ADVANCED MAGIC BAKERY… Chapter Two

Chapter Two… Market or No Market…

You write this short story. All done. In your magic bakery you have created a magic pie. That pie has a lot of value that I will talk about in later chapters.

But instead of taking the pie out of the kitchen and putting it in your store to sell to customers around the world, you just put it on a shelf in the kitchen, for some reason deciding not to market your story.

Pie will not spoil. It can just sit there for years and years. But it is not making you any money, not paying you back for the time and energy it took to write it.

Not helping you find new readers, new customers for your magic bakery.

I can’t begin to count the hundreds of times in the last few years I have heard a writer complaining about not selling much when they only have five things up for sale, while at the same time have a lot of stories and novels they have not gotten out of the kitchen.

So for a moment, let’s look at your magic bakery from the perspective of a customer.

This customer happens to run across your bakery. Maybe someone told them where it was. So this customer steps in the door into the wonderful smells of baking.

You only have five things out for sale, which means only five pies on the shelves. But the customer sees this great store full of nothing but empty shelves. Customer knows there will be nothing there for them and turns around and walks out.

This is why the 20 major books idea works. It is enough, if you stage your store correctly, to help the reader think there is something in your store they might like.

Think about what you would do as a customer if you walked into a store of empty shelves with only five things for sale total. You would turn and leave.

But new writers who have listened to the myths of write a book and get rich flat don’t understand this concept. And their magic bakeries are very sad places, not even earning enough to brew themselves a pot of coffee.

Now imagine my magic bakery.

I have thousands of pies of novels, novellas, short stories, collections, and editing projects. Hundreds of people browsing at any moment of the day or night in my massive store, the cash register constantly ringing up sales even though the pies never change.

Now granted, I have some shelves in my kitchen full of pies not yet put out into the main bakery, mostly because I am writing at such speed, spending so many hours in the bakery kitchen, the publishing part can’t keep up, but those stories will get out into the store and when they do I might have to add yet another addition to the magic bakery.

One thing to remember… A magic pie sitting in the kitchen or out in your store has a massive amount of value. When you put a magic pie out and let it start earning for you, its value does go up. But earning or not, the magic pie still has a lot of value.

The big problem is that the owner of that pie must believe in the value and even try to understand the value in the magic they have created. Sadly, for most writers, it seems almost impossible that what they have created is worth anything.

And thus why so many magic pies never make it off the kitchen shelves and years later end up in the trash, even though they are still fresh and have immense value.