These things. Cedar shoe trees. Spend $10 more and your $20 leather shoes will last much longer. They absorb the moisture (insert demonstrative hand gesture) from your feet, which keeps the leather from cracking. Yeah. Seriously. It's been 25 years and I still remember the spiel.

I've had a lot of jobs throughout my life, and a good many of them had some aspect of sales to them.

This is a thing I really hate.

As a teenager, I worked in a shoe store in the mall. It wasn't enough to smile and be charming, help people find what they needed. No. Once I'd made them thoroughly happy with their choices, I gathered up the boxes to escort the customers to the register, then had to attempt to sell them extras: socks, shoe polish, extra laces, and the grand prize for good salesmanship, a $10 cedar shoe tree to help the shape and leather of their $20 pair of shoes last longer. A  certain percentage of my sales had to come from these extras. I detested this part.

Twenty years ago, I worked at the Disney Catalog call center. Eventually, I managed to get a position answering the mail, but until then, I took orders and customer service calls. Not a problem, until management decided once the customer gave us the items to order, we had to choose another item from a short list we were given and offer it to the customer as well.

I hated that part. They already knew what they wanted to buy. Why would my suggestion cause them to add something to the list they called me with?

Here's the thing–are you ready for the thing? In both those cases, I spent quite a bit of time with the customers, helping them make decisions, chatting with them about their lives, establishing a rapport. Then WHAM! I had to become a sales person and try to convince them they needed something we both knew they didn't need.

Everything changed. I went from helpful friend to unwanted salesman. It always felt as if I were betraying a trust and that I'd lured them in under false pretenses. I think, for the most part, they understood I was being forced to do that part. Some even joked about it with me. Still, the relationship I'd established was no longer the same.

With my first novel coming out in July, Mr. Miracle and I are working on a big marketing push. So, here I am, doing the thing I've always wanted to do (publishing novels), but in order to continue doing it, I also have to do the thing I absolutely hate most (selling).

Because if people haven't heard about my books, how can they buy them? And if nobody buys them, then I'll have to go back to selling shoes, because the Disney Catalog doesn't exist anymore.

I have to be very careful not to sound pushy or desperate, because it'll feel like I've betrayed the trust of my Twitter, blog, and Facebook followers. I know this feeling has more to do with my distaste for sales. I'll just have to get over it.

Soon, I'll be putting on my shameless-self-promotion hat, and if it's a little tight, I'll try not to fuss with it. It's part of the job.

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