Networking Tips for Shy Writers: Three Steps to Success

If you're a writer, you likely want to make a living from your craft, but the idea of networking to market your skills or work may seem too intimidating for you.  As a shy writer, I've had to develop the skills to connect with others to promote my work.  Here are three quick tips to get you started.

Be No One Else But Yourself

Much of Western business culture is biased towards extroverts. It seems that you need to be outgoing, charming, and charismatic to really make it big.  For a shy writer, this belief is not only intimidating, it's repulsive.  It seems that we must become someone other than who we are to succeed.  That creates an understandable resistance to the whole idea of making a living from writing.

Writers thrive most whenever they express themselves authentically.  That's why it's important to walk into every networking event as yourself.  If you're shy, be shy. If you hate small talk, don't do small talk.  Simply be yourself in every interaction you have when meeting others to promote your work.

Of course, you may be asking "how can I be myself and still be sociable enough to succeed at networking?"  The best way to defeat your anxieties about networking for your writing is to actually go and do it, as yourself.   

Attend Two Networking Events a Month

In the same way that you didn't have to take a class in order to learn how to ride a bicycle, the best way to learn networking is to just do it.  Find two open networking events happening this month in your local area, and then go to them.  Ideally, space them two weeks apart so you can establish a rhythm to your routine.

A great resource for finding these events is Meetup.com.  This is a site designed to connect like-minded individuals, so if you're a writer, look for writer's guilds, book clubs, and marketing groups to start.

If this idea stirs up your anxiety, then this should calm you: when you go, you don't have to talk to anyone. What you're doing is learning through immersion. Show up without attachment to any particular outcome.  Your only goal is to get in the room.

At these events, you don't need to invent an icebreaker. Everyone is there for the same reason you are: to connect with others in business, so feel free to walk up to anyone and just say "hi". For that same reason, you may not have to do anything to have someone come up to you.  As with riding a bike, you'll get used to networking with practice.  Let your connections happen naturally, and be gentle with yourself. 

Learn From The Experts

As critical as learning by doing is, don't forget to read up on what the experts have to say about connecting with people. I recommend Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends And Influence People, the cardinal guide on communication for business and pleasure.  Another great read is Nicholas Boothman's How to Make Someone Like You in 90 Seconds or Less, which uses an approach based on neuro-linguistic programming (NLP).


Jody Aberdeen is a freelance writer and the author of the sci-fi romance Convergence.  You can visit his page at www.jodyaberdeen.com or his blog, Another Odd Place For A Hill.  
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The Hopelessly Romantic Writer (Emphasis on the "Hopeless" Part): A Micro Rant On Love, Loss, and Getting Through February Without Having a Complete Mental Breakdown

by Jody Aberdeen

All aboard the Bitter Train, with whistle-stops at Singlesville, Lonesome Prairie, and, you guessed it, the Heartbreak Hotel. Get your tickets out and hold on tight: this ride's gonna suck and we don't serve peanuts. (Wait, they do serve peanuts on trains, right? No? Well, they do now.)

I've never been a fan of February even before it became the unofficial "Love Month" after about a decade of chocolate hearts and exchanging Valentine's cards at school ("You Choo-Choo Choose Me", in keeping with the train theme). Even when I was in my relationship, the lead up to February 14th and even the rest of the month was just one giant bubble of peer pressure to out-romance the other couples in our networks.

Then, when I became single, and those couples disowned me (as couples tend to do when le divorce strikes their comrades), the new challenge became fending off the artificial pressure to find someone so I could have this perfect "Valentine's" moment, along with balancing my own feelings of loneliness.

Well, fie to all of that. Fie, I say!

Now, these aren't uncommon complaints, but as it happens, I am a writer and a creative person, and at the risk of sounding like a stereotype, my skin is thinner than most people, despite my best efforts at swagger and confidence when I'm out at parties or at my day job in retail.

And so having a holiday about love, sex, and romance that's grown, amoeba-like, from the 14th of the month into the month itself, I think I could be forgiven if it opens up a few things that I normally keep locked up under my bed the rest of the year.

