How to Get Your First MAJOR Writing Sale

If you’re yet to make your first major writing sale – a book, or a sale to a major magazine – you may be dreaming of how you’ll feel on that magical day. Here’s how to bring that day closer.

The biggest benefit of your first major writing sale is that it 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 the next sale and the next.

How do you make that major 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 the sort.

Give yourself a deadline to make your BIG first sale. You’ll know how long the 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 the 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 the sale

Once I’d set the ten-year deadline, I knew I had to ask for the sale. This meant submitting partials to publishers. A partial is a fiction proposal. It consists of a synopsis, a chapter outline, and the first chapters: around 50 to 100 pages of the novel. I wrote a partial every two months, and sent them out.

How will you ask for the sale? Essentially, you write and then send out novel and non-fiction proposals, or proposals for magazine articles.

Keep in mind that “Ask for the sale” means ask the person who can buy your product to buy it. I approached editors at publishing houses who could buy my work. I didn’t approach agents. As handy as literary agents are, an agent can’t buy.

No matter what product you’re selling, from apricots to zebras, you must ask the person and/ or company with the cash to buy your product.

It’s worth mentioning here that you don’t need to follow any particular rules when you’re asking for the sale. For example, most writing books will tell you that to sell a novel you must write the complete novel, then write the partial, then get an agent and then wait while the agent sells the book. You can follow someone else’s rules if you want to. Or you can choose your own route. Do what you intuitively feel is right for you.

Three: If it’s not working, get feedback from others

You’ve set your deadline, you’ve asked for the sale repeatedly, but no one’s buying.

At this point, I need to tell you that everyone who’s ever followed this process for selling their writing has sold their writing before the deadline. So from long experience I know that this process works. If this process hasn’t worked for you it means that somewhere you’ve bumped into a wall, but don’t see that is a wall.

You need feedback. Find someone’s who’s doing what you want to do, and ask them for help. You may need to pay for it, but it will be money well spent, because they’ll be able to put you on the right track. Don’t ask for help from people who have never done what you want to do. If they haven’t done it, they may think they know how it’s done, but they don’t.

After you get your feedback, set yourself another deadline, and then ask for the sale until you make the sale. Try this simple process: it works.

Sell your writing: a process that works

When you’re not selling your writing, you get discouraged. I’ve been there too. You send out your work… and get nothing in return. You feel depressed, then you stop sending out anything at all – what’s the use?

It’s discouraging to write without feedback, and without sales. You start to wonder if you have a talent for writing… or not.

If you’re selling the occasional article, you wonder why you can’t sell more – what’s standing between you and the income you deserve to make as a writer?

My ebook writing manual “You CAN Sell Your Writing Now: Marketing Skills For Writers” teaches you essential marketing skills. Discover how you can sell your writing today.