Every Writer Needs the Right Connections

According to Malcolm Gladwell's book, The Tipping Point, there are three basic types of people: Connectors, Mavens and Salesmen. I believe each of us have characteristics of each of these types. If you don't have these characteristics, then you can learn and acquire them as a writer. In this article, I want to emphasize the importance of connections and talk about how you get connections in the first place.

For writers to succeed and get published, they need to send the right material at the right time to the right place and the right person.  You are searching for a champion to communicate with you and guide you to that right place. Admittedly you have to take action to find this place and experience some mis-steps and rejection in the process. The persistent search for the right connection is a key part of the writing life.

Whether you've been in publishing for many years or are just getting started you have connections. For each relationship, you need to collect information and preserve this information in a format which you can use. For example, I have an email list and for each email, it includes my mailing address and phone along with my email address. The information makes me easy to reach. A week ago, when I spoke at a writer's group, I brought business cards and made sure each person who attended, got one of my cards to reach me if needed.

As a writer you want to exchange information with others and carefully put this information where you can easily access it. I put much of it into my iPhone because the contact information is backed up automatically and preserved. I also collect it through my email account and online address book. I do not use the information carelessly—i.e. calling people and wasting time chatting on the phone.  I call or email when important to reach the other person—admittedly a judgement call on your part.

Last weekend, one of the websites that I use went down for the first time. The website is a critical piece in a teleseminar event. This particular site collects the questions from the participants in a teleseminar. I've been using this site for years and it has never gone down—until this weekend. I tried sending email messages for help to their support address and anything else that I could think of to reach the site. The bill that I get each month had a phone number attached to it—so I called that phone number—yet it was no longer a valid number.I was stuck. My event was stalled because of this missing piece. No one could register for the event because the site was down. What else could I do? As typical, this situation happened on the weekend and not during the week.

I recalled that the owner of this site was good friends with another one of my contacts. For this particular contact, I had his cell number in my phone. I sent a short text to this friend about the situation and asked if he knew how to reach the owner. It turns out this friend was in North Carolina in a mastermind meeting with the owner of the downed website. 

Since they were in a face to face meeting, they were away fro m their email and computers. Because I reached them, the owner immediately looked into his down website and in a short amount of time it was back up and running. My event can go forward since everything is working now.In fact, if you want to hear the event (which is now on replay), you can have immediate access to it—just follow this link.

I'm certain there were many others who were stuck with this down website. Yet through my contacts, I was able to creatively reach the right person and get it resolved. There are several action points from this story:

1. Always be working on increasing your connections with different types of people.

2. Keep their information in a format that you can easily access—on your phone or on your computer. I'm using tools which are internet based and can be accessed any place. If it only on a printed business card, then that information doesn't help you away from your office. You want the information in a format you can access any many different situations.

Last week I met with one of my new authors at Morgan James Publishing. He was in Colorado since his son was in a hockey tournament. Even though on the weekend, I drove up to his hotel and we spent some time together, talked and exchanged business cards.  As a writer, you always need to be working on your connections and relationships. You never know when a particular relationship will be important to you.
  
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Chase Rainbows In the Rain

I love to see the rainbows in the desert It does not happen often because we don't get much rain. The perfect combination of rain and sunshine creates that multi-colored arch streaking across the sky.

Many times in these entries, I will point to an article in The New Yorker magazine which arrives in my mailbox every week. Often as soon as possible, I will read the various articles. If I fall behind, they tend to stack up and I will miss something significant. Last night I read through the November 10th issue. Many people don't notice the author of a particular article but as a writer, it is always a combination of the subject of the article and the author which will draw me to a particular story. I enjoy Malcolm Gladwell and his contributions to the magazine. I have mentioned Gladwell's excellent book, The Tipping Point in other entries.

Gladwell has caught my attention again with his article, The Uses of Adversity which was thankfully posted online. The full article is worth reading but here's a couple of interesting paragraphs quite a ways into the article, "It's one thing to argue that being an outsider can be strategically useful. But Andrew Carnegie went farther. He believed that poverty provided a better preparation for success than wealth did; that, at root, compensating for disadvantage was more useful, developmentally, than capitalizing on advantage."

"This idea is both familiar and perplexing. Consider the curious fact that many successful entrepreneurs suffer from serious learning disabilities. Paul Orfalea, the founder of the Kinko's chain, was a D student who failed two grades, was expelled from four schools, and graduated at the bottom of his high-school class. "In third grade, the only word I could read was 'the,' " he says. "I used to keep track of where the group was reading by following from one 'the' to the next." Richard Branson, the British billionaire who started the Virgin empire, dropped out of school at fifteen after struggling with reading and writing. "I was always bottom of the class," he has said. John Chambers, who built the Silicon Valley firm Cisco into a hundred-billion-dollar corporation, has trouble reading e-mail. One of the pioneers of the cellular-phone industry, Craig McCaw, is dyslexic, as is Charles Schwab, the founder of the discount brokerage house that bears his name. When the business-school professor Julie Logan surveyed a group of American small-business owners recently, she found that thirty-five per cent of them self-identified as dyslexic."

If you are one of those who struggle with a learning disability, you can gain encouragement from this news. If you don't have one, you can still gain encouragement looking at the persistence and determination of these dyslexic learners who became successful.

Another fascinating article in the same issue is a detailed profile of bestselling author Thomas Friedman called The Bright Side. I devour these profiles in The New Yorker and unfortunately only the abstract is online. (But I understand The New Yorker is selling magazines so you will have to purchase this one to read the full article.) Friedman is a much published and colorful writer, three-time Pulitzer Prize winner and best-selling author (among many other things).

The paragraph which stood out to me relates to Friedman's mother, Margaret Friedman. "She died earlier this year, and Friedman wrote a column headlined "Call Your Mother," which was largely based on the eulogy he gave at her funeral. "She was the most uncynical person in the world,"he wrote. "She was not naive. She had taken her knocks. But every time life knocked her down, she got up, dusted herself off and kept on marching forward, motivated by the saying that pessimists are usually right, optimists are usually wrong, but most great changes are made by optimists." Friedman said to me, "I don't do pessimism." (page 58)

It's important to focus on the possibilities for your writing and work instead of focused on rejection. I love what Mark Victor Hansen and Jack Canfield teach writers about how they handle rejection. They say, "Next." Then move ahead to the next opportunity.

The Extra Degree of Effort

What will take your writing to the next level? Is it a writer's conference where you invest and travel across the country and have a significant conversation with an editor? Or maybe it's a class which you take from one person at the conference or several of them. Or it's an email that you get from a writing friend which spurs you ahead in your craft.

It's easy to get discouraged in publishing if you look at the massive amount of material in circulation for consideration or the large number of books which are constantly being released (and few of them selling in a significant way). Rather than look at the negative, it is better to be focused on the positive. What can you do today that will make a difference in your life and move you along the path to success? Where is your personal "tipping point" to use a phrase from the best-selling book by Malcolm Gladwell called The Tipping Point. I've had other entries about this book.

If you need a bit of inspiration, I recommend you check out this short film, 212 The Extra Degree Movie.

May this presentation inspire you to put out the extra effort and not only today but into everything that you write. I've watched this inspirational piece several times. See if you can raise your efforts by one degree.