Write For Catharsis

My first book, Convergence, is a science fiction romance, consisting of about 1/3 an old idea about soulmates and alternate dimensions, but 2/3 catharsis as I worked some psychological damage control after my marriage ended three years ago. As such, I have a track record of successfully processing out heavy emotions involving love and loss into a great piece of writing.

To that end, I've started an erotic sci-fi/horror story, hopefully finished by the end of next week, that will hopefully capture these feelings, honour them, and then put them somewhere safe and half-way productive, kind of like a carbon sequestration for the soul.

If the bad feels lead into a great story and get me a writing credit to boot, then it's almost worth it. Almost....

Sex Transmutation, Winter, and the Kobayashi Maru of Positive Thinking

Thing is, I'm not completely satisfied with writing catharsis, because around this time of year, the feelings run on this spin cycle, like a Superstorm Sandy of confluences between the winter weather outside (I read somewhere that NASA astronauts on long duration missions would experience similar emotions to SAD because of the lack of the colour green in their experience) and all of these feelings that Love Month drums up for me. Everything just swirls around until the spring, and the sky may be bright and blue one day, but get cloudy and sleeting the next.

Writing is indeed my One Thing that I'm going to be doing the rest of my life, regardless of pay and benefits, but when it becomes almost exclusively a tool for emotional stability rather than a creative outlet, it stops being fun, and then I just don't feel like doing it. That short story will probably miss its deadline unless I have some kind of turnaround on the inside.

But I'm also tired of my personal development practices that tell me to be positive all the time just like that: to me, that's a dishonouring of my authenticity. Sure, I'll get back there, but I have to process first.

Yet still, I have to be careful not to start re-ingesting the crap I've been venting out (sorry for the image, but it's the only way to describe it accurately), which then just feeds the cycle.

The whole thing is a little like the Kobayashi Maru (watch Star Trek II or even the J.J. Abrams movie if you don't get the reference). Nothing really to do but keep going. That's the key: persistence.

Interestingly, our fearless leader Carrie Bailey recently mentioned Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich. There's a chapter on "Persistence" that I read over and over again when I'm on my upswing. Check it out if you haven't, as well as the chapter called "The Mystery of Sex Transmutation", which I recently blogged about on my site and which is in keeping with Love Month.

Life vs Fiction

(Audible sigh). I guess I don't know how to end this mini rant. At one of my writer's guild meetings before Christmas, we had a deep conversation about if many writers become torn between creating interesting characters and becoming them. Hemingway is the chief archetype of this idea, but you look at the lives of most writers in the English language, and you see this Bohemian blend, contrasting stripes of tragedy, emotional instability, privilege and poverty, and almost always a touch of otherwordly inspiration: all traits that themselves are worthy of novels.

Yesterday, I saw The Words starring Dennis Quaid and Bradley Cooper, one of the finest and accurate (and devastating) movies made in recent years about the reality of becoming a career author. Near the end, someone says the following line: 'You have to choose between life and fiction. The two are very close, but almost never touch."

More than most, Love Month makes me highly self conscious, which hurts my ability to write about anything else other than my own life, one that isn't nearly as interesting or as relevant as Hemingway's, I'll admit (though it would make a fantastic comedy of errors, I'll admit, perhaps starring George Lopez as my older, wiser self).

As always, though, I have my vocation to get me through the winter, at times like these I can't help but think about the improvements I need to make in my life, especially in the romance department: putting myself out there again, taking down that ten foot wall around my heart or at least expediting the search for the girl with an eleven foot ladder cleverly concealed in her deceptively small purse. Or, possibly just dropping the pursuit altogether and seeing what else I can do to fulfil myself.

I'll be fine come the spring, honestly, but for now, I do what I was born to do, and write my present truth in fiction.

(This is the part where I'm supposed to refer back to the train metaphor I started with, but I'll leave my fellow Peevish citizens to do that...what do you guys think?  Try to make it end on a high note: this is admittedly a downer post).


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Planning Your Own Book Launch

by Jody Aberdeen

Our fearless leader and occasional radio personality Carrie Bailey has set us the challenge of writing on the theme of problems and solutions. I'd like to talk about a "problem" that I always wanted to have: namely, launching my own book as an independent author.

