The Hustler Diaries Part 3: Sell Your Story

It’s easy to have a lot of ideas about things you want to sell, and a lot harder to turn those ideas into a products. Oftentimes, what you’re selling is your story. Whether it’s the story of your company, the story of your product, or the story of your brand, it’s still a story. Stories are important because people love stories. Stories make people feel something. And when people feel something, it makes them want to be engaged with the thing that made them feel. (Your company / your product / your brand.)

Here’s one story I sold:

Make it something you love

A wrote a short story called “The Tumor.” It’s about a bad man, a malignant wife, and an anthropomorphic tumor. I wrote it relatively quickly, and then it lived in a .doc. I really like this story, so I decided to sell it.

Make it beautiful

To sell it, I recruited several people to turn the story into something beautiful. People like beautiful things. Beauty makes people feel a certain way: wonder, awe, excitement. I worked with a copy editor, an artist, and a designer to turn my story into a beautifully designed thing. It went from being a story to being a Story.

Make it easy

To sell it, I turned to Gumroad. I believe this was a recommendation from my photographer friend Clayton Cubitt. Gumroad is incredibly easy to use, and they pay you out in a very easy way. It’s just, well … effortless. I also used Pay What You Want pricing, which means people pay at least $1 for it, but can pay more.

To date, I’ve sold 159 copies of “The Tumor” for a total of $867.50.

Not bad for a story that once lived inside my head.

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