Day 1
Both emails arrive before noon on a Monday. One confirms interest in a story I will write about a trip to North Dakota. The other offers me an unsolicited assignment to write about the relationships that formed after a retired soldier with post-traumatic stress disorder sent his Purple Heart to a NASCAR driver.
Sold out in 2 hours and 14 minutes, these two deals are more than half a month's typical salary for a freelance writer like me. After telling my editor to SUCCESS about the big morning, he wonders what my best month has been. He asks me if I want to use today as a springboard to try and beat him and write about the ups and downs along the way.
The most lucrative month of my solopreneur career was September 2015. I won $14,772. I haven't come back from that since. I look at my list of story ideas and the tumbleweeds roll by. I see no way to reach my big goal of $14,772.01.
I still tell the editor that I accept their challenge.
Day 2
It's 4 h 40 and I can't sleep. I'm going to fail, which doesn't bother me that much, but it does bother me not to do something I hate. I feel like I agreed to go to the dentist every day for a month. I love writing stories, but I hate selling them.
“To have my best month ever, I have to see myself not as the helpless man on a wire but as the pilot. »
Wait. Scratch that. I love to sell. I hate trying to sell.
I swear I won't work 80 hours a week or pitch 600 stories. I don't want to do these things long term, so I won't do them short term. I want any success I find in pursuing my goal this month to be repeatable. I still want to be me, only better. The only way to win $14,772.01 is to force myself to be intentional, swallow doubts, take risks I don't normally take, and break rules I normally follow.
I open my list of story ideas and brainstorm.
Day 3
I call Pat, a salesman friend who has been an invaluable mentor to me. I tell him about this quest, and he tells me to use it to fill my pipeline, a variation of the advice he's given me 57 billion times.
When he uses the word pipeline , I think of the movie Air Force One . At the end, Harrison Ford (playing the role of the president) hangs from a metal cord behind a jet as it flies through the air. He has no control as the wind and the speed of the plane throw him through the sky. That's how I often feel as a solopreneur – connected, yet subject to the forces around me.
To have my best month, I need to see myself not as the helpless man on a wire but like the pilot.
Like a pilot, I look away. It's only April, but I'm thinking of when my pipeline is always empty, mid-December to mid-January. What could I write then? The answer:a story for a baseball season preview magazine that I've written for occasionally. I had an idea last year, but the launch deadline was far away, I had other things to do and I postponed it. When I finally got to pitching, it was too late.
I won't repeat that mistake. I send the pitch. Whether the publisher buys the story is almost irrelevant. Intentionality is the point. This thought hits me like a thunderclap, the first of three I'll have in these 30 days:intentional selling puts me in control.
Day 8
So far so good. No answer yet on baseball history. But I accept the conditions of four others. I had two but all sold out and a third was an apple waiting to be picked. In the spirit of intentionality, I wrote direct and targeted emails to finalize them. At $11,500 already, I'm starting to think this could happen easily, and wondering how far I can go further.
Day 17
I don't know what's going on right now, but everyone says yes to everything. Three days in a row, I sold stories worth $2,000 each, including the baseball story. To sell each, I broke or bent the rules I normally follow.
One piece I sold on a Green Beret that was shot four times in Afghanistan, spent three years recovering, and was discovered that driving his Porsche on race tracks helped his PTSD deserves attention. The sale violated three guidelines that I generally adhere to:
Except in rare circumstances, introducing new clients is rarely worth the effort. A decent idea with an established client is better than a good idea with an unknown client.
Don't pitch the same client more than one story at a time. Two yeses is unlikely, and the second idea is best saved for later. This is especially true for a new client.
Don't submit multiple posts with the same idea at the same time. The first publication acknowledged receipt of the pitch but never expressed interest. After two weeks, I sold it to someone else. An hour after making that deal, the first publisher said they wanted to buy it. I had long feared that this scenario would make me look stupid. Instead, it showed that my work was wanted. This editor told me to keep pitching it because they wanted to work with me.
Selling the Green Beret story pushes me to $17,800, well past my target. I decide that counting the two stories that pushed my lens plus the one you read made it too easy. So I add the total of those three to my previous high water mark and find a new target:$20,272.01. Eighteen days ago, I would have laughed at this as impossible.
Today I think, why not?
JONATHAN SCHOEPS / SHUTTERSTOCK.COM
Day 24
I'm playing with house money, so I'll try anything – even addressing one of my biggest fears about sales:being seen as too boring, too aggressive or can't. -even being desperate.
