Selling Bibles Door to Door
I spent the day working on booking shows, which for an independent artist, is a grueling exercise in (mostly) rejection. If you’ve ever done any cold-call sales, or been on a job hunt, or gone to one of those speed-dating events (I haven’t), it’s probably like all those rolled in one.
For every 20 emails you send or calls you make, you might get one response. And if you can get someone on the phone, you might get about two minutes to convince them they should hire you. There are SO many bands and musicians trying to play at a small number of venues, it’s like trying to get a date with the most popular girl in school. Sure, you think your band is great and the venue should book you. What makes you any different from the other 300 bands that sent an email this week? Sometimes, unless you know somebody, you can’t ever get in! And unlike a job hunt, which mercifully ends when you get hired, booking shows never ends. If you get a talent buyer (or bar owner) to bite, you still have to land a gig for the next night! Sure, once you get to a certain level, a booking agent willl handle the dirty work and will usually have the connections to open doors and get you gigs. But an agent won’t even look at you unless you’re gigging enough for him to make a steady commission! So you’re stuck, it seems. But you’ve still got make the calls and try.
When I was growing up on Hilton Head Island, there was a group of men who were the top real estate agents in town, year after year. They had come up in the business together, starting out from the bottom as young men, and eventually became kings of that market, selling the most (and most expensive) properties in the area. The local legend was that they cut their teeth selling Bibles door-to-door during their summers in college, and that experience helped make them the uber-salesmen they became.
I went to school with their kids, and several of their sons actually followed in their fathers’ footsteps after high school, and spent a summer selling Bibles. The way I heard it, every morning they would get dropped off in a town somewhere on the mainland, and they’d walk the neighborhoods and knock on doors trying sell people big, expensive, ornately bound, family Bibles… the kind people used to record births and weddings and funerals in. At the end of the long, sweaty day, they’d get picked up and taken home to start again the next day.
Even at that time, it seemed like a losing strategy, to me. When I was growing up, my mother owned a Christian book store. If someone wanted to buy a Bible, they’d go to a shop like hers, which might not exist in every town. I remember it became a big concern when Walmart started stocking Bibles and selling them for less than she could. Why would anyone make an extra trip, and pay more at her shop, when they could grab a paperback copy of the “Good News” for $6.99 while they picked up some dog food, batteries, school supplies and a pack of undershirts?
Now a person can go to any Walmart, Target, Borders or Barnes & Noble and find a selection of inexpensive Bibles. But guess what? Most people don’t care, because they don’t want one anyway. So if I came to their house and knocked on their door, trying to sell them an over priced, oversized Bible that they don’t want anyway, I’d probably be wasting both of our time.
I feel like that as an artist. People have changed they way they consume music, but we’re often trying to sell them the old way. Most people I know don’t go to concerts very often. They might go see U2 when they come to town, or occasionally go see an indie artist they like, but I don’t know anyone who goes out to shows to just to discover new music. gone are the days when you can set up a P.A. in a field, hand out some flyers and have a few hundred people show up to hear a few local bands. A venue owner really only wants to know if you can put bodies in the room and sell drinks. And lately, the selling drinks part has been easier than bringing the bodies.
And CD sales have been declining for years. Sure, some people want something physical they can hold, but mostly they’ll either download a few tracks to shuffle on their ipod, or they don’t want it at all. And according to a recent report, of the some 13million songs available for purchase online, 11million of them were never even downloaded once! So how does an artisit make it?
I don’t know.
Maybe we’re entering a dark age where few musicians can make a living at it. Or, maybe there will be a huge “middle class” of musicians who eke out a living, but very few will be known outside of their niche. But for those of us who just have to make music, we’ll keep putting out music. And maybe it’ll spread and somewhere down the line someone will say, “oh, yeah…T.J. Edmond!I love his music!”.
When I played in Hilton Head last week I was introduced to a woman who, upon hearing my last name, said “Oh! Didn’t your mother own the bookstore? I loved going in there!” My mom’s store has been closed for a decade and a half, and people still fondly remember her and her store.
So maybe there’s hope for me.
Last night I was in Atlanta with my wife, 
