Mentoring and what we learn

I have been a mentor for a year or more to a fellow Kiss of Death RWA chapter member. It isn't an onerous job -- we email occasionally, I've read her synopsis & query letters, we chat about publishing opportunities, and when she made her first sale, we talked about contracts, cover art, etc.

Lately we've been chatting about promotion. Her first book will release this spring and she's so anxious (remember that feeling?) She wanted to hire a marketing professional to "get out there and talk about her book." She asked a lot of questions of me: who to hire, where they should promote, etc.

I gently pointed out that unless she was with a major publisher (she isn't) she shouldn't expect to make a ton of money and that really, readers want to make a connection with the author, not with a publicist. That entailed a discussion about blogs, and how to blog, and where to blog, and what to do when you blog...

Anyway, the point of all this is: it showed me how much I have learned in the four years I've been published. I well remember that panicked feeling of "how do I tell people about my marvelous book!" and "I must talk about it today, on the day it releases, or...or..." (Not sure what came after 'or' but it felt dire). I've learned that promotion isn't about the one book. It's about your writing, which means it's about all the books, all the writing, all the things you're learning along the way.

Now I have to laugh, because one piece of advice I gave her was "don't sweat a blog post. If you're scheduled to blog, sit down and write what comes into your head. Don't spend a ton of time agonizing over it."

And you know -- that's exactly what I did. I sat down, knowing I had to do a blog post, and I thought, "What to write about? Oh, hey: how about practicing what I preached."

If you get a chance to mentor, give it a try. It's amazing what you learn about yourself in the process!