your family to adopt, yourself at a job interview, your products at a shop and so on. If you just placed things on the table and hoped that others would perceive the value in it and buy, you may walk away disappointed.

Just as a book has powerful words in it but is all closed up and sitting behind the cover so that no one knows what’s in it apart from the one who wrote it, so is it with almost every other thing in life. The owner has to speak up, introduce it, and get others to buy it.