“You don’t start out writing good stuff. You start out writing crap and thinking it’s good stuff, and then you gradually get better at it.
“That’s why I say one of the most valuable traits is persistency.” -Octavia E. Butler
Sales is driven by your ability to fill your funnel for every stage of the sale. After all, it’s a numbers game.
If you initiate enough conversations, you’ll build a list of contacts. Out of those contacts you may get a few appointments which will hopefully lead to one sale. Depending on the product and the seller, it could take upwards of fifty to hundreds of contacts just to get your “yes.”
For many artists and writers, their creative brains start by building new ideas, filling post-it notes, index cards, and whiteboards. Like lost tracks from bands, many never see the light of day.
While most end up in the creator’s graveyard, some ideas get planted. Maybe it turns into a short story scribbled in a notebook, or the sketch becomes a quick painting. The artist taking the steps to flesh out the idea, but not completely committing.
And yet the writer still only picks a handful of those to nurture, and build upon turning into a work for submission. A piece of the artist’s heart given out to editors and critics to dissect and reject.
Only then does that piece have a chance of making it through the funnel and becoming published... and that’s if it is accepted.
How do you fill your creative funnel?