Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Lies, Scam Artists, and Bullshit Meters (Networking Part Five)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

Irony of ironies.  If it hadn’t been for networking, I wouldn’t have lost an hour of my work time today saving one of my best friends from a scam artist.  Not that he would have fallen prey entirely.  My friend, whom I met in college, works in one of those professions where, if you add the word “thriller” to the end of it, you get a bestselling book category—for some of its practitioners, anyway. For every Robin Cook or John Grisham, there are a slew of wannabes or almostbeens who write good novels, but never really make a living.

But everybody thinks these writers make a living—meaning everyone outside of the publishing profession, everyone who reads one of those hyphenate thrillers.  The other side to those thrillers is that people who have degrees and/or expertise in the professions that inspire the thrillers believe they have experiences and/or the knowledge to write a better thriller than the current practitioners of the genre.

My friend has more than enough experience to write a good thriller, and better chops than most.  He was a good writer in college, and with some practice, might write a fine novel someday.

He dreams of it.  And lo and behold, through a continuing education brochure in connection with his current business, he gets offered the chance to take a seminar on writing the thriller.  He’ll be able to write this conference off as a business expense for his current business (or hell, I don’t know, he might even get the entire thing paid for by his employer).

So, bright man that he is, he asks me—in a private message on Facebook—if I’ve ever heard of the people putting on the seminar.  Smart question.  He follows that with a second question: is it worth studying with these people? (See my post on continuing education to learn what other questions to ask before you pony up cash to attend a seminar.)

My answer to my friend, after a bit of digging, was an unequivocal no.  Two of the people putting on the seminar are legit—they’ve published books in the hyphenate thriller genre—small books, not bestsellers. But the person who will “train” everyone to break into publishing, the person who talks through most of the two-day seminar?

That person I’ve met. At conferences.  That person is what I call an accidental scam artist.

And now a bunch of you are asking yourselves, “How can you be an accidental scam artist?”

I go back to intentions.  If I told this person that they were a scam artist, they’d be appalled. This person is really and truly trying to help people get published.  This person’s intentions are very, very good.  The advice given at the seminars is probably excellent when it comes to believing in yourself and awful on the nuts and bolts of publishing in 2010.

The problem is within my industry itself.  So many peripheral parts of the publishing industry are unregulated.  People can call themselves editors just because they know how to pick up a pen; people can call themselves agents just because they want to; and people can call themselves book doctors because they have opinions on what a novel should be, not because they actually know.  Only two states in the nation regulate agents—California and New York—and those regulations only apply to the agents’ fiduciary responsibility.

For more on this, see my husband Dean Wesley Smith’s Killing Sacred Cows series on agents and J. Steven York’s hilarious blog, written from the point of view of his cat Sydney, who has set herself up as (and she says this) the World’s Worst Literary Agent.

My business isn’t the only one with unregulated “experts.”  The financial services markets are filled with them.  And even if someone is in a regulated industry, that doesn’t mean that they’re good at their job.  I  know of one very famous speaker in a regulated industry who is so successful at speaking that he now holds seminars all on his own.  My friends in that industry point out that this man cannot hold a job in the industry (“He’s been fired from all the best places,” said one), but he is  making his living teaching seminars geared to beginners in that industry.  I have a hunch this sort of thing goes on more often that we like to think.

My friend came to me through traditional and nontraditional networking means.  He asked the only person he knew well who worked in the writing field about the credentials of the folks putting on the seminar.  He would have called me (old-fashioned networking) if Facebook hadn’t provided a quick and easy way to contact me.

If the web didn’t exist, I would have had to ask my friends about the unintentional scam artist, and after a few queries, I would have remembered that I had met this person.  My recommendation would have been the same—don’t waste your money on that seminar—but it would have taken me longer to find answers.

Tonight, all I did was use Google, and I found more than enough to jog my memory.  I also found the brochure for the seminar that my friend was thinking of attending, and I saw how the classes broke down among the instructors.

