Sell Before You Buy

Before you buy something, try to “sell” it.

How well do you research what you’re buying? Sure, if it’s a 25-cent gum ball, you’re probably not going to check the surrounding local 2.3-mile radius for diameter-to-cost ratios. But what about a car? Or a workshop? Or a house? Or a book?

META: This is one of those, “I know there’s a moral in here somewhere, maybe if I write about it, I can pull it out.” This is along the lines of our product line of “Write your book sales page before you write your book.” services, but now maybe it applies to, uh, everything?

We’re selling our car. I don’t even really want to sell my car, but we’re moving and we have to sell it. I just learned, this morning, thanks to my 12-year old pointing it out, that the middle row of seats folds down flat. We’ve only had the car for 7 years, I was just getting to know it. Honestly, I would have really appreciated knowing that this was possible in my car, especially since I’ve been taking almost-daily trips to Goodwill and the storage unit with the car full of boxes. Although, ahem, not quite as packed as it could have been.

Now that we’re selling it, I’m learning more about it than … when we bought it. Why do we do that?

If you’re working to sell your book, would it have been handy to know how you plan to sell it when you started writing it? If you’re now thinking about the benefits to the reader, had those benefits helped when you wrote it?

Another angle is to imagine reading the entire manual of, say, your phone and benefitting from the knowledge of how best to use your phone early on rather than way down the road. Most people use a small fraction of the functions of most things they own. Sure, I don’t really care how to use my vacuum cleaner as a cat-hair-on-shag-carpet appliance, but think about all that you would learn. Here’s the twist: you will most likely learn what you didn’t expect to learn?

You’ll certainly know quite a bit of already, you’ll learn some things where you’ll nod your head in “that makes logical sense,” but you’ll almost guaranteed learn something that you didn’t expect to learn.

In other words, how would you sell what you’re about to buy (or create)?