Yesterday in Atlanta, I gave a speech at a conference managers of independent Christian bookstores. Since all of my time and energy has been focused on composing it over the past several days, and since I won’t have internet access for about thirty-six hours, I thought I’d share the contents of the speech over the next few days. Hope you enjoy! I’ll let you know how it went soon!

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Belief in the Product
While goals and deadlines are what drive sales people and writers to try to accomplish their quotas, what makes it worthwhile—what makes it a career instead of a job—is a strong belief in the product being sold.

What makes a sales person go out day after day, year after year, whether on the sales floor of a bookstore or out in the city to sell newspaper ads? The best sales people have a strong belief in the quality and effectiveness of the products they’re selling. In Christian bookstores, it’s the knowledge and confidence that the products you’re carrying—from the music, to the art, to the books—are going to make a difference in someone’s life, whether to edify Christians where they are, to encourage those who are downhearted, or even to reach out to the lost.

How many of you in the room would say you’re an extrovert, that you enjoy meeting other people, that you like talking to people who come into your stores about the products you offer?

Something you may not know about the majority of writers is that by nature, we’re introverts. We get stressed out meeting new people. It’s hard for us to go up and talk to someone we’ve never met before. And, for most of us, our writing is something so deeply personal that it’s hard for us to talk to anyone about it. So what is it that makes someone like me—who didn’t let anyone read anything I’d written, outside of school assignments, until I was thirty years old—go to a writers’ conference and sit down and tell professionals in the publishing industry about my story idea?

Well, it’s the same thing that makes you want to run a bookstore—belief in the product.

I always made up my own worlds, complete with fictional characters, growing up. When I was about twelve or thirteen years old, I wanted to remember those worlds, those characters, so I started writing them down. But even though I was a voracious reader, I didn’t know anyone else who wrote, so I kept quiet about it. Actually, I had a walk-in closet in my bedroom which was a great place to sit and have complete privacy as well as block out any distractions, so I literally was “in the closet” for many years when I first started writing. My senior year of high school, I discovered that if I took two English classes and two electives, I could be finished at mid-term and go ahead and start college. Since most of my friends had graduated the year before, I took that option—and the second English class I picked up was Creative Writing, with the teacher I’d had for AP English in 10th grade who’d barely passed me with a C grade. I could tell he had about as much trepidation as I did going into that first assignment—a short story. When he handed our stories back to us, I felt sick, because it was the first time I’d ever let anyone read anything that came purely out of my imagination. But when I turned to the last page, I read this: “A+ — I think you’ve finally found what you’re supposed to do.” Talk about a revelation.

So when I started college, I discovered that LSU had a creative writing major. Perfect for me. Little did I know, though, that they weren’t looking to actually teach young writers the nuts and bolts of how to write the types of stories we wanted to write, but that they expected us to already be writing in the style of Faulkner and Hemingway and other writers like that whose books I owned the Cliff’s Notes for because I’d never been able to read them. After somehow scraping out passing grades in both of my creative writing classes that I took in the three years I went to school there, I dropped out. I’d thought I’d been called to write, but my experience with those classes made me want to retreat back into a closet and never let anyone read anything I wrote ever again.

So, over the next several years, I wrote for myself, and I kept it to myself—my family knew I did it, but by then, I lived on my own, so I was once again “safe” to be able to do it and not have anyone trying to read over my shoulder.

But then I felt the calling again. I felt God pushing me, telling me that He’d given me the desire to write, the imagination to make up stories and characters, not for me to keep selfishly to myself, but to do something with it—along with the desire to go back and finish my education. That was in 1999. Now, ten years later, not only have I “come out of the closet” with my writing, but I’ve put it up on the shelf, proudly on display. Not to say “Here’s what I’ve done,” but to say, “Here’s what God is capable of.”

Because God gave me a belief in my “product,” I could confidently walk up to two of the top agents in the industry and ask them if I could submit to them. And that confidence wasn’t shaken with the first rejection came in quickly. I believed in my novel. I knew that God had told me the time was right, that it was the right story at the right time. And that belief in the product paid off, not just by landing me the agent of my dreams, but by sustaining me through the next year when every single Christian publishing house said no to it.

Novelist and former editor-in-chief with Simon & Schuster MICHAEL KORDA said: “To succeed, we must first believe that we can.”

We had a saying in our office at the newspapers: Seven nos means a yes. In other words, stick with it. Persevere. Keep going back—show the customer how much you believe the product will benefit them. And eventually, they’ll say yes. Nine months after the first submission, I talked to Barbour’s Rebecca Germany at the ACFW conference. And even though she’d initially said no to the proposal, when I saw her then, the business model had changed at the house slightly, and she was looking for trade-length contemporary romances. If I’d taken that initial ‘no’ and not followed up—if I hadn’t believed in my product—I wouldn’t be standing here in front of you today.

Conclusion
It’s been several years since I left the newspaper industry—for a position as an editor at a publishing house and now as a freelance editor working for several different publishers in addition to my writing. And while I’m so thankful to have the opportunity to have my “dream job” and not have to deal with the super-high-intensity lifestyle of working in a sales office with daily deadlines and multiple demands upon my time and attention every hour of the day, I am so thankful for everything I learned while working in that kind of environment. There are so many things that God can use our day-in-day-out jobs to teach us to carry over into our ministries for Him, such as goal setting, working under deadlines, or believing in the product—the ministry or service—He’s given us to do. So I’d like to close with the passage from the Bible that to me, epitomizes both my Christian walk as well as my career as an author, Hebrews 12:1-3:

Therefore, since we have so great a cloud of witnesses surrounding us, let us also lay aside every encumbrance and the sin which so easily entangles us, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of faith, who for the joy set before Him endured the cross, despising the shame, and has sat down at the right hand of the throne of God. For consider Him who has endured such hostility by sinners against Himself, so that you will not grow weary and lose heart.