Write Your Own Way: Are Other Authors Your Rivals?
We’ve been talking about common misconceptions about the “right” way to be an author, from your platform size to how much you should write in a day. But there’s another misconception about the author's life that we want to touch on, and that’s how you view your fellow writers. With the many best-seller lists, book awards, and the constant notifications of deals on Publisher’s Lunch, you can sure feel like other writers in your genre are your competition. After all, there can only be one number one, right?
Well, yes and no.
Sure, by the nature of numbers, only one author can be the best-selling author in a certain genre, and when it comes to landing on lists or landing awards, only one person can win. So in that way, yeah, other authors are your competition.
But on a larger scale? Other authors are the farthest thing from competition with you.
Above anything else, your fellow authors are your community. Although it is true that everyone is competing for awards and sales, that should be prioritized far below the community you build with other authors—especially other authors in your chosen genre. That community can greatly impact your experience as an author, so let’s talk about reframing how we look at other authors to see them as community rather than competition.
Mentors
So much about publishing you simply have to learn by experiencing it for yourself. And especially if you’re self-publishing, you not only might find yourself in unfamiliar territory, but you might not have anyone to act as your team to support you and help you make tough decisions in your author journey. If, however, you’ve connected with an author who has been working in your genre successfully and consistently longer than you, you can not only find support from them, but they can help you learn and navigate some of the stickier points of publishing. Not every author has the space, bandwidth, or desire to take a new author under their proverbial wing for a long-term mentorship, but the sooner you start looking at more established authors as a source of knowledge and community rather than a barrier to overtake, the better!
Network
Being connected with other authors in your space can also be a huge boon to the success of your book—even if those authors are “bigger names” or sell more than you have in the past. That’s because once it comes time for your publishing day, you can not only ask some of those authors to give you a blurb for your book or maybe write a foreword, but you can also ask them to help publicize it.
Shifting your perspective to see authors as community rather than competition means that you all want to help each other succeed, so they’ll help you with your book, and then you get to help them with theirs.
Writing and publishing can sometimes feel like a very solitary thing, but when you’re investing in community and working to build meaningful relationships built on respect and mutual support, you and your fellow authors can link arms and advance in your publishing career together!
Vibe Check
Publishing, like any other industry, has some amazing people, but it also has some pretty slimy folks that you might want to avoid. If you’re moving through your publishing career without a community, you won’t have anyone to warn you of a particularly predatory company, a challenging editor, an unkind agent, or some other professional that you might want to steer clear of. Similarly, if you’ve encountered someone who you’re not sure you’re comfortable working with, having a community to ask and see if anyone else had a positive or negative experience is so valuable.
It’s great to be able to run a vibe check with family and friends about certain professionals, but being able to balance that vibe check with some actual experience or industry instincts and experience from your fellow authors? That’s priceless!
You Can Have More Than One!
The other thing to remember is that you don’t have to stick to one author community. Perhaps you write paranormal romance. You will want to seek out a community of other paranormal romance writers, but that isn’t the only community you can (or should) build for yourself. Thanks to the internet and social media, you can find a ton of different communities that would be beneficial and meaningful to you. You can join (or build) a community of fellow authors who are in your same city, who share your religious or ethnic background, who enjoy reading the same types of books as you, or any other modifier that would make a meaningful community for you.
In short, your fellow author is hardly your competition. Your fellow authors are there to lift you up, help you grow, support you, cheer you on, give you advice, and help you feel like you’re not alone on your publishing journey. And you can do the same for them.
Don’t be afraid to reach out and plug in with other authors, because the reality is we are all better when we’re in community. There’s nothing wrong with friendly competition, but remember that we’re all stronger when we work together
If you’re not sure where to start with your own publishing journey, schedule a free consultation with us! We’d love to talk about your book and publishing goals, and see if we can be the first members of your publishing community!