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.
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