Build Your Inventory – #1

If you don’t write it, you can’t sell it. Seems kind of obvious, doesn’t it? But it can be easy to get caught up in the creative side of writing and forget all about the business aspects. After all, we’re writers, artists… we take our imagination and weave stories of adventure, passion, intrigue to beguile our readers. Art takes time to produce if you want a quality product.

But the word “product” is the one we have to remember. Yes, you’re telling a fabulous story to entertain and enthrall your readers. But it is also your product, the thing that you produce and, with a lot of work, some luck and the stars aligned just so, the thing that you sell.

So many of us are striving to quit our day jobs and work full-time as writers. We’ve all heard the statistics about how many achieve that. And how many don’t. If you want to support yourself as a full-time writer, you need to have stories (short or novel-length) to sell and they need to be available on a regular basis.

Quality is important in what you write, so just churning out words is not the best way to build your inventory. By focusing on completing more pieces, though, you can build your writing “muscles” and have more available to sell.

Angela Booth gives the advantages of building your writing inventory in her article Build Your Writing Inventory where she talks about building inventory for both fiction and non-fiction writers.

• Lack of pressure. There’s no pressure when you’re writing for inventory. This means you can be creative, and can take risks.
• You’ve got lots of work extant, so you can court a new market immediately, as soon as you find it. This increases the likelihood that you will get your foot in the door with a new magazine, or a new publishing house, and have your work purchased simply because you showed up when your work was needed.
• When a new market appears, it takes several months for it to register on the radar screen of writers. Once the market has been listed in a writers’ marketing guide, they’ll be flooded with work. If you can get in early, the chances of your work being purchased goes up, simply because it will be read with more care.
• You’ve always got something to sell. “Rejection” has no meaning for you. Rejection simply means that you haven’t yet found a home for a piece of work.

While you’re working on your best-seller, keep these things in mind:

1. You can’t make money as a writer without a product (i.e., novel, short story, article) to sell.
2. The more products you have, the better chance you have of selling something.

In the next few days, we’ll talk more about how you can build your inventory of writing products, so you’re ready when the right publishing opportunity comes along.

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