For Your Information

Mike Hyatt had announced a mentoring program he is starting. You can find information about it here: http://michaelhyatt.com/2009/11/an-invitation-to-my-mentoring-group.html

I don't know enough about this to know whether I would endorse it or not, but I thought I would provide the information for anyone who might be interested. His criteria for consideration is quite selective. So you single guys out there, if you are interested, you are going to have to go find you a wife if you want to participate. But if you are married, live in the Nashville area and enjoy looking at yourself in the mirror, you might want to consider it.

Book on "Mentoring"

If you are interested, Mike Hyatt is giving away a book on mentoring. Visit his blog at http://michaelhyatt.com/2009/11/book-notes-mentor-like-jesus-by-regi-campbell.html/comment-page-5#comment-40477 for more information. The book he is giving away is focused more on a discipleship relationship rather than on a mentoring relationship, but it may be a good read anyway.

10,000 Hours

Author Mary DeMuth recently wrote a guest post for Michael Hyatt’s blog titled What it Takes to Become a Master Writer. This is related to mentoring, so I thought it would be good to place the link here for people reading this blog. Go read the post and then come back her to read my take on the subject, as it relates to mentoring.

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First, let’s consider the 10,000 hours. How many hours have you practiced writing? Unlike with the mastery of a musical instrument, it’s hard to guess. I’m a pianist and I know how much time I spend sitting at the piano each week. I can average that out, multiply it by the number of years I’ve been playing and it will give me a rough idea of how much I’ve practiced, but with writing, we must count many things that include things like the time we’ve spent typing out stories, the time we spent on English homework, even the time we’ve spent daydreaming about a story we will write. All of that is required for a writer.

Mary states:

Those who write novels ask me how to deepen characterization, or create a character out of a setting, or evoke mood, or widen suspense. I usually can’t answer that. Why? Because most of what I write now is instinctive, born from years of experimentation and failure.

Consider those words for a moment. What does that mean to us in terms of mentoring? What good is a mentor that can’t tell us what we want to know? The moral to this story is that those people we might think are the ideal mentors may not be. Our natural tendency may be to seek out the most highly recognizable author in the industry, the guy with ten bestsellers to his name and multiple houses, all paid for by his writing. But though he may be able to write very well, he may not be able to explain how he did it. A better mentor is someone who isn’t that far along the path. If we want to know how to do the things Mary mentioned, we shouldn’t seek out Mary as a mentor, since she has told us she doesn’t know how to tell us those things. Instead, we should seek out an author who has less experience overall, but who has recently developed the skills we need. Such an author will be able to tell us what he did to learn that skill, what mistakes he made, etc. After we have learned that skill, it might then be time to seek out a more experienced author, like Mary, who may not be able to explain that kind of stuff, but can explain the skills she has recently developed.

Teaching and mentoring as also skills that improve with practice. While we imagine that we will always be able to explain to mentees what we have learned, if we don’t do this on a regular basis, we will forget how to explain the things we have learned to do instinctively and we will be in the same boat that Mary has found herself in.

Formal or Informal

This blog has talked a lot about the formal mentoring relationship, but we often find ourselves in informal mentoring relationships as well. Which is better?  There may not be a good answer to that. In the formal mentoring relationship, there is a special emphasis on the development of the mentee involving what the mentee sees as his needs for development. In the informal relationship, the mentor may give the mentee advice many times or just once. Things are much more relaxed and it could be that the mentor or the mentee is no fully aware that he or she is in a mentoring relationship at all. The mentor may see something that the mentee is doing and feel the need to offer advice. Or the mentee may need help and asks questions of the mentor. Neither actually asks to begin a mentoring relationship.

There is room for both types of relationships. If the mentee is seeking ongoing help to improve an area of his life, the formal mentoring relationship is better because it gives both people a chance to set their goals for the relationship. If the mentee is just seeking occasional help, the informal relationship is better.

A Different Point of View

Whether you are the mentee or the mentor in the relationship, one of the benefits of a mentoring relationship is that it will give you the benefit of a different point of view. Most of the time, we spend out time hanging out with people who are a lot like us. We work with people having a similar educational background. In our free time, we go to places where there are other people who enjoy the same things. We worship with people who have similar beliefs to our own. We tend to read books written by people who agree with us. It is easy for us to assume that everyone is just like us.