Had, for example, the two people with actual credentials in the hyphenate thriller category been doing most of the speaking, I would have told my friend to go and avoid the accidental scam artist.  But the other two speakers were incidental; the main focus was the one person who really didn’t know the industry.

I wrote back to my friend, told him to avoid this seminar, and suggested other seminars for him to attend.  I also mentioned conferences and organizations in his area that would be worth his while if he wants to learn how to write a thriller set in his professional world.

Then I paused, and realized that he would be just as vulnerable (if not more vulnerable) to scam artists, bad advice, and wrong turns at those conferences and in those organizations as he would have been at that continuing education seminar.

And therein lies the problem of networking.

It’s only as good for you as your bullshit meter allows.  If you have a faulty bullshit meter, you’re in trouble as a freelancer, my friend.

Let me give you a case in point.  As I mentioned above, Dean has been writing a series on Killing the Sacred Cows of publishing.  Lately that series has focused on the worth of agents to the writer.  Dean believes in having an agent, but he also believes that writers who hire one know what the agent’s job is before hiring any old person (makes sense, right? If not, see my sections on employees).

Also on that site are a number of successful freelance writers who discuss their experiences with agents at length.  No one blogs anonymously.  Everyone gives credentials and opinions, and uses experience and statistics to back up their point of view.

This week, Dean got some rather hateful mail in his comments section on the first agent post.  He let the least egregious of the comments (the ones that didn’t use foul language and call him horrible names) through to the site.  But it wasn’t until he got a few of them that he realized where they were coming from.

They were coming from a blog by someone who claims to be an editor, someone who blogs anonymously.  Now, I’ve only read the unbelievably nasty post about my husband that this anonymous person has put on its (his? her? I dunno) blog, so I can’t tell you if this person’s advice is sound or not. And after that attack on my husband, I’m likely not the best judge of the anonymous blog.

However, I can tell you this: that is a blog—irregardless of the attack on my husband—that I would never read.  Why? Because it is anonymous.  I cannot check the credentials of the person writing the blog.  Whereas, in the case of the accidental scam artist, I could easily check their credentials.  That person was up front in on the website that this person now makes a living giving seminars about how to get published. The accidental scam artist even mentions that their experience is thirty years old (as an editor) and more than fifteen years old (as a writer).

The accidental scammer’s blog and seminars look positive, upbeat, and cheerful, helpful in a believe-in-yourself kinda way.  If that was what my friend needed, I’d tell him to go and ignore all the nuts and bolts publishing advice.  Because the accidental scammer isn’t hiding anything for the person who knows how to look.

But the anonymous blogger is hiding something. And when Dean pointed this out in his return e-mails to the people whose posts he declined to put on his site, they wrote back to him telling him they would trust someone who blogged anonymously over someone with his credentials because the anonymous blogger is taking a risk and could possibly lose their job by being honest about the industry.

Okay, that might be true for whistle-blowers and some political bloggers (a columnist in Madison, WI in the 1980s comes to mind, who wrote for Isthmus under the name the Capitol Eye), but it’s not true in publishing. There is no reason to be anonymous in this business. Lots of editors blog—including my editor at Pyr—as a way of helping writers, yes, and as a way of promoting their book lines.

The poor naïve writers attacking my husband through his site have faulty bullshit meters, and until they get those meters fixed, they’re not going to survive in the big, international world of publishing.

Unlike my friend. Who took one look at that seminar and contacted someone who could verify credentials.  My friend has a mighty fine bullshit meter, and knows some of the basics about life: find out who you’re taking advice from.  Figure out if that person is worth listening to.

And figure out if the advice is worth following.  Not all advice is.  Not all advice—even from the best people (like me, she says with an evil grin)—is worth following all the time. What might be right for me might be wrong for you.  Think it through before doing it.

Especially advice that comes through anonymous sources.

Just this morning, I read a post by comic book writer Kurt Busiek about breaking into the comics business.  However, in my opinion, his advice applies to all freelancers.  He says, “If you need to have someone lay out a set of instructions for you, you probably don’t have the skills or imagination to be a freelance writer.”  He goes through the long arduous up and down path it took him to get to his place in his freelance career.  It’s an excellent analysis of the ups and downs of freelancing.  It’s also an example of someone who knows who he is and what he can do as a freelancer in order to survive.