Lucianna, testing the art of Japanese shibari bondage,
one of the fun things guests will get to see at our launch

I'm doing just that for my novel "Convergence".  My writers guild, the Toronto Wordslingers, is hosting my a launch for my time travel romance.

My friend and fellow guild-runner Lucianna LiSacchi is also joining me to promote her erotic drama "Mommy's Little Playgroup".

Everything happens at 8pm on Friday, February 1st, in Toronto, at Arta Gallery in the Distillery District.

Appropriately, we're billing it as "An Evening of Sex and Romance". 

So, what's the "problem"?  Well, let's first take the advice of a multi-millionaire gentleman I happened to meet in Toronto a few years back and change the word "problem" to "challenge". Mindset is everything when you start to make a living doing what you love the most, and challenges contain far more opportunity than "problems". 

Why are we doing this?  Shouldn't we wait until we get picked up by a publisher. Absolutely not!  Independently published books are now so prevalent that publishers are now scouring e-pub sites for new talent. 50 Shades of Grey began as an independently published e-book. British author John Locke made over a million dollars selling his e-books for just under 99 cents. 

All this means that, as unsigned authors with books now ready, we have no incentive to wait to celebrate our achievements.  And if you're going to celebrate, you may as well go big.

Creating a Platform 

Arta Gallery, Toronto, the site of our book launch. 

That's not to say we're opposed to being signed: in fact, that is still the dream. We still query agents and publishers, and we're hoping that some representatives from Random House and Harper Collins will show up.

However, one thing that publishers look for in these risk-averse times are serious writers who will have more where that came from, and that's hard to demonstrate with just one book unless you have a platform.

We're investing thousands of dollars, an Indiegogo campaign, several media outlets, and all of our social and professional networks behind this evening.  That's not even counting our websites, smaller events that we're going to host and take part in to promote ourselves, and other ideas we haven't even thought of yet but are seeking out.  As platforms go, they don't get much bigger than that.

Challenges We Face Planning Our Book Launch 

^^dressed for success (really,
a friend's wedding, but you
get the idea)

Becoming salesmen.  Not one person in our little boutique guild has a background in sales.  We don't like it.  We've had to evolve some cojones to shamelessly plug our launch at every turn.  As artists, we all share a reluctance to be inauthentic, and I've always viewed selling as a sleazy business.  That being said, reality dictates that we learn techniques to show people why what we're doing should matter to them.

The solution?  See yourself and your work as worthy of the time, money, success, and attention of others, and keep going. 

Learning on the fly.  I tell my guild and coaching clients that sometimes the best leaders and teachers are only ever twenty yards ahead of you on the way to the end zone. This is definitely the case with planning our own launch: we're learning as we go.  We will screw things up.  We may lose our investments.  We may miss out on opportunities.  That's okay, because this is our first of many books we want to crank out, and many more book launches we want to host.  This is the life we chose. 

The solution? Forgive yourself in advance, keep learning, and keep going. 

^^scared shitless

Being scared shitless. There's a veritable Zeno's Paradox of things that could cause our event to fail.  Then again, a million things can happen to you stepping out your front door: that doesn't mean you're going to be housebound the rest of your life.  Still, that rational assurance does nothing to quell the butterflies buzzing around your solar plexus.

The solution? Let the fear do its thing....and keep going.

Aside from the details of getting things booked, putting down deposits, and meeting with people, there's little that separates hosting a book launch from the art of expressing what's in your soul onto the page.  The solution to every challenge the writer's life throws our way is the same: keep going.

My Shameless Plug 

Speaking of sales-y things: if you're not in Toronto, but would like to support us anyway, visit us on Indiegogo and choose the "Pen Pals" perk.  A $20 USD donation will get you an e-anthology featuring short stories from our Toronto Wordslingers writers, including yours truly, along with the thanks of a grateful group of writers just like you.

And if you don't donate, feel free to promote us to your friends and contacts by sharing our link.

Book signings, champagne, and a little light bondage.
What more could you want
from An Evening of Sex and Romance? 

I'll be sure to update the Peevish Nation on how it all turns out, and share everything that we'll have learned by then.

Until then, boys and girls, continue to believe in yourselves, your stories, and your work,  and always keep going despite your fear. This is what you were born to do.

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