I was in a formal mentoring relationship during a time that I was involved with making plans for celebrating our pastor having been the pastor of our church for fifty years. At dinner with my mentor one day, I mentioned this. He told me about their church and how that their pastors move from church to church. I don't remember how often he said that happens, but I seems like it was a less than ten year and maybe less than five year period. They have some kind of organization that makes the decisions about which person will pastor each church. That was strange to this Baptist's ears, since most Baptist churches view the local assembly as being the highest earthly authority and each body chooses their own pastor. But that isn't how all denominations do it.

The point is that the mentoring relationship exposed me to a concept that I wouldn't have known much about if I hadn't been in it. It didn't change my opinion on the subject, but it did help me to see that other people may not see church in quite the same way as I do. As writers, that is important to us. Things like that flavor our characters' lives. A character may respond to a situation differently if he knows his pastor is going to be leaving in a few months than what he might if the only way the pastor will leave is if the pastor feels the need to leave or the church kicks him out. Some readers may find our writing to come across oddly if we assume the understand the way things work and the reader knows they work another way. Today, it is almost comical to see the way writers used to write about computers, when they understood very little. Spending time in a mentoring relationship is one way to learn more about things we don't understand.

Performance Evaluation: Mentee

Don’t expect your mentor to evaluate your performance and don’t ask him to. Putting the mentor in that position makes things difficult for both people. It will almost always leave you, the mentee, feeling down. Your mentor is better than you in the area you are trying to improve, so he is likely to notice problems rather than being impressed with your skill. If he gives you an evaluation, you will feel like you can’t do anything right. The mentor also finds it difficult because he doesn’t want to tear you down, but he also wants to be honest.

Instead of putting your mentor in that situation, do an honest self evaluation before you meet with your mentor. If you are trying to improve your writing, for example, you might pick out some of the paragraphs from your work and say, “I think I could do better with these, but I’m not sure how.” If you are trying to improve your work ethic, you might mention some of the times you didn’t spend as much time writing as you think you should have and ask your mentor what you can do to improve. When you evaluate yourself, you own the evaluation and are much more willing to find a way to improve.

Performance Evaluation: Mentor

Imagine that you are a mentor and your mentee has asked you to help him develop his speaking ability. You know that he is going to be speaking for a crowd of about three hundred people, so rather than telling him that you will be there, you slip in, find a seat at the back and listen to him speak. He is terrible. So what should you tell him the next time you meet?

The mentor should not evaluate the performance of the mentee. Consider how the mentee will react if you meet with him and say, “You did it all wrong. You looked at your notes too much. You never made eye contact. You stood too far away from the microphone. The jokes at the beginning were lame. People were asking where they got this guy.” The mentee is going to leave that meeting feeling like he can do anything right and he won’t know how he can fix it.

Do this instead. First, ask the mentee how he thought he did. If he says that he thought he did okay, ask him to put a list of things in order from the weakest to the strongest. In this case, the list would include such things as eye contact, connecting with the audience, use of notes, etc. Then take what he considers to be the weakest and discuss what he can do to make it stronger. This way, he doesn’t feel that you are telling him that he is terrible, but he see you as helping him in an area where he knows he can benefit from improvement.

Are You Ready?

A mentoring relation ship is not something to take lightly. Many people see the advantages of a mentoring relationship, but they aren’t fully prepared to take advantage of it. Below are some things that will help you decide if you are prepared to be either a mentee or a mentor:

For the Mentee

• Are you prepared to take an active role in developing yourself as a writer, speaker or whatever area of development you have?
• Do you know what you hope to gain from the mentoring relationship?
• Do you know what is preventing you from reaching your goals?
• Are you willing to develop your interpersonal skills?
• Have you considered what it is that your mentor can do to help you?
• Are you willing to listen with an open mind to suggestions your mentor makes? Are you willing to try the suggestions before dismissing them?
• Do you have time to spend improving and working with your mentor?

For the Mentor

• Do you have an interest in the success of your mentee?
• Are you willing to use your contacts in the industry to help your mentee?
• Do you have time for this?
• Are you looking for ways to be a better mentor?
• Are you willing to develop your interpersonal skills?

Personality Tests

At some point in your life, you have probably taken a personality test of some point. Schools often give personality tests to help their students decide what they want to do with their lives. Churches will sometimes give personality tests to assess a person’s spiritual gifts. Businesses will give personality tests to help access how to utilize the skill sets they have available. You have probably heard of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, which classifies each person into 16 personality types based on their preferences.

