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, out of the blue to be honest, an author invited me to join an online book club she was creating with other European authors. The premise was books by women, for women. I got it. But I asked what made it different from the ones I already knew in Dubai and Canada, because she was using a Brazilian club as her reference and that one already existed. Moving it online and to Europe did not feel like enough on its own. I never said yes, but honestly I was not convinced and I already had a short window to do everything from my own marketing to writing books to living. But I threw an idea out there, an author interview, a book introduction before the reading month began. Like, here is something. Come back with more.

But she did not bounce back ideas or seem to take the time to think through what the group would actually be. She almost immediately said she liked it and announced she would create the group. Never giving me a firmer sense of what she was expecting or what she wanted us to expect.

And honestly, I had known her for only a few hours up to that point.

Then she created the group and went basically silent.

Days later I messaged her asking what had happened. She said she had cancelled the group because there had been no interaction.

That is the part that keeps returning. She built something, invited strangers, gave them no direction, and then waited. When nothing moved on its own she called it done. And when I said that the group needed someone to carry the first energy, that you have to give people a reason to show up before they will show up, she deleted me from every platform she could find me on.

Her answer, right before deleting me: It is a book club. I do not need to sell anything.

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.

That is where I think 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.

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.

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 feedback arrived after it had already failed in her view, which probably made it land as a verdict rather than as help. I understand that. But we had only known each other for a few hours, I had no clear sense of what her expectations were, and she had never given me one. The timing may have been awkward. The feedback was not wrong.

I have been running my own public version of this argument in the Marketing Underdog series, putting real numbers out into the world instead of performing confidence about them. The uncomfortable part is that showing the numbers is also a form of selling.

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