Unless you resolve on a subsistence existence – find your own food, make your own clothes, et cetera — you must sell something to others. That, of course, requires you to make or find something to sell that others will pay you for. And so begins the division of labor economy. That encourages each of us, by the efficiencies available from specialization, to adopt a particular occupation and get good at it.
Some decide to become pure salesmen: i.e., to produce nothing by their own labors, but to specialize in selling goods and services from some other source. In the usual case, that other source is other people or organizations. But an unusual case is on my mind this morning. It unites salesmen who would otherwise appear to be unrelated.
Those salesmen sell hope.
Hope is a peculiar good. The hope salesman doesn’t mine, harvest, or manufacture hope; he evokes it from within his customer. He does this by offering some less abstract good or service that the customer hopes will bring him nearer to some cherished goal. Sometimes that good or service is objectively real, even tangible, but evoking and strengthening the customer’s hope is the point of the matter.
People hope for many things: love; sex; companionship; money; acceptance into specific groups; recognition of their excellences; propagation of their ideas. That list could be extended, but the point has been made. If a salesman can get you to believe that your specific hopes will draw nearer to achievement by purchasing what he’s selling, he’s got a hook in you.
An honest salesman will hang in there with you for a long spell. He’ll try to show you how to use his nominal product to get closer to what you hope for. He’ll watch how you do it, and comment constructively on any missteps he recognizes. And should there come a point when it’s plain that you aren’t likely to get what you hope for in the foreseeable future, he’ll mourn with you.
However, he’s unlikely to offer you a refund. Word of that could get around. The hope salesman can’t afford that.
Of course, there are dishonest hope salesmen as well. We call them con men, charlatans, gamesters, snake-oil salesmen, or something even less appealing. They know perfectly well that what they’re selling will do nothing positive for you. It might even make you ill.
Persons in certain fields are heavily beset by such salesmen.
Since the customer is the true source of hope, it will be in plentiful supply for as long as there are people who want something. Paradoxically, that “oversupply” appears to have no depressing effect on hope’s price. Economic wisdom fails to apply to hope.
Roger Zelazny once wrote a short story, “But Not The Herald,” around the theme that the Hope that lay at the bottom of Pandora’s box was the true scourge of Mankind. Now and then I find myself thinking he just might have been right about that.
Anyway, if you’ve been wondering why this topic today, it’s because of a collection I’ve been amassing. Among my various categories of incoming email is a folder titled “The Promoter Scam.” Those emails came from persons who claim expertise at promoting books: an expertise they generously offered to put at my service. This morning, the number of entries in it passed 1000.
“The Promoter Scam” has about 100 subfolders. Each is dedicated to the emails of a particularly persistent promoter: one who has importuned me three or more times. Persistence is sometimes an asset, though it hasn’t served the persons whose emails fill those subfolders.
Yes, Gentle Reader: one of those promoters did “get me.” I may be a Certified Galactic Intellect, but I’m as susceptible to hope as anyone. It was a costly lesson, but it served to inoculate this foolish old man against foolish hopes.
If you’re an indie writer, please consider this your warning: those promoters are trying to sell you your own hope. If you’re a friend or relative of an indie writer, you might want to pass this essay along to him. If you do so before he bites some promoter’s hook, you could save him money and disappointment. As for me, I write as a public service. There’s no money in it, anyway.
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