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.