Selling intangibles means selling things like luxury in an automobile, or security in an insurance policy, or the peace of mind knowing your family is protected by a smoke or burglar alarm.
Luxury can be defined in word or reality, but it's the feelings that it creates that really sells the product. After a time, you fell in love with your little car. You sleep better at night knowing you are protected. It's those feelings that customers seek.
The car, the insurance policy, the alarm device is real. The luxury, the security, the peace of mind are the intangibles. You can’t touch it, see it, hear it, taste it or smell it. You can’t eat it, so why is it so important?
Intangibles represent feelings. And everybody has them.
Once you understand this, you are ready to sell intangibles for fun and profit.
You get out of something what you put into it. Ah, but what if you get more out of it than you put into it?
You have a profit.
In terms of writing a book, if I spend the time, say three months, to write it, edit and format it, put it up on a sales platform then guess what: I have a novel, i.e. presumably no more than the sum of its parts in terms of man-hours, uploading time, word count, the time spent on a marketing image and getting an ISBN.
I put a novel in, I get a novel out. It’s that simple. I put in the work, and out comes a novel.
Zero dollars have been earned by that book on publication.
The first book I sell earns a profit, on paper, because I haven’t spent any cash on it. Let’s not bother with estimating what I put into it in terms of so many dollars an hour. In all humility, my time is what I make of it.
But there are also intangible profits, feelings as it were. I get to look at another book—one written by me. It’s what I always wanted to do. So why waste time over-analyzing? Why not just do it?
There is this feeling of accomplishment, for I have created another work of literary art. I like art.
I like experimenting and learning new things. The results are interesting and to write a good story is challenging. I like challenging myself.
Art is all about nuance, and I like nuances. I like it when wisps of smoke go off in all directions in fading blue curlicues and the reader’s mind is taken off into their own unique creation as they speculate and realize that there are permutations outside the book and yet the author has chosen to leave them out. That’s why there are spin-offs and trilogies and series in books and stories. The readers themselves demand them.
I get feelings of satisfaction, self-worth, the feeling that I did something that I felt I must do with my life. I get all sorts of good things from publishing a book that might not sell in spectacular numbers. I enjoy the work. When I was a kid, I spent many happy hours dabbling with acrylic paints. It was fun.
The work above is actually a one-by-twelve pine board with lines gouged in it with a buck-knife. I took a sort of Japanese ‘floating world’ approach, with a bit of a misty feeling and an elevated point of view. The pigments are acrylic.
I guess you had to be there.
I like the colours, I like the composition. The last time I tried to paint, honestly, I wasn’t very good at it. You kind of have to love it and do it every day if you possibly can. But this painting conveys a certain feeling.