Making Professionalization Painless

Peruvian-American writer Monica Brown, whose award-winning bilingual books for children include My Name Is Celia:  The Life of Celia Cruz, My Name is Gabriela:  The Life of Gabriela Mistral, and My Name Is Gabito:  The Life of Gabriel García Márquez, offers this advice to emerging writers:

Aside from craft, I think that writers just beginning their journey need to professionalize--and that encompasses many things.  Join your professional organization--join SCBWI if you want to write for children or the Romance Writers of America, if that's your genre.  Then go to conferences and network--and by network, I don't mean stalking editors.  Rather, come with your best work and be curious, polite, and friendly to everyone.  Open your mind to new ideas and listen! 

Create a website, get business cards.  These are basic things, but sometimes creative people don't want to be bothered--or perhaps just aren't "good" at those aspects of the business.  I certainly wasn't.  But part of what we do is a business and we need to become literate in that part of publishing as well--networking, marketing, etc.  And always--pass it on.  It's my privilege now to be able to mentor newer writers the way I was mentored.

I love Brown's emphasis on friendliness, openness, and passing it on.  (The whole Q&A is available in the most recent issue of Latinidad.) 

Professionalizing yourself as a writer might feel a little awkward (like many writers, I'm sort of introverted and shy, so it has often felt like a high school dance for me), but it can actually be a fun, interesting journey, and you get to interact with so many fascinating people.  It widens your world.  Having a website, por ejemplo, has allowed readers to write to me from all over the globe--most recently, from New Zealand!  And conferences like Bread Loaf, Macondo, and AWP have been great resources, both in terms of learning about writing and publishing and in terms of getting to know writers, editors, and agents. 

And here's a surprising truth:  you don't have to be good at schmoozing or socializing.  I'm (painfully) not.  (When those commercials for social-anxiety meds come on TV--you know:  with the woman hovering anxiously in the doorway, afraid to go into the party, and the voice-over listing about eighteen social fears--I'm always like, Hmmmm . . . sounds like someone I know all too well.  So if I can do this, you can definitely do it.) 

Just be sincere, and "be curious, polite, and friendly to everyone."  Sure, some people will blow you off--you learn to recognize the way their eyes surreptitiously scan the crowd for someone more important/famous.  Seriously!  People really do this; it's almost funny. 

But more often than not, being sincere and being yourself connects you with really nice, interesting people--the ones you'd want to be with anyway.  As shark-tankish and snarky as publishing can be, an astonishing number of thoughtful, kind, generous people manage to thrive within it.
  
Remember that book editors are looking for writers who have not only a great manuscript but also a great platform.  Send out your work.  Network.  Make friends.  Try again.  The economy, as you know, is hitting publishing hard.  So we have to work harder.