Below is the transcript of my talk on networking to the AZ Historical Novel Society. It covers the basics of building platform and presence as a writer, broken down into face-to-face and online, in a homegrown sort of way that pretty much anyone can do. If you don’t live in Arizona there are some parts that you’ll have to “translate,” i.e. find your own local chapter of this or that organization, but otherwise it applies to any writer anywhere.

I founded and lead the Arizona Chapter of the Historical Novel Society. We’re very informal—all you need to do to be a member is request to be added to the email list (107 members). Everyone is welcome whether you write HF or not. We meet in homes so we have no costs, so no dues collecting. What we are good at is sharing our expertise as historical fiction writers and readers, and building community together. We meet every month or two on Saturdays during the fall, winter and spring. I’m about to send out the schedule for September through May. I asked for member recommendations for topics/speakers and got enough great ideas that I put together the whole year’s program. Wonderful! There’s still room in May if anyone has a speaker they definitely want to recommend (or be). Those of you who are members, will see that email soon. Just a few bits of info about the program descriptions to nail down and then it will go out.

With Rebecca’s help, I reorganized our FB presence. We’re there as a group. Right now it’s closed, which allows us to put up meeting addresses (since they are our homes, we need privacy), so I’m leaving it closed for now. But you should click through and request to join, so you’ll have that way of connecting along with the emails I send out. Sometimes those emails fall into spam or whatever. Here’s the link to request to join the FB group: AZ Historical Novel Society Facebook Closed Group

Our first meeting is September 17, 2-4 pm at my house with Fernanda Santos as our speaker. She’s the author of The Fire Line: The Story of the Granite Mountain Hotshots and the Phoenix bureau chief for the New York Times. Her talk is “Reconstructing (recent) history: Transforming public records, academic studies, historical documents and live interviews into pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal the story behind of one of the deadliest days in American firefighting.” She’s dynamic and pretty amazing, so be there. Feel free to email me to request to join the chapter if you haven’t been a member before, but would like to be.

Here’s our last talk from the spring, given by me with some good recommendations from attendees at the end from the discussion afterwards.

Networking for Authors: What, Why and How?

Face to Face Networking: Local Community and Abroad

1. Join writer organizations such as AZ HNS, Desert Sleuths Sisters in Crime, Romance Writers of America (Desert Rose or Valley of the Sun), Society of Southwest Authors Valley of the Sun, Arizona Authors Association. Choose one that really serves your needs, get to know people and then volunteer for a board position or to run a program.
2. Join or create a writers’ critique group. I think, although it might be counterintuitive, that you want to find writers at about the same place in the process of learning to write. You’d be amazed at how successful the blind leading the blind can be and if you have totally disparate levels, you’ll annoy people. As you go “pro” you can expand into manuscript sharing with other published authors. Get to know people at the writers’ groups mentioned above and recruit your own, or join one of the groups in action at several public libraries, bookstores, etc. There are also online critique groups such as SinC’s Guppies.
3. Attend local workshops and conferences. Also author visits and readings at bookstores, Virginia Piper Center, etc. The Desert Sleuths’ WriteNow! happens each August. Poisoned Pen often has one in June and also CozyCon. RWA has both smaller workshops and a conference. Changing Hands has many workshops. Take advantage of onetime events like the Donald Maass workshop in May.
4. Retreats or other writer-development conferences. (There are also Residencies where you work in isolation on your manuscript but at a place where other writers are gathered.) These are expensive, but worthwhile. Do your research carefully to make sure a particular retreat or extended conference will do the right things for you. These are focused on developing craft. The networking will be with other writers and publishing pros like agents and editors. At some, you work in detail with an agent or editor on your particular manuscript. At others, you’re attending classes and may have opportunities to pitch and get critiqued by agents and editors (very short meetings). The Poets and Writers website (pw.org) has good lists to get started on the research. Here’s some I’ve heard of: San Diego Writers Conference, Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Rocky Mountain, Writers Unboxed Unconvention and Iowa Writers Workshop Summer Festival. The Historical Novel Society Conference offers short craft panels and workshops and offers agent appointments for pitching. Thrillerfest (and a lot of books qualify as thrillers beyond what you’d think) also has agent pitch opportunities and mentoring of authors.
5. Reader Conferences. Unlike those in #4, these are designed to connect authors with readers and build a broader readership for your books. So, a different networking focus than #1-4. Totally worth doing, but very specific to genre. So, for romance writers, there’s RT and a host of other smaller conferences. For mystery writers, Left Coast Crime, Bouchercon, Malice Domestic (and a really long list of others). Tons for fantasy. None (that I know of, but I’d love to learn) for historical fiction, except to the extent that the HNS conference aims at readers, which HNS continues to work on.
6. Conference advice: make appointments to get together with people before you go. Look through the list of attendees and make a networking plan. Do not fear to contact writers whose work you love but haven’t met. Don’t approach conversations as a place to “get” something. Same good manners as always: ask about what is going on with the other person. Build real friendships not “usable connections”—the usefulness will flow from real friendships. On the other hand, don’t be shy about talking in an engaging way about your writing. Have a one or two sentence pitch of your book, whether you’re talking to agents, fellow writers, or readers. You need it. It should come trippingly off the tongue. It should make anyone want to read your book. You should not cringe when you say it. No apologizing for your work. And since we’re historical novelists, be knowledgeable and fascinating about your chosen time and place. Your ability to sound authoritative and charming is key. Practice on your pet if you need to. Hold imaginary conversations on long drives. Whatever it takes. Make sure you bring business cards. Only hand them out when requested or it seems genuinely clear the person wants an easy way to contact you.
7. The Book Fair. Tough nut to crack. Tucson Book Festival is close and huge. Go and check it out. Getting on panels requires a major publisher or a respected literary press. I’ve become a regular moderator. To become one, you need to demonstrate experience elsewhere as a moderator and get the regulars to recommend you. It won’t sell books. It will network with other authors in a meaningful way. People have bought booths to sell from for the weekend. Seems very expensive and exhausting. Kris Tualla has a huge booth with multiple authors and finds that very successful. Scheduled signings at bookstores or venues at the festival are worthwhile if you’re there already. Go to listen to panels and workshops, to learn. LA has a festival and many other cities.

