If you are a Creative in business for yourself, you probably got into business so that you could spend more time creating (instead of having to go to a… yuck… job.)

Now, if you are in business, there is one thing you HAVE to have in order to stay in business… indeed, to be in business: revenue. You can have the greatest product or service in the world, but if you can’t (or don’t) sell it….

(I am not saying you can’t give your product or service away. Lots of people do that every day. But if you are always giving it away, you are a charity, not a business.)

And, most Creatives don’t really like selling… if they did, they would go out and be a salesperson instead of what they do.

And that is the irony. We don’t like selling, but we have to sell our creations in order to be able to afford to create more. (For some, it is more than irony… it is immense frustration. Perhaps you have felt it was unfair of life. Perhaps you raged against it. Perhaps you wished for the old patronage days when a rich benefactor would subsidize a Creative’s work. Haven’t we all, at some point or another?)

And still, in today’s society and culture we have to sell our work… or get a job (becoming, in a sense, our own patron. But that carries its own resentments and frustrations.)

So, accepting that we have to sell our creations, are there things that can help us do that? Are there things that can make it more fun? Surprisingly (and for many Creatives, it IS a surprise), there are.

Let’s explore those in the next few posts. (And for those who follow me on Twitter or Facebook, these posts are a partial fulfillment of the promise I made to share some of the great stuff I got at Kevin Hogan’s Influence Bootcamp 2010 (IBC10).)

Have you found ways to make selling your creations fun? Or at least, easier? I would love to hear about what works for you. Just use the comments and tell us about it.