Writers Who Are Much Better Than Me At Community Building

Even if you're no good at it, you must do something

My writing goals have always been simple:

• Make enough to support myself

• Earn the respect of my peers.

That’s it! Often, it’s the most basic things that are the hardest to achieve.

The thing about writing is that you don’t get to see your coworkers every day. You can’t earn points by bringing them coffee. Instead, you have to show up digitally and do things that actually make an impact.

Clicking on an article is a nice start, but your fellow writer doesn’t know that you’ve done that. In Medium, you can highlight, comment, or clap. This means that the writer will at least get a notification (unless those notifications have been turned off).

Comments are probably the equivalent of the verb “to be” when it comes to building community. I mean that in a good sense, not in a “write without using the verb ‘to be’” kind of way.

Your community will really start to appreciate you (maybe), if you do things like share to social media. If they see that you’ve shared their article to your followers on another platform, that makes them happy. That draws in new viewers. If it’s your aspiration to be good to your coworkers, you should make this habitual.

This is just scratching the surface of how to build community. There’s a lot more you can do, and the most successful writers seem to be the ones who are dynamic about community building.

On Medium, I really enjoy the Bouncin’ and Behavin’ Blogs community. Jason Provencio set this up, and I think it’s a good intersection point of quality work and an inclusive atmosphere. There are some publications that publish anything and some that are extremely selective. I think BBB, as it’s affectionately known, is a nice starting point for new writers.

When I first came to Medium, I used to publish something once or twice a month on Illumination. I appreciated that publication, but you can kind of get lost there.

BBB has a meetup place on Discord that’s also useful. I prefer that to the various Facebook writing groups. It’s nice to see the names you start to recognize lurking around.

Robin Wilding is another writer whose work I enjoy, and she’s recently launched an interview channel on YouTube. I found out about that on this article. I’ve only watched the one with Jason so far, but I hope to get to the other ones soon (I’m literally behind on everything right now... EVERYTHING, I’ve got a stack of books to read, I have a remodel to finish, as I’m typing this I have a bill staring me right in the face that I have to pay, there’s laundry everywhere, I’m tired, I haven’t eaten breakfast yet, I have some edits to finish on an article I meant to publish last Friday, I have to write my column for the Writing Cooperative, the dog needs a walk, my mechanic hasn’t rescheduled since the last time he canceled on fixing my muffler, I need to hang a shelf in the entryway, I don’t have time to finish this list...).

I thought Robin asked some very insightful questions and it was a good discussion. I like seeing Medium people giving an informal chat. To be honest, I think the impression you get of writers from their work is the truer version of that... entity, is that a good word? My point is the words are the real thing, not the person sitting around in coffee stained pajamas. But, it is nice to get a little insight from the other side.

I’ve also been publishing a lot lately with Linda Caroll’s On Reflection. Actually, that one is interesting because I got to know Linda quite a bit better through her Substack. I get the sense that she knows what she’s doing on Substack more than I do, she gets a lot more comments on her posts. I’m finding valuable ideas in her newsletters. I enjoy reading the newsletters that leave me wanting to write something.

Another Substacker who I appreciate is Alison Acheson and her Unschool for Writers. She was one of the first people I met on Medium, but she found Substack was more suited to what she wanted to achieve. These days, she’s got a good presence on both platforms, and she always has valuable writing advice.

My group of social justice writers includes Allison Wiltz, Johnny Silvercloud, William Spivey, Zuva Seven, Clay Rivers, and more. I think I get my biggest boost from social justice stories on Twitter (I refuse to call it anything else).

I also enjoy Justin Cox’s community with the Writing Cooperative, but he’s in the middle of switching platforms. I get the impression that Justin is a lot more tech savvy than I am, and he’s always got useful information. I get a lot of story ideas from reading his newsletter too.

Every now and then I’ll share something on Facebook, and I always regret it.

As for me, the thing I feel I’m best at is simply writing book reviews, but, like I said, I have a bunch of writers waiting on me. If you want to get an author’s attention, write a book review. Now, that’s not going to be true of all authors, some of them don’t care if you write a review (bad community building). Others reach out and thank you (good community building). Some of them share your review on social media (like they should...duh!).

Here’s where everything gets a little murky. There seem to be huge groups of very successful (as in “they have money”) writers who don’t bother to do community building at all. In some cases it makes sense, Stephen King obviously doesn’t have the time to send a thank you note for every review. But if you see a new writer featured on Good Morning America, and you write a review of that writer’s book, he or she should feel some excitement over that. In my experience, that’s extremely rare. You’re not even going to get a retweet (did it again).

All this leads me to believe that something is going on, but I don’t know what it is. My conclusion is that I prefer the real writers who have YouTube interview channels and Discord rooms and interesting Substack letters and Twitter feeds (thrice, thrice you have betrayed me…).

“Thrice” is a good word. It sounds cool and it’s appropriately ominous. I should write a novel titled THRICE!

Actually, come to think of it, I still have a few awesome writer friends who are trapped on Facebook. Make the move to Medium already!

To those of you who are good at community building, keep charging along. I can’t give you great advice on how to repeat that success because it’s not what I’m best at, so look to the examples I’ve provided.

I try to answer every comment I get on one of my articles, and I tweet (QUARICE—there is no good word to come after ‘thrice,’ I googled it) good articles. Just resolve to do something to either contribute to or build a writer community. Even if it’s not “your thing,” you have to do something, you can’t do nothing, you need the community and the community needs you.

Here’s a quote to end this, just swap out ‘wolf’ for ‘writer’:

"NOW this is the law of the jungle, as old and as true as the sky, And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die. As the creeper that girdles the tree trunk, the law runneth forward and back; For the strength of the pack is the wolf, and the strength of the wolf is the pack.”—Rudyard Kipling