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My introverted husband likes to tease me about the way I plunge into meeting new neighbors whenever we’ve moved. I joke that I want to make them casseroles to say hi and introduce ourselves to the neighborhood, and I have always made strong efforts to get to know the people who live in my community.

Rather than showing up weirdly on people’s doorsteps with lasagna, though, I do it organically, little by little over months and years.

We walk our two giant dogs twice a day, and invariably encounter other neighbors out walking theirs, or jogging, or strolling with their kids, or working in their yard. I always say hello, and sometimes stop to chat and introduce myself. Our Pyrenees, Alex—the giant white fluff—thinks himself the neighborhood ambassador, and will pull himself toward anyone we encounter to offer himself up for petting. (Nearly everyone obliges. He’s a charmer.)

I say hello at the mailboxes, wave at neighbors driving by, attend neighborhood block parties. Our fairly small neighborhood will share recommendations for local services and businesses and restaurants. We exchange recipes and names of plants we’ve succeeded in keeping alive in the Texas weather extremes. We buy mulch and Girl Scout cookies and gift wrap from the neighborhood kids when they’re selling them, or sponsor them in their tournaments to raise money for their schools.

We collect mail for neighbors when they’re out of town, or toss their newspapers onto their front porch as we walk by their driveway if the delivery person misses the mark (like if she’s throwing them from the 1980s).

I’ve brought cookies and toffee to neighbors for the holidays or when they aren’t feeling well, or for no reason—just as a fun pick-me-up. I’ve brought meals when neighbors had a baby. I’ve given saplings to other neighbors who wanted them when they weren’t suitable for my yard, returned wandering dogs home when they got loose, helped pull dead branches to the curb after last month’s ice storm.

Neighbors don’t necessarily become your closest friends (though in one delightful case they happen to have done just that). But little by little you learn people’s names and their families and a little bit about their lives. You create community ties.

So when a bit of a crisis came up in my neighborhood recently that needed quick community awareness and action and we needed to reach out to as many people as possible, I wasn’t starting from scratch.

When I knocked on neighbors’ doors or accosted them in their driveway or on their walks, many of them already knew who I was. They were happy to chat with me for a few minutes. They were willing to give me their emails and phone numbers so that we could continue to communicate about what was going on. They reached out with questions or concerns or to discuss the matter more deeply—and many of them asked how they could help.

Within an incredibly short period of time we had assembled a large grassroots network of neighbors who were able to come together and take effective action to solve our issue.

Would that have happened so readily and quickly if I had been a complete stranger approaching people? I don’t think so. Over the years we have all accrued a certain amount of social currency together, simply by socializing—not with any eventual end goal in mind, but just for the sake of being neighborly.

But when the time came, it turns out that community was an invaluable, in fact indispensable way of approaching an issue where we genuinely needed community engagement in order to be able to tackle it effectively.

Why “Building Your Author Platform” Sucks

As authors and creatives, we are often so often preached at to create a network, a platform, a “street team” to publicize our work. To me this always feels transactional, and I think it’s why the idea of “networking” puts such an icky taste in people’s mouths. In this scenario people seem to be regarded as commodities, tools for gaining an author what she wants and needs.

A lot of us don’t care for that approach, and so we resist those exhortations.

But the truth is, to use a hopefully forgivable cliché, it takes a village. And “it” is everything—from living in a community to raising a child to creating to reaching people with your creations, and every other element of life. Human beings do not live in a vacuum, and no one is an island (as long as we’re rampantly throwing around clichés). We are an interconnected larger organism, one made up of individuals, but (and let’s just go all in on the clichés) stronger together.

Authors do, in fact, need a “network,” a “platform” to create a successful career.

So how can you use this approach in creating yours, while not doing it in a way that feels inorganic or smarmy?

Don’t create a network. Create your community.

My way of doing this in my field includes a lot of different endeavors:

• It includes this blog you’re reading right now, something I do that doesn’t pay off in any overt way, but which allows me to share perspectives and insights I may have as a longtime publishing industry “insider” with authors who may benefit from it, and lets us connect, as well as my monthly How Writers Revise feature where authors share their career challenges and revision techniques.

• It involves the free resources I have provided on my website for years.

• It involves community outreach—speaking and presenting and donating time and services when I can.

• It involves taking time to respond to authors who may reach out to me with inquiries, questions, concerns, areas they struggle with, and give them as complete an answer as I can—and point them toward others who can help where I may not be able to.

• It involves fan letters I write to authors and industry professionals whose work I have found meaningful or helpful, or reaching out just to connect with colleagues whose names I may know, but we haven’t yet met directly.

• It involves commenting on people’s blog posts and social media posts, supporting and celebrating others’ successes and wins.

There are some things I don’t do. For instance, I don’t leave reviews online of books that I’ve been involved with, because it feels a little ethically gray to me. I may not be able to support those authors in that way, but I do it however I can—for example I may send a personal note of congratulations or appreciation for their work, or feature them in my How Writers Revise feature, or repost their release-day posts.

How Community Matters with Your Career

When Intuitive Editing came out, I felt it was important that I have “proof of concept” in the form of authors and other industry professionals who might have a few words to say about the book that I might use as blurbs.

Not expecting a huge percentage of people I asked to say yes, I sent out a lot of requests. Like more than two dozen, thinking that if I were lucky 10 percent or so might find some time in their busy schedules to read a lengthy nonfiction craft book, take time to offer their opinion, and allow me to use it in my publicity materials.

Reader, every person I asked said yes. Every single one, despite busy schedules, deadlines, their own demanding lives and (in the case of agents I approached) businesses.

It was an embarrassment of riches (it’s why there are so many pages of blurbs in the beginning of the book), and it made me literally cry with gratitude and amazement. It still does.

But I believe that that didn’t happen because I built a network. I’ve never been mindful of doing that. Instead I’ve simply spent the 30 years of my publishing career building relationships with people, gradually and organically, because in the same way that that’s what makes my neighborhood feel like home and my life feel like a connected community, it makes my career feel like one too.

Building Your Author Community

Maybe you are already a multipublished author. Or maybe you’re earlier on the spectrum of your career and feel you are years away from your first book launch and don’t need to worry about a “network” yet.

I agree. In fact, I encourage you not to build your network, not now and not ever.

Instead, involve yourself in your community—in this case the community of writers and other folks in our field—from the moment you decide to pursue your creative impulse to write. And give more than you get.

There are so many ways to do this that I’ll talk about in a future post, but just a few ideas:

• Take time to write reviews on outlets like Amazon and Goodreads and others if you can.
• Help spread the word about friends’ books through word of mouth, or your social media.
• Celebrate joys and triumphs with your fellow writers, and commiserate and support the setbacks and challenges.
• Write fan letters.
• Talk to presenters at conferences and tell them what you liked about their presentation or how it helped your writing.
• Offer feedback to your fellow writers if they ask for it, and make it constructive and positive.

Don’t do these things because it builds currency you can cash in at some future point, but because it develops strong community ties. And because it feels good—for the people you reach out to and connect with, and for yourself. And because it’s good for you, as countless studies show.

And then just maybe, when the time comes that you actually could use the support of the people in your community, you will find that they are there for you…in an overwhelming way.

Talk to me, authors. What are your thoughts about this topic? Do you think about building a network, a support system, a community? How do you approach it—and how do you actually do it?

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