In the early 2000s, I started selling some short stories to horror markets. I joined the Horror Writers Association.
When you’re young, working in a warehouse or selling hot dogs, you look at work – at acting – as something precious. It gets you out of the stink.
I always felt like what I was doing wasn’t selling toys; I was making a happy sound at Christmas. When people hear something so familiar, it brings them back to a special place, and that’s been meaningful for me.
With Comedy Central, they produced it and did everything – I just had to walk up there and tell the jokes – whereas with Netflix, I was heavily, creatively involved, from the logo to the lighting of the room to selecting the venue to selling the tickets and promoting it.
It seems like everyone’s got an agenda, and the agenda seems to be selling magazines or air time with sensational stories.
For years, as a seller of real estate and star of reality TV, Donald Trump made a living wooing customers and viewers. His selling skills were good enough that he even convinced voters to elect him as president in spite of his near-total lack of qualifications.
It’s far too much to say that effective hoping is the only – or even the biggest – part of what it takes to succeed. If 14% of business productivity can be attributed to hope, that means 86% is dependent on raw talent, fickle business cycles, the quality of the product you’re selling, and often pure, dumb luck.
Every time a pundit or elected official is on any TV news program, it should be a polite formality to mention that GE has made such and such billions off the war in Iraq by selling arms or that Murdoch is a right-wing activist with a clear stake in who wins and who taxes his profits the least.
We ask from the heart that supermarkets, which are now more profitable and selling more, help us to take care of the pocketbook of the people by not raising prices.
Some days, I would find what seemed like entire family trees, torn from once-treasured albums and dumped in disorganized bins, selling 10 for a dollar. I wondered how people could give up pictures of their great-grandparents for complete strangers to paw through – or why complete strangers would want them.
The model of Coca-Cola is local, whether it’s investing, partnering, sourcing, producing, or selling. We market and distribute locally; we pay taxes locally. And it works.
I think, as an artist, part of your job is being aware of what’s going on around you and not selling out and not following the trend, which I’m totally against.
To be selling out shows and these kids who don’t speak English singing along every word? It’s wild.
All I can say, being young people being in a band, writing songs that we felt were great… we never felt that years later we’d be selling out shows.
Individual investors have become far more powerful than anyone gives them credit for. Today, 85 million Americans invest in stocks. Collectively, that kind of buying and selling power can move markets.
When you run the Walt Disney Co., you gain a fair amount of experience in customer-facing businesses, particularly in site-based entertainment. I have a lot of experience in marketing, a lot of experience in selling, particularly tickets to site-based entertainment or movies or whatever.
You see I don’t like to be really too commercial about things but in this business you’ve just got to be commercial otherwise the films don’t make money and you don’t make films and as a long as a commodity is selling it’s silly to kill it dead.
The biggest affront to any audience is if you feel like someone took something you love and is selling it out.
I’ve always loved dogs and have had one since I was three. We bought her from a kid selling puppies out of a cardboard box on the street where we lived in New York City. Great dog. We named her ‘Marcella’ after a Raggedy Ann character. She grew up with us.
What often, too often, happens in magazines is that you end up with a great editorial product, and then you’re selling things that you don’t really approve of.
The fact is, Joe Isuzu is very successful at selling cars.
Most people who are selling their mineral rights, this is a once-in-a-lifetime transaction. The people who are buying, the landmen who are coming in, do it every day. So there’s a little inequity there about knowledge.
I love directing. I love creating things that I don’t necessarily even have to be in. I like creating worlds. So I’m getting into writing movies and selling movies and television shows and creating worlds that then get to live beyond me.
From the very beginning, I envisioned success as selling enough books so I could keep getting published and continue to write what I wanted to without compromising.
When I’m in the studio, I’m strictly thinking about the beats, the rhymes and the song. The decision I make once the songs are created, and there’s a barcode put on the package, and I’m out there in the street selling it, those decisions as a businessman are different than the creative decisions you make.
We still have money issues. We will always have them as long as Cash Money is selling anything that has Mannie Fresh on it.
I would have been happy to play in Holland for a big club, but I can see the point of selling me to an English club. It’s very simple: Dutch clubs are not going to spend £16m on a player like me.
If you write a lovely story about India, you’re criticized for selling an exotic version of India. And if you write critically about India, you’re seen as portraying it in a negative light – it also seems to be a popular way to present India, sort of mangoes and beggars.
Look at smartphones. We are seeing growth almost like a barbell. You see lower-priced but high-volume growth in the developing world. But it ends up the average selling prices in the developing world are actually a lot higher than what people think.
Well, capitalism is a big problem, because with capitalism you’re just going to keep buying and selling things until there’s nothing else to buy and sell, which means gobbling up the planet.
While Wall Street firms typically underwrite offerings in teams, the lead underwriter, or manager, of the offering has primary responsibility for selling the offering and reaps much of the fees and profit.
My first job was at the Inala Plaza selling jewelry; I’ve seen all sorts of life; I’ve studied overseas; I’ve worked hard in my community; I can sit down with anyone from any sort of background and have a chat; I’m involved in community organizations. How do you measure those things?
I think it’s OK if somebody likes my music and likes Sam Hunt’s music, too. And I think if we’re both selling records, it’s good for everybody. I think it allows other records to get made.
I worked on ‘Boone’ for five years. I tried to find money for it. I couldn’t. I ended up selling my house to finance it personally.
We were selling out venues, not just in London but also major cities in France and Germany before labels had even noticed what we were doing.
Curating our data is valuable. Like 23andMe – while selling us the chance to know whether we’re Vikings or whatever, they’re amassing these huge DNA databases that are unimaginably valuable. Get people to pay you to add their DNA to this database. Genius!
Selling art is a lot different than making it.
So if the wall’s cracked or you’ve got leaky faucets, or you’ve got mold issues, or some sort of damage to your home, selling a home that’s got that kind of distress to it is the biggest mistake you will make, because immediately people who are fearful will walk away.
The name Minted speaks to the freshness of our design – the fact that we are receiving thousands of new designs each week and selling freshly minted winners from our design competitions.
MTV made a huge impact. Heavy rotation took you from selling 1m albums to 20m albums, and that meant a lot of dough.
I can say with full sincerity that I am happy. I’m happy because I’m doing what I love and I’m not selling out.
If you look at the very best presidents, the most effective presidents, they were always decent salespeople. Ronald Reagan was an extremely effective salesman, very tuned to the people he was selling to, very clear in what he was selling, very resilient and buoyant.
I just think that I’ll never have plastic surgery if I’m not in front of the camera. If you make your living selling this thing, which is the way you look, then maybe you do it. But trust me, the minute I’m directing or producing and not starring, I would never even think of it.