On last week’s American Idol (and if you want to know why I watch it, see this post), Ryan Seacrest pointed out to Crystal Bowersox that she received contradictory advice from two of the judges, Kara Dioguardi and Simon Cowell.  Diogardi told Bowersox to lose her guitar for her next performance. Cowell told her to keep the guitar.

“Who’re you going to listen to?” Seacrest asked.

Without missing a beat, maybe without taking a breath, Bowersox said, “Me.”

And both Dioguardi and Cowell applauded, because Bowersox was right.  If you’re going to survive as a freelancer, the only person you can trust to do the right thing is yourself.  As I realized in the middle of a negotiation last week, if I screw it up, no one is going to give me a failing grade. Three years from now, I’ll probably not even remember that I was negotiating, let alone that I had made a minor mistake.  I’m not going to get slapped; no one will yell at me. The worst that could happen was that I could make a bad deal or do something I didn’t like.  Oh, well.

The advice side of this is pretty simple: listen with your bullshit meter on.  Realize that good advice for the person next to you might be terrible advice for you. Figure out what you need and then go after it, through networking, education, and  of course, good hard work.

I have no idea, as I write this, if my friend will go to the seminar. For all I know, he’ll still sign up.  It might be worth his time to listen to the two legitimate writers at the seminar.  He might need a trip to Los Angeles and an excuse for some downtime.  He might think he can get something out of the seminar, especially now that he knows that one of the speakers cannot help him get published as promised.

Or he might take my advice and go to other conferences.  Of course, at those conferences, there will be scammers and frauds, people who set themselves up as experts when they know little about the industry, and people who have incredible credentials, people who know quite well how to do something.

My friend will survive whatever he does, because he knows how to filter information.  I don’t know how to teach you how to do that, except to research experts before you take their advice.  And even then: once you’ve taken their advice, that becomes your decision.  You have taken the action; it’s not their fault if something goes awry.  It’s yours.

I can’t tell you how important a good bullshit meter is.  Without one, you’re drowning in the deep end, unable to know where to turn for help.  Start training yourself now; it’ll save you a lot of grief later.

I still have some other topics to deal with in networking, including managing expectations.  As I’ve mentioned many times, I’m writing this Guide out of order.  Had I had  my druthers, I’d’ve put this post in the  middle of the continuing education post—which is where it will be in the final book.

You’re seeing my messy out-of-order work method as I go here. But I wouldn’t be finishing this at all without your input, so I thank you.  Just like I thank the folks who’ve had questions and comments, people who have been discussing the Guide with me for the past year.  I also appreciate the donations which, week to week, keep the Guide a priority in my writing life, even when I’m under a New York deadline, like I am right now.  So thanks everyone, and see you next week…

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Lies, Scam Artists, and Bullshit Meters

(Networking Part Five)” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

Travel, workshops, exhaustion.  Many things got in the way of my reading in February.  February wasn’t the reading bonanza that January was.  I did read a few clinkers—more than one all the way through. (Not because I felt I had to finish, but because there was something compelling about the book, just not anything I could recommend.)

The books I did enjoy are listed below, including two stellar nonfiction works.

February, 2010

Bruen, Ken, The Killing of the Tinkers, St. Martins Minotaur, 2005.  Another short bleak novel, beautifully written, with an uncompromising view of the world.  Wonderful stuff.  I laughed aloud in several places, shook my head in surprise, and just enjoyed.  This book is noir, for those of you who don’t know what noir is.  Fiction doesn’t get much darker—or more enjoyable.

Curriden, Mark, and Phillips, Leroy, Jr., Contempt of Court: The Turn-of-the Century Lynching That Launched A Hundred Years of Federalism, Anchor Books, 2001.  I read a lot for research and much of what I read is dry, to say the least.  This is anything but dry.  It’s so compelling that I talked to Dean about it the entire time I read the book, exclaiming about it, and wondering why I hadn’t heard about this in my con law or my history classes.