I have lunch once a month with my friend Matt, a salesman who recently crashed it. He tells me about tactics he uses that I would never have used. He showed me a photo that he sends to customers who have cut off communication. It's about a man and a woman holding a giant log against a door to knock on it. The text says, "I know you're there." ”
I would never send this, not even now. When I ask him where the line is between aggressive and boring, he responds as if he's waiting for me to ask him. "Don't think it's boring," he said. "We call it 'professional perseverance,' and there's a big difference."
Here's Thunderclap No. 2. I'm aggressive as a journalist, and I should be at least as aggressive trying to sell stories I tell them. For reasons I can't explain, I've long considered selling a story and making a story separately. Now I'm going for a more holistic approach.
I'm concocting a way for you to apply Matt's taunt. I have long wanted clients to sign me up – X number of stories per year for X amount of dollars. Nobody agreed to do it, so I stopped asking. Would a client meet me halfway – agree to give me another assignment without knowing what it was?
Before this month, I would have stifled the idea for fear that I would be say no. Now I'm excited about the possibility of a yes.
The target customer is the Southwest Airlines Employee Magazine. The Southwest has become America's largest carrier by embracing bold ideas, which I mention in my proposal. Strange result:Southwest said no, but another client is committing to an unknown next assignment without me asking.
Day 25
It's 4:22 a.m. and I can't sleep again, but for good reason:I've gone through the various sales techniques I've tried and all the others I haven't had a chance to try again.
I never thought I'd say that, but it's fun. Whether I will maintain this attitude beyond this month, I cannot say. For six years, I viewed trying to sell as an unfortunate consequence of being in YouEconomy. Now I see it as a skill to master.
I'm at $20,100. Another story will push me beyond the new goal.
Day 30
Oh damn. I can't believe I'm going to tell this part.
“Avoid distractions” is not on the list of changes that came to mind this month. It probably should be, but ideas often come to me when I am distracted. Last week I surfed to see if there was anything new about my favorite band, Rush. It was an incredible waste of time - they broke up a year ago so there's still no news to be had.
I came across Rush Camp, a weekend at a resort in Pennsylvania for fans to come together to talk about how much they love the Great Philosophers of the Great White North – Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart.
I felt like a bear discovering Honey Camp. I started dreaming of going to Rush Camp and writing a story. I'm a sucker for a good subculture story, and I know an editor who is looking for that kind of story. But it's much easier to present a subculture that I'm an observer of rather than a member of, the same way I can say anything I want about my family, but you can't.
Before I could type the first sentence of a pitch, doubt kicked in – real, legitimate doubt, weighing 1,000 pounds on my chest. My #1 unbroken rule for pitching is “don't pitch anything that makes me look like a fool”. And “send me to Rush Camp” sounds… well, that sounds ridiculous. Can't throw this?
Last year I wanted to write about falconry. I created a pitch, worried that I wouldn't look foolish throwing it, and hesitated to send it. When I finally did, the editor said he had just asked someone else to write about falconry. Later, another publication that I thought of pitching but also did not publish an article on falconry.
"It's become thunderclap #3:I'm not afraid to hear the word no anymore. »
At the start of this month-long process, I called Michael Robert Moore, my coach when I became a solopreneur, for advice. He suggested that the next time I had an idea for falconry, I would use my doubts in the field. I did not want. "Don't give editors a reason to say no, they'll find enough on their own" is another of my "rules".
But it's all been about doing things differently. I sent my target editor a pointless, borderline email so I could (nonchalantly) mention that I had a corny argument. His response:“Ha! I like corny locations. Bring it on. ”
I ventured as far outside my comfort zone as ever with this course. I was proud to have swallowed several reasons not to send it and embraced the singular reason in its favor – the editor could say yes. It became Thunderclap #3:I'm not afraid to hear the word no anymore.
That alone would make this ordeal a success.
A few days passed with no response. I assumed the editor hated Rush (the gigs are 99.999% male) and thought the idea was so dumb it was going to revoke the other assignments I owed her.
Finally, she responds. Not only does she buy the land, but she hints that it might be worth twice as much as I expected. We agree to review the fees after attending Rush Camp and set a “placeholder” price at $500 more than I expected.
The deal comes on the last day, two hours before the date limit. This pushes my total to $22,600. Even if I delete the current start – the two Day 1 stories that prompted the quest, plus the fee for that story – I still set new staff. My longtime friends will think it's absolutely hilarious that Rush Camp pushed me over the edge.
I started the quest for my best month with low expectations. I thought I was having a good month and learning some new tricks. I did not expect to see my view of the whole world of sales explode. Little did I know how much I cared about rules that now seem contrived at best and counterproductive at worst. I had no idea how liberating it would be to ignore those rules.
And here's the weird thing:I'll never break them again.
Because those aren't my rules anymore.