Personality tests can be useful in a mentoring situation. No personality test is completely accurate, but they can be a good starting point from which a mentor and mentee can get to know more about each other. Personality tests can also help to identify areas the mentee needs to work on. The demands of the writing career make it such that the extravert tends to succeed where the introvert does not. The judging personality may have advantages and disadvantages that the perceiving personality does not. Using his or her knowledge of the mentee’s personality, the mentor can then help to identify traits that the mentee can take advantage of as well as identify traits they he must work to overcome.

What Mentoring Isn’t

Some people go into a mentoring relationship with unrealistic expectations of what it should be. The following is a list of things that mentoring isn’t:

• A Guarantee for a Book Contract
• A Relationship that Lasts Forever
• A substitute for reading books and/or attending conferences to learn how to write, submit queries, market books etc.
• A way to get someone to edit your work for you.
• A method of getting a good ideas that agents and publishers will jump on.
• A substitute for building a platform.

Benefits of Being a Mentor

Why would I want to mentor someone? I have enough trouble selling books (editing books, writing books) without giving all my secrets away from free. Here are some reasons to consider mentoring:

• Broader understanding of the publishing industry and writing community, obtained by seeing it through the eyes of someone less entrenched.
• More readers, achieved by increasing the quality of books and the genre in general.
• A better understanding of diverse backgrounds, providing a better understanding of readers.
• Satisfaction from helping someone else.
• Improved self-awareness.
• Improved ability to order thoughts and to transfer knowledge.

Benefits of Mentoring for the Mentee

Why would I want a mentor? Here are some of the potential benefits for writers and aspiring writers:

• Increased Awareness of the activities of the publishing industry and the writing community.
• Increased Knowledge of what works and what doesn’t in writing, marketing and platform building.
• Improved Effectiveness
• Opportunity to develop skills, such as writing, querying, public speaking, interviews and connecting with fans.
• Impartial “Sounding Board”
• Motivation and Confidence

An Example Agreement

In a formal mentoring arrangement, it is best to have some kind of written agreement. This helps to assure that both parties understand what they are getting out of the arrangement and what will be required of them. The last thing a published author needs is a wannabe author thinking that the published author will convince his publisher to offer the wannabe a contract. And the last thing an aspiring author needs is a lawsuit from a published author saying the aspiring author stole his intellectual property. You might watch Finding Forester again to see some of the benefits and problems of mentoring within the author community. How formal you go is up to you, but the following will give you some idea of what you might want to put in a formal agreement:

Example Agreement

We, the mentor and mentee have mutually developed this agreement to lay down the ground rules of how our mentoring relationship should work.

We are both committing to do our best to honor these ground rules. We will both try to:

• E-mail at least once per ____________, for at least _____________ (amount of time)
• Deal with any problems we might have by talking about it—even when it isn’t easy. We will face our problems and things that don’t feel right, rather than not dealing with it.
• Keep the other person apprised of times when we will not be available, via an e-mail message.
• Honor the other person’s privacy. We will ask the mentor/mentee before passing on any information that person has given us. The only exception to this is that it does not excuse us from doing our duty to report illegal actions that come to our knowledge or dangerous situations. Nor does it prevent the mentee from asking advice from others when he/she feels unsafe.
• Work toward our shared goals. These include (list below):
• Recognize that we are not the same people. We will respect and value each other for the ways we are alike and the ways we are different, recognizing that while we may not at agree on all things, we can learn from our differences and the path by which we came to those differences.
• Listen. We will try to understand the other person’s viewpoint.
• Take responsibility for making sure that we get things done, but also have fun doing it.

Additionally, we understand that:

• Any story ideas, wording, intellectual property, etc. should not be used in our own work without express permission.
• If one person’s idea or wording does happen to show up in the other person’s work without permission, we will handle the situation between the two of us, rather than involving other people and lawyers.