The Online World

1. Participate/comment on websites/blogs/online communities. Find the sites of writers and readers you enjoy and with whom you share things in common. Make yourself a familiar, pleasant voice there long before you have a book out, or at least no pushing “buy my book” even if you have books on the market. Same strategy for all the social media interactions.
2. To Blog or not to Blog. Do you have a topic you genuinely want to talk about on a regular basis that will appeal to the people you want to sell books to? Can you see a direct way your blog will build readership? If not, don’t blog. Lots of people are now saying it’s not the brilliant idea everyone used to think. So let go of the guilt. If you blog, no now and then. Do it regularly and interact with other bloggers. Use your blog to build connections.
3. Jane Friedman’s advice: Don’t blog in a vacuum. “research and understand the community you’re about to enter. That doesn’t mean you need to know and meet every blogger out there (or comment regularly), but you should identify every blogger already well-known for the topic you’ll focus on. If you’re blogging about literary fiction, you better keep an eye on sites like The Millionsor Large-Hearted Boy, among dozens of others. Why is this important? Because your early traffic will likely come from other bloggers or sites in the community, and you should be talking about or sharing their stuff, engaging on Twitter or elsewhere, and offering your own perspective on topics they cover. This helps them become familiar with you long before you might ask them for a favor.” (https://janefriedman.com/community-platform/ and from other linked posts that you’ll find by going to this one. Spend some time reading around her blog.)
4. Literary Citizenship. Maybe, instead of a specific blog focus, be an active good citizen of the book world. Celebrate when friends’ books launch with a quick spotlight. Review books you particularly love (in your own voice and style—so your readers fall in love with you along with the books you talk about). Interview authors (DO NOT use preset questions for all!). Feature guest posts. Write about upcoming conferences and fun you had while touring with a book or talking books with friends over lunch, etc.
5. More Jane Friedman advice: “Bloggers who acknowledge the importance of community often do link round-ups and point to valuable content elsewhere (these sites know when you link to them and send them traffic). Even if your footprint is small, being a thoughtful literary citizen is a first step to becoming a blogger (or online writer) anyone pays attention to. What was my first community-driven initiative? Best Tweets for Writers, a weekly roundup of the best tweeted links I found, sharing other people’s compelling content. That’s how I began building a meaningful presence through my blog—and also through social media.” Do you hear how she made her way by boosting others? That’s really important!
6. Pick your social media with care and then have fun. You might want to experiment and then prune. I haven’t gone to Instagram, for example, because I’m so bad at remembering to take photos, so that photo-rich environment doesn’t feel like my world. But it’s huge these days, so maybe I should give it a try. I can say no if I’m right about it not being me. I tried Google+ for a while and really liked it, then not so much. I have an active account that I could bring to life again, but I don’t spent time there. For me, FB and Twitter work, but that’s just me. On Twitter, I can spend 10 mins on one of my favorite lists and find 5 or 6 good tweets to retweet. That keeps me present without much effort and I find stuff I enjoy knowing about. Then I supplement with one or two tweets of my own—links I like, something from my own website or personal announcements. But learn how lists work and use them or Twitter is a wilderness. One note: do not use the cross-posting method, that is, don’t use the same post for FB and Twitter. They are fundamentally different communities. FB is chatty and you want some humor or pathos or something along with the core info. Don’t just put up a link without commenting on your take (So when you share, don’t hit “share now” use the “share” button which will give you a place to write something above it.) Twitter is very condensed. You need a strong keyword or phrase to catch the scanning eye. Use hashtags and handles to interconnect. On both platforms an image is more effective than no image, but not as key as the distinctiveness of your topic/word choice. On FB you’re trying to entice your friends to comment and engage with you. That takes word count. No room for that on Twitter. But the quirky idea that provokes or the instant ironic