I Have Some Bad News. You Still Need to Sell It.
It kind of hurt my feelings when I got deleted from everything and I have spent more time thinking about it than I probably should have.
Some time back, an author invited me to join her book club. It was a group of strangers expected to jump in at the gate and create community organically. I asked a few basic questions: what made this group different, what the reading selection was based on, and why she thought this particular circle was worth someone’s time.
She had created the space and assumed the energy would follow. The group was a circle of strangers with no shared context, no direction, and no obvious reason to care yet. When I told her the group needed a heartbeat and that she was the one who had to provide it, that she needed to push the conversation the way you push an idea you believe in, that is when things went sideways.
Her answer, right before deleting me: It is a book club. I do not need to sell anything.
Then she removed me from every platform she could find me on. It was an efficient response, and also the entire problem in a single action.
When you make something from scratch, from your own time, your own conviction, and your own kitchen table with cold coffee, the idea that you then have to convince people to care can feel like a betrayal of the work. The invitation should be enough and the thing should speak for itself. Having to articulate why someone should show up feels uncomfortably close to admitting it might not be worth their time without the explanation.
That feeling makes sense and it is also wrong.
People are careful with their time. Attention and enthusiasm do not transfer automatically just because someone built something and sent out an invite. The person who created the thing has been living inside it for months, thinking about it, talking about it, watching it take shape. Everyone else is standing on the outside of all that, with none of the context and no obvious reason to care yet.
That is where we get selling wrong. You do not have to manipulate people into wanting what you made but you do have to make the value legible. You have to give them enough information to decide if it is for them.
There is a version of selling a book club that is not sleazy and does not feel like a pitch at all. It sounds like this: we are reading this book because of this specific reason, and I think your perspective on this particular topic would make the conversation richer. That is not marketing but a reason. It tells the person they are not just a warm body being added to an empty calendar slot.
The inherited scorecard running through a lot of creative communities says good work finds its people on its own. That if you have to ask, something is already wrong. That promoting yourself is desperate and staying quiet is integrity.
I am increasingly suspicious of those rules because sometimes people do not show up because you have not given them a way in.
She had built something she cared about, and my questions felt like a dismissal of it. But I was not asking her to prove the book club was valuable. I was asking her to help me see what she could already see.
Selling is closing the distance between what you can see and what the other person cannot see yet.
If your idea needs you to delete the people who suggest it might benefit from being sold, it definitely needs to be sold.
Jessica Gabrielzyk