____________________

Mentee Signature

____________________

Mentor Signature

An Atmosphere of Friendship

It is in the best interest of both parties to be able to trust the other person as a friend, but if some issue does come up, such as one of the mentee’s ideas appearing in the mentor’s next book, it is better to keep it between the two of them. Court cases are costly and the the lawyers seem to be the only people who make money. Besides, in the future, potential mentors are likely to turn down requests from someone sued a previous mentor. There are situations where the situation may require more drastic action, such as if a mentor were to take advantage and abuse a mentee, but if at all possible, it is best to bow out of the conflict in other situations. Of course, the best thing to do is to pick a mentor/mentee that isn’t going to create such a problem in the first place. Also, if you don’t want an idea shared, it might be better to not mention it at all. It is easy to latch onto an idea and forget where it came from. We may not intend to use another person’s idea, but things happen. Look for a mentor/mentee you can trust and don’t burden him/her with keeping any secrets if it is not necessary for reaching your goals. Try to create and Atmosphere of Friendship.

What Should Happen When We Meet?

At its heart the mentoring relationship is about two friends coming together to talk about how the less experienced can gain from the experience of the other. How friends interact with each other is as varied as the friendships themselves. How you meet in a mentoring relationship is up to you. Do what works best for both people.

I was in a formal mentoring relationship set up by my employer. My mentor was a senior manager, so he had managers working for him who had other people working for them. The first time I interviewed him over the phone. I remember him cutting that conversation short, “There’s people in my office. Something must have broke.” Later, when we planned how we should meet, he told me that it would work best for him if we met away from the office because, if he were there for people to find, people would interrupt our meetings. We met for an hour each month at some of the local restaurants and discussed such things as setting objectives and wording for what should be on a performance appraisal.

The first time we had lunch together, really didn’t know how we would handle the bill. It is always somewhat messy when a ticket has to be split. I wondered if I should pay it, since I was taking advantage of his time. He made it easy for me. “I’ll pay this time and you can pay next time.” Here again, you do what works best in your situation, but I think it is best if both people pay their own way. It is best if the mentor be one to express how he would like for it to be handled.

The meeting itself can include some amount of small talk and probably should. It is easier to communicate if we know something of what is going on in the other person’s life. But mentoring sessions should not degrade into nothing but chitchat. Whether you are the mentor or the mentee, it is your responsibility to make sure that the primary conversation during these meetings is about what the mentee needs to be doing to reach the goals that have been defined. There should be some discussion of what the mentee has done since the last meeting. There should also be discussion of what the mentee should do between now and the next meeting. These meetings are also a good place to discuss things that may be coming up later and any goals that may need to change due to the current situation.

Mentoring meetings should happen at regular intervals, though they don’t have to fall on the same day each month, fortnight or week, as the case may be. Before the mentoring session ends, a time for the next meeting should be discussed. If a decision can’t be made as to time at that point, there should at least be a plan for setting that time in the near future. For example, one of the two might say that he will email the other when he finds out when his wife is off work.

Who Runs the Show?

The mentor deserves respect, but the mentee sets the agenda. This isn’t a teacher/student relationship. In the teacher/student relationship, the teacher decides what the student needs to learn and tries to deposit that knowledge in the student’s brain in some way. That relationship is necessary and important, but it has its problems. In the mentor/mentee relationship, the mentee decides what he wants to learn and asks the mentor for assistance in doing so. There are some distinct advantages to this.

One advantage is that the mentor doesn’t have to decide what the mentee needs to know. The mentee comes to him and asks. “How would you handle this situation?”

Another advantage is that the mentee is more open to learning. He isn’t sitting in class telling himself he needs to learn this boring stuff because it will be on the test. Instead, he recognizes the importance of the information he is receiving because he has probably run into a situation where he could use it, causing him to ask for it.

Each time they meet, the mentee is asking the mentor questions. The mentor has the option and is even obligated to make suggestions on what questions the mentee should be asking at this point, but if the mentee doesn’t see the value in it, the mentor shouldn’t try to force it on him. The mentee initiates the relationship. The mentee sets the agenda for their meetings. The task of the mentor is to address the questions of the mentee, if he can.

A Mentor Isn't a Fairy Godmother

When entering into a mentoring relationship, whether as a mentor or a mentee, it is essential to establish a clear understanding of what will take place. If you happen to be a bestselling author, it is best that you don’t attempt mentoring a wannabe author unless you are already a close personal friend of the author. I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that, since you may have your fair share of people trying to send you manuscripts to look at and such. Here’s the problem. A wannabe author will go into the mentoring relationship with the expectation that the bestselling author can wave her magic wand and solve all of her problems. Short of that, the wannabe author may want the author to edit her manuscript. The bestselling author may want the wannabe author to make changes that the wannabe is unwilling to make.

