Several months ago, I cold called a brick and mortar bookstore and pitched Creative Doing to the manager of a bookstore. To my surprise, the manager placed an order for a few copies right away. 

Since cold emails have a low success rate, I had thought the odds would be incredibly low for something like that. Maybe it was beginner’s luck. That’s the simple story of how I got Creative Doing into its first bookstore.

My instinct was to call in favors and get people to purchase books from the store, so that the bookstore would see momentum and order more copies, but I had to focus on other priorities and I wasn’t sure if it made sense for me to call in favors. 

The next time I visited the store, the booksellers told me Creative Doing was selling well. Again, I was surprised. The store would re-stock it for months after, and it performed well enough that one of its sister bookstores also picked it up.

There are a handful of lessons I took away from this, which I’m writing in second person:

1. The odds vs. what you think of the odds are two very different things. You may have a higher chance than you think. If you have nothing to lose, except for an inflated ego, it can pay off to be overconfident.

2. Even if you can’t put in the extra effort to promote the work, maybe it’s still worth publishing or asking for distribution. There’s a chance the work will stand and sell on its own. 

3. Disappointment feels so painful that most people will not be able to overcome it. Even simply anticipating it will stop people from taking action. If you can learn to be okay with disappointment, then you will have a competitive advantage over the people who run away from even the possibility of it.