In 1906, Ed Johnson, a black man, was convicted of raping a white woman in Chattanooga, despite having dozens of alibi witnesses.  A mob nearly lynched him right after his arrest.  No blacks served on juries there.  His appointed lawyers were told in no uncertain terms by the trial judge that they could not apply for a change of venue, even though the whole town thought him guilty.  At his trial, a juror stood up and shouted that he wanted to rip the defendant’s heart out right then and there.  At the trial.

His lawyers refused to appeal. Two black lawyers took up the case, but the judge refused to hear the appeal within the time limit for filing. So they went to federal court, asking for a stay. The federal judge wasn’t sure he had jurisdiction (the law hadn’t evolved yet), and stayed the execution long enough to let the lawyers go to the Supreme Court. Which they did.

Surprisingly, the court chose to hear the case—and sent telegrams to the local sheriff as well as the papers and a local magistrate, demanding that Ed Johnson get put into federal custody. Instead, Ed Johnson was lynched.  The locals blamed the Supreme Court for “causing” the lynching with their ruling, and a sign on Johnson’s body—well, I can’t type the foul thing here.

So the Court had to deal with this blatant disregard of its authority, and…you’ll see.  This book is so worth reading.  It’s riveting. The writing is superb. There are two court cases here, and lots of fascinating issues.

Because this was such a big deal at the time, there was a lot of newspaper coverage. The lawyers involved wrote about it, and then there was all the court records. So the wealth of detail in the book is amazing.  A lawyer and a newspaper reporter got together to write this, and the newspaper reporter, Mark Curriden, knows how to tell a story. Or in this case, several stories.

This is an amazing book. If you like history or just a good legal thriller, read this.  I was sorry to see it end.

Larsson, Stieg, The Girl Who Played With Fire, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009.  I don’t know why I waited so long to read this.  I think it was because of the subject matter as mentioned in the blurb—sex trafficking (which turns out to be a minor, almost unimportant part of the story) and the explosive power of the prologue.   All the reviews have said that this, the second book in Stieg Larsson’s story about Lisbeth Salander, is better than the first, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (which also made my recommended reading list).  I normally don’t read reviews, but these were hard to miss, since they were everywhere.

This book is better. It has a more traditional structure, and it’s impossible to put down.  It gets more and more fantastic—a gigantic, impossible-to-overpower man fighting the greatest boxer in Sweden, for example—but as it gets more and more outre, the characters in the book remark, “How much more unbelievable can this get?” and that’s more than enough to sustain the story.

Lisbeth Salander is a tremendous character and she’s in grave danger in this book. Because we know her from the previous book, we also worry when she sets her sights on someone who betrayed her.  Not for her, but for that character (scummy as he is).  Excellent writing, albeit a bit creepy.  Particularly the chapter in which a publisher discusses whether or not to publish a dead author’s masterpiece.  Larsson, for those of you who don’t know, died shortly after turning in the third book in this series.  It’s a shame that he’s gone, depriving the world of his stories.  Fortunately, we have these three books.  I’m expecting the third to measure up, even if it doesn’t quite hit the pyrotechnics of The Girl Who Played With Fire.  The next book is on preorder, and I’m tapping my fingers as I wait.

Penzler, Otto, editor, The Lineup, Little, Brown, 2009.  This is the perfect book for the long-term mystery fan.  Penzler asked his favorite authors to write a chapbook about their most famous character.  He gave those chapbooks away at his mystery bookstore in New York to excellent customers.  Eventually, someone convinced him to compile the essays.

Good thing that he did.  They’re mostly marvelous, with fantastic writerly insights, and tales of characters gone wild.  I was going to write about each essay, the way I write about the essays in an essay collection, but then decided against it.  I often found I was less interested in the essays by my favorite authors because I was already familiar with the character and the character’s history.  (The only essays that worked for me by my favorites described the writing process as well as the character.)  Since everyone has different favorites, everyone is going to have a different reaction to the various essays.