If you want to read your mentee’s manuscript and make suggestions, that is up to you, but that is not the point of a mentor/mentee relationship. Going into the relationship, the mentee should establish some goals for what he wants to accomplish during the period of the relationship. Each month, or each fortnight, the mentor should discuss with the mentee what the mentee has done to move toward those goals and make suggestions on what the mentee should do during the next month or fortnight that will help move him toward those goals.

Let’s say the mentor is a bestselling author and the mentee is a published author who has just gotten the largest contract she has ever seen. She doesn’t need someone to tell her how to write. What she needs is someone to help her through this mess of finishing the book, while meeting the increased expectations of the publisher that she will do marketing and any number of other things. The mentor can sit down with her in that situation and talk to her about avoiding the mistakes she made in the same situation. But going into that situation, both need to be clear that that is the purpose of the mentoring relationship and not something else.

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Why Would I Want to Mentor Writers?

Let’s see. You want me to give advice to someone who is competing with me for customers. You want me to take two or three hours a month out of my schedule. And you want me to do it all for free?

Yeah, you get the gist. It isn’t hard to convince potential mentees that mentoring can be a great thing. The real question is why would anyone want to be a writer mentor? You could be setting someone up to knock you out of one of those precious publishing slots at your publisher. Yes, you could, but publishing doesn’t work exactly that way. Mentoring produces better writers. Better writers means more readers. More readers means more publishing slots. So, mentoring produces more publishing slots, more money for publishers and potentially more money for you.

Mentoring will also help to make you a better writer. You’ve heard that the teacher learns more than the student. This is true with mentoring also. The mentor will naturally grow in the area in which he is helping his mentee to grow. You will recall things you have forgotten and you will be able to put them to use.

Mentoring is a pay it forward system. You’ve had people help you, asking nothing in return. Return the favor by doing the same for someone else. The beauty of mentoring is that even while you are mentoring someone, you may have your own mentor who is helping you and your mentor may have his own mentor.

There are other benefits to the mentor. The mentee may decide to include the mentor in the acknowledgements for a book or request the mentor write something to go in the book or on the cover. All of these things are great honors. Publishing is sometimes about who knows you. Mentoring can provide a means for you to connect with more people. Of course, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that mentoring makes people feel good. There is more joy in helping someone and seeing them succeed because of that than there is in our own success.

I Want a Mentor. How Do I Find One?

You may be sold on the concept of mentoring. Having someone there to help you over some of the hurdles of the publishing industry sounds great, doesn’t it? Or maybe you know there are things you can do to help a less experienced person and you feel you could mentor someone. How do match mentees with willing mentors?

My employer has encouraged mentoring for many years. One of the things they did toward that effort was to set up a website that listed the skills of potential mentors so the potential mentees could look for a good match. Upon selecting candidates, the mentees interviewed the candidates before selecting one. But my employer is larger than some small towns and this blog is in its infancy. I can’t offer that capability.

The best way to find a mentor is to ask. But first, figure out what it is that you need help with. Do you need a better platform? Does your writing have problems? Are you struggling with public speaking when you attend an event to promote your book? Is all of this Internet based social networking flying over your head? There are any number of things that a mentor might be able to help you with. Decide on one or a small number of things and then look for someone who you know has a strength where you have a weakness. Then send that person an e-mail, expressing your need and ask if that person would be willing to be a mentor.

It’s okay to ask people you don’t know well and who may not know you at all to consider being a mentor if you think that person will be able to help you. It is an honor to be asked to be a mentor, but keep in mind that not all are willing to be mentors. Even people who are willing may already have a full compliment of mentees or there may be circumstances prevent them from saying yes. People who know you and people who are only a little farther down the publishing road than you are will be more willing to agree to a mentoring relationship than someone who is much farther down the path and doesn’t know you at all.

Don’t be creepy. If you send an e-mail and get a no back, it means no. Move on. Don’t try to change this person’s mind. Also, I hate to do this to you, but no response also means no. If you don’t get a response within a week, don’t expect one. If the person is interested, a week is plenty of time to write back with a yes or a I’ll have to think about it. No is much harder to write, so if the person is busy it might not come at all.

Why Shouldn't I Be Paid For Mentoring?

