15. Building Your Writer Community

Build Your Writing Community While Editing Your Novel

In this episode, Beth Barany discusses why building community is essential while editing a science fiction or fantasy novel, even though writing and revising are often solitary.

She describes three tiers of community—peers/colleagues, mentors/teachers (including writing books), and readers—and explain how each supports learning, feedback, motivation, and eventual book sales.

Beth encourages writers to start cultivating readers before publication by gathering interested contacts, and later using alpha and beta readers for direct feedback.

Practical suggestions include keeping a categorized contact database (peers, mentors, readers, potential beta readers), delaying paid newsletter services until ready, and using Substack to share the writing journey.

Beth offers an assignment is to create structure and habits for community-building, such as monthly or weekly sessions, and to participate in Edit Lab calls and the Fellowship of the Pen Facebook group.

00:00 Why Community Matters
 01:09 Three Tiers of Support
 01:45 Finding and Growing Readers
 02:43 Community During Revisions
 03:26 Simple Systems to Track People
 04:05 Newsletters and Substack
 04:43 Your Community Building Routine
 05:28 Join the Groups and Next Steps
 06:19 Wrap Up and Farewell

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Transcript

Building Your Writer Community

[00:00] Why Community Matters

[00:00] Hey, everyone. Today, I want to talk about building community while you edit your novel. Editing a novel takes a long time. As we edit our science fiction and fantasy novels, remember that you have, and I have, we all have people around us. Also, we have daily lives. We might have day jobs. We have other responsibilities.

[00:24] What I mean to say is that, as writers, we do the work often alone by ourselves, right? Computer, keyboard, notebook, et cetera, research. But to be a successful writer, we need to build community. Now, this is something that I didn't realize I had a competence around, but as I was learning how to write, I was in rooms.

[00:47] I was in critique groups. I was in classes. I was in organizations. I was in a professional association of writers all working toward being published, some of whom were published. All this to say, I want to call your attention to a few different ways that you could be building community, and I also want to tell you why this is important and what I mean specifically.

[01:09] Three Tiers of Support

[01:09] So when I'm talking about building community, there are three main tiers of community. There are your colleagues, which if you look around when you're in a room or in our group, Edit Lab calls, right? That's community, the people around us, our peers. Second is our teachers, mentors.

[01:26] When we read writing books, I consider those people our mentors. I'm a mentor to writers, obviously. There are a lot of other writing mentors that you may have studied with, worked with, and gotten feedback from. So we have our peers, and we have our mentors. Can you guess the third leg of our three-legged stool here?

[01:45] Finding and Growing Readers

[01:45] It is your readers. This is the most mysterious part, especially when you haven't yet published. And I remember going, at the beginning, "Where are my readers?"

[01:55] Number one, your readers are people like you, people who like what you like, and that's who you're writing for.

[02:01] Your peers can also be your readers, and so can your mentors.

[02:04] But how do you start gathering them together so that when you're ready to launch your book out into the world, you already have people you know you could tell about the fact that your book is coming? So we know what I mean by community, and I think I've mentioned why building community is so important.

[02:25] On all three legs of this stool, we need our peers. We learn a lot from our peers, and we get to teach our peers, which is also a form of learning. We learn a lot from our mentors. That almost goes without saying. And third, obviously, we need our readers, so readers buy our books. Readers keep us going.

[02:43] Community During Revisions

[02:43] I don't know about you, but I write to be read, so therefore, I really want to learn how to cultivate the relationships with my readers in a way that works for me. What better time to start learning how to do this than when you are in edits and revisions?

[03:00] This is the time, because you're learning how to get feedback from your peers, you're learning how to give feedback, and at some point, when you're ready, you can start getting alpha readers and beta readers, which is a fabulous way to start getting direct feedback from your readers and help you polish your book for publication.

[03:19] And I will do an episode on that, upcoming, on beta readers. I have a lot of content on that. All right.

[03:26] Simple Systems to Track People

[03:31] So how specifically do you build community? You can start off simply by keeping a contact database of all the people that you meet and categorizing them. And you can set up your categories however you want, and here's just a suggested way you could do it, which would be: peers, mentors, readers.

[03:45] You could even do: interested in hearing about my book when it comes out, or interested in being a beta reader when it comes out. So this is what you can do. As you meet people who express interest, you can gather their contact information, create a spreadsheet, or Gmail has a contact database.

[04:01] You could use that. I was using that for a long time myself.

[04:05] Newsletters and Substack

[04:05] And then when you're ready, and we'll talk about this in a different episode, you could set up a newsletter subscriber list using a paid service. And I would recommend you hold off on that. Or you can get started on Substack. If you're really community oriented, I would say start on Substack, sharing about your writing journey and cultivating relationships with your peers, mentors, and possible readers.

[04:29] And start telling people that you will be bringing in alpha readers or beta readers or have an announcement list. Be sure to subscribe so you can know when my book is ready to launch into the world.

[04:43] Your Community Building Routine

[04:43] So here's the assignment. What can you do to start building community now?

[04:48] What kind of organization can you put around it? What kind of structure can you put around it? And what kind of practices can you put around it? I really recommend even devoting one day a month. If this is all new to you, start with one day a month. If you are willing for a bit more, start with once a week.

[05:07] Every week, at a set time that you put on your calendar, you sit down for 20, 30 minutes, an hour, and you do the next piece in building community. Just like you built your writing practice by sitting down to write regularly, you also need to build the muscle to build community. I've given you a bunch of tips today.

[05:28] Join the Groups and Next Steps

[05:28] Let me know if you have any questions, and also let us know in our monthly Edit Lab call what steps you are taking. And just a reminder, we also have a Facebook group for the entire writer community that I serve called Fellowship of the Pen. If you're not already there, be sure to ask me about it, and I will also be indicating how to access Fellowship of the Pen on Facebook.

[05:53] You could search for that and find our group. There are a few questions that you need to answer so that I know that you're a real person, and then I will let you in. And that would be a great place to practice building community. And of course, in our Edit Lab. I look forward to seeing you in the next monthly call.

[06:11] Be sure to send in your 250 words at least a day in advance if you would like to be edited in our monthly Edit Lab.

[06:19] Wrap Up and Farewell

[06:19] That's all for this week, everyone. See you in the next audio.