The only ones I didn’t like were the ones that the authors wrote in the form of a short story.  It seemed a bit twee to me—and a lot less revealing, about the characters, and about the writing process.  The only one of those that worked for me was Robert B. Parker’s.  But I suspect Parker could have written about the interior of his underwear drawer and come up with something fascinating.  (What a shame to lose him this year!)

If you like mysteries, buy this book.  If you like fiction, buy this book.  If you like knowing the background of your favorite characters, buy this book.  And if you are a writer or an aspiring writer, buy this book.  Enough said.

Willis, Connie, Blackout, Ballantine Books, February, 2010.  I have been waiting for this book for years, ever since I saw the first third of it in the editor’s office.  I’ve known Connie’s editor, Anne Groell, for a long time, and for a while, Anne was my editor.  (I’ve known Connie longer.  Wow.)  At lunch in NYC in 2007, Anne showed me the first third of Connie’s manuscript for her time-travel World War II book.  That first third was about the size of one of my Fey novels—at least 800 pages in manuscript, maybe more.

Connie says this novel grew like crazy, and I can believe it.  It’s now two books—Blackout and All Clear, which won’t be out until the fall. Dammit. Which is much too far away.

Clearly, some of that 800-page draft had been trimmed.  But the book is still big, and complicated.  If I were Ballantine, I’d’ve left some of those early pages, cut the book into three parts, and released them one after the other—in February, March, and April, the way that romance hardcovers get released sometimes.  But I’m not in charge of marketing this.

Too bad, because I worry that current marketing might hurt the book.  The cover’s attractive to WWII fans, but not sf fans, and there is no ending.  In fact at the end, the action has just started to get tighter.  Nothing in the cover blurb or the flaps say that this is book one of anything, which is a problem, I think.

But it’s only a problem for people who are surprised, and now you won’t be surprised.  Pick up Blackout.  I devoured it in a few short reading sessions.  Connie’s trademark excellent characters are here, and her historical detail is spot-on. The time-travel concerns feel frighteningly real, and the story moves quickly.  It’s easy to tell the large cast apart, and to keep track of all the different time periods.

The story so far is about time-traveling historians who may or may not have gotten stuck in the London Blitz of 1940. But there’s more than that here—Dunkirk, the British children sent to the countryside for safety reasons, hospitals, shopgirls, and bomb shelters in the Underground.  Excellent scary stuff, with the bombs as real as if they were falling outside your window as you read.  Read this and then order All Clear immediately, so that Ballantine will buy more books from Connie and we can roam around in her vast imagination once more.  Enjoy!

I have an impy streak.  And when Kerrie Hughes asked me to write a story about guns and monsters, I somehow came up with this.  Combining a writing workshop with a famous writer and a writing student and some monstrous behavior…well, you’ll see.  You can get the book at your favorite bookstore, or you can order it here.

Artwork donated by Pati Nagle.

The Freelancer’s Survival Guide: Groups Continued

(Networking Part Four)

Kristine Kathryn Rusch

I am an inveterate group builder.  I can’t help myself. (My dictionary, consulted because I can’t spell inveterate to save my life [you should have seen my first attempt], tells me that inveterate means fixed in habit and practice, particularly a bad one.  Yep. That fits.)  I build groups wherever I go.

My husband Dean Wesley Smith told me once that we needed to move somewhere where we didn’t know anyone and we needed to remain anonymous after we did.  I told him it wouldn’t work and added, “Wherever we go, we colonize.”

And we do.  We bring other writers with us.  We built a writing community in Eugene, Oregon. We’ve built another here in Lincoln City, Oregon.  And we’ve built two international writing communities, one of which died a rather ugly death, the other of which is still on-going.  In fact, our Eugene writing community continues as well, even though we left the community fifteen years ago.  We have no involvement in the writing community in Eugene, yet people still ask me about it all the time, thinking I still go to meetings.