Mentoring is a valuable service, right? So, what is wrong with a mentor charging a mentee for that service? It is a valid question. Mentoring requires a time. Let’s say that the mentor sets aside an hour per month to meet with his mentee. That is twelve hours per year and when you consider that the mentor may spend a couple of hours getting ready for a meeting with a mentee, we could be looking at thirty-six hours per year. We’ll look at the benefits of being a mentor later, but what would be wrong with getting compensation for that time.

You may not realize it, but in many corporate mentoring programs, neither the mentor nor the mentee are compensated for their time, but the mentors not only volunteer to take on one mentee they often volunteer to take on two or thee. But as I said, we’ll look at that later. The real problem with the mentor being compensated by the mentee is that places the mentor in a position of not only being the employee of the mentee but also in a position of trying to maintain the relationship at a time when the mentee should be seeking a different mentor. If you are looking for a new car, you might go to various dealers. The salesmen will accentuate the positives of what they are selling. They may not be dishonest, but there are things that they won’t tell you. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were someone who would tell you the good, the bad and the ugly, not just what they think will encourage you to buy a car? That is what we are looking for with mentoring.

Mentoring is not a replacement for things like reading books or paying someone to edit your manuscript. It also isn’t a shortcut to getting your manuscript accepted by an agent. A writing mentor may sit down with the mentee and say, “What really helped me was that I read such and such book,” or maybe he tells the mentee that it would really help to have the manuscript professionally edited. If the mentor is a published author, the mentee might pass him his manuscript and ask, “Can you show this to your agent?” I think you see the problem. If the mentor is on the mentee’s payroll, it creates a conflict of interest, making it hard for him to tell the mentee that it wouldn’t be advisable to show the agent the manuscript at this time. That is part of why literary agents are paid the way they are, so that they are not in a position where they must show editors everything that crosses their desks.

Why a Blog About Writer Mentoring?

Last week, literary agent Rachelle Gardner wrote about mentoring in her post Do You Need a Blog Mentor? The gist of her post is that some writers may be great at writing, but when it comes to the platform building stuff of blogging, websites, Twitter, Facebook or whatever, they are struggling. Yes, there are books out there that will tell you how to do all of this stuff, but that information can be overwhelming. What they need is a blogging mentor to filter out the noise. I have talked about mentoring on another blog. For men, Rachelle’s post highlighted a deficiency I see in the writing community’s concept of mentoring.

A number of editors and publishing industry consultants, not to mention leadership consultants, have hijacked the term mentoring to mean pretty much any service they are trying to sell. I suppose they believe mentor sounds more cool than consultant or editor. Let me make it clear, many of these people provide a valuable service that is well worth the money they are asking, but it cheapens the term mentor when we use it so liberally. It isn’t that these people intend any harm. I believe the problem is that many in the writer community just fail to see the true value of mentoring as it should be. I hope that this blog will help solve that problem. In the weeks to come, I hope to provide tools and information that will help anyone who wants to be part of a mentoring relationship, either as a mentor or a mentee.

What Is This Thing Called Mentoring?

Do a simple search of the Internet and it won't take you long to realize that there are many definitions of mentoring. Depending on who you ask, mentoring can mean anything from an adult working with a child to consulting services for hire. In the corporate world, mentoring typically means a situation in which one employee who has been with the company longer or has a higher position in the company works with a newer employee or one of lower rank. On this blog, our use of the term mentoring is much like that definition, but we focus our attention more toward writers and the publishing industry.

In mentoring, the more experienced mentor works with the less experienced mentee to help the mentee develop skills that he will need along his journey. You have no doubt heard the story of an old man who crossed a stream and once on the other side, he built a bridge. Some one asked him why he built a bridge that he would never use. His answer was that someone might follow the same path and have trouble crossing the stream. Mentoring is about building that bridge.

Corporations see the need for mentoring because they see the number of employees that will soon be leaving the company, either through retirement or through death, and mentoring offers a way to pass the experience of these workers to new employees. Most writers also see a need for mentoring, whether they realize that is what it is called or not. What writer wouldn’t want guidance from a more experienced writer? But the publishing industry doesn’t have the same structure as other kinds of businesses and we don’t see the same top down encouragement of mentoring.

Mentoring writers is not about bestselling authors telling wannabe authors how they did it. We all have strengths and weaknesses. I may know more about website development than you and you may be a bestselling author. While it would be silly for me to mentor you in how to write, I could still mentor you if you wanted to learn how to make changes to your website. Mentoring is about someone who is strong where you are weak helping you to become stronger in that area.