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.
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