contrast, etc will get responses. Whereas one post on FB a day with some days none is about as much as you might want to go for, Twitter builds best with some higher numbers—hence the retweets. On any social media, you should have way more tweets/posts about other people or books or ideas than mentions of your own books or anything that sounds like “buy my book.” If you tweet and post regularly great things about other people’s books, there is a reasonable chance that some of those people will return the favor when you have a launch. Let others toot your horn as much as you can. Keep your social media interactions about building community, sharing information of genuine interest/amusement to your readers.
7. Good general rule for all Networking: Don’t ask anyone for a favor unless you’ve done him or her favors in the past or have built a real friendship already. Here’s how Jane Friedman puts it: “Are you making an ask without any engagement beforehand? This happens all the time on social media. Someone uses my handle, or posts on my wall, or otherwise shouts in my ear—in the hopes I might look at their work or share their stuff. But there’s no prior relationship. I’ve never heard of them in my life. Sometimes writers think social media “networking” is about bugging people to help them. But if you want to ask a favor, it’s far better to warm up your connection first. Retweet or share their stuff. Comment on their blog. Offer something useful to them. Act like a real person who cares beyond the favor you plan to ask later. That’s the best way to ensure that when you ask for help, your “target” doesn’t feel used.”
8. Do not expect concrete, immediate results. You will build followers, friends, etc slowly—figure more than a year at the minimum—unless you pay someone for fake friends. Don’t do that. It is destructive to you because your followers and friends have to interact with you or they count against you. You’ve seen the desperate authors whose book just came out and they are building their social media overnight. It shows. They aren’t pretty. Don’t do that. If you waited too long and it’s already too late, go with reality as it exists. You aren’t yet big on any social media. You’ll survive.
9. Goodreads: Find the threads about the kinds of books you really do read or even more important, write. Comment in intelligent ways but never ever ever be snarky or negative. It’ll come back to bite you. Never be that way anywhere online. Even in what you think is a private conversation. Nothing online is really private. For every word you type, ask, how would I feel if someone said this about me/my book?
10. Goodreads: how to build friends. Whenever someone “likes” one of my reviews, I click through and send them a friend request with a message about how they liked my review and I’d enjoy following their reading as a friend. I check out their profile, find connections and I mention them. I often have an extended conversation back and forth for a while via messaging. When you see a smart comment about a book, click through to that person’s profile and request friendship and send a message about how you liked what they had to say or some other real and solid comment.
11. I haven’t been good at this, but I noticed a lot of experts saying Twitter is the best place to form professional connections. Find your heroes and follow them, retweet their stuff, respond intelligently and then later down the road they’ll know who you are. I haven’t found this so much on Twitter, although I may just not be meeting in real life the people I pay attention to on Twitter since I stick to archaeology and history and I attend readers conferences etc where the working archaeologists wouldn’t be. Maybe if I was focusing in my Twitter world more on authors and agents, this advice would be true. Just sharin’ what the “experts” claim. For example: http://www.thecreativepenn.com/2012/06/16/7-networking-tips-for-authors/ I noticed much of her advice at this link echoes what I’ve written above. At least two of us think this is good advice.
12. DIY MFA website recommended having a “wing man.” Bring a buddy to a conference or to local meetings or to work on a blog with you. I think that’s a good idea that’s worth planting into this mix.

And my parting word: a link to the “120 Most Helpful Websites for Writers 2016” Arranged by categories so you can find what you’re needing right now. Click here! An informed writer is one to whom networking opportunities will come.

And during the discussion part of this meeting, two excellent networking suggestions were made.

Explore and use this website for better Twitter connectivity: hashtagify.me

If you blog, use this hashtag to spread the word about your blog posts: #mondayblogs