Amazing. Groups do live long after their founders. Dean started a writing community in Moscow, Idaho when he lived there, and was one of the three founders of the Moscon Science Fiction convention, all of which lived past his residence in the town for decades.  My writing community in Madison didn’t live beyond my move, but I had just started it when I left.  My radio community, however, is still alive and well (and we’re all now Facebook friends).

Groups form easily and groups sometimes form hard.  But groups form and have a trajectory.  See last week’s post on whether or not you need a group, and how to figure out which groups you already belong to.

I have been a part of so many groups that I’ve learned they all follow the same general pattern:  Groups form among like-minded people who gather in a fit of enthusiasm.  Sometimes those groups have rules.  More often than not, they don’t.

The group then has some kind of success—however that group measures success, whether it’s in a large membership or in putting on a successful convention or successfully arguing for someone else’s rights.  The success reverberates through the group, giving it confidence, and helping it grow.

Growth is a group’s friend and a group’s enemy. Groups with a lot of members gain clout, but those groups also gain strife.

The group’s founders usually run the group until they get tired—usually both physically and emotionally.  Then they hand leadership to someone else, someone less or more qualified, but (and this is important) someone who usually has a different vision for the group.

In the last stages of the group’s founders phase, several things can happen: the founders realize they’re not up to the task of running a large group; the founders no longer have time to run the group; the founders aren’t capable of running anything—they’re starters, not managers; the founders are no longer all that interested in the group; or the founders hold onto power with everything that they have to the detriment of the group.

At the last stages of the founders phase, the founders are usually in the way of good group growth.  Someone will point that out. There will be bickering and strife, bad feelings and nastiness all around.  The fighting can (and probably will) get ugly.

The group will probably splinter if the founders are still interested in running it.  If the founders aren’t interested, they’ll leave the group.  If the founders are interested but aren’t very politic, they’ll get kicked out of the very group they started.  Or, if the founders are smart, they’ll find their own replacements before all of this happens and they’ll let the replacements run the group with no interference.

This is the phase at which many groups implode and disappear.  The enthusiasm can’t carry the group through all the strife.

But if people are smart and the group is still valuable to a large number of members, it will survive (or a new group, with the same membership minus a few troublemakers, will start under a new name).  If the group does survive this phase, it will often grow and become more professional.  It’ll develop written rules, maybe even rent a meeting place, and elect officers—sometimes paying them.

Eventually these groups become established parts of the landscape, their beginnings lost in the mists of time.  People can’t imagine life without that particular group.  Or a profession without a particular professional organization.

Eventually, the group gains power of its own.  It will survive without any of the founding members.  It will become an entity in and of itself, one that can hire and fire employees, one that can admit or discharge members, one that can make statements about its beliefs with the weight of history behind it.

Because I love history and politics and group dynamics, I read about group beginnings all the time.  And every group goes through these phases.  (There are more, but these are the general ones.)

For a few examples: The Science Fiction Writers of America began around the dining room table at Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm’s house.  Damon became the organization’s first president; Kate designed the Nebula award.  I don’t know much about the early years, but I do know that the in-fighting among the early members became so extreme that two decades later, when I met all of the founding members, half of them hadn’t spoken to each other in fifteen years or more.

Most members of the Science Fiction Writers of America can’t tell you a thing about those early years. Nor can they tell you who the past presidents were, what the infighting was about in the 1970s, or why the organization even got founded. But the current members can tell you about the current in-fighting, the good things that the organization is attempting to do, and why they joined this particular group.  (For many sf writers, joining the Science Fiction Writers of America is a goal—from childhood.)

Romance Writers of America had a similar start.  I don’t even recall who started the organization.  I do recall going to some early RWA meetings in 1979 and 1980. Everything was mimeoed, meetings were on the fly, and the organization’s bulletin was photocopied and stapled.

Then RWA wanted the publishing industry to acknowledge that romance novels sold more copies than most other genres combined.  The early mission of RWA was to gain respect for its members.  The organization achieved that better than any organization I’ve ever seen because somewhere along the way—in the years I was solely in science fiction and not romance—someone (I have no idea who and I’m not going to look it up [I have a romance novel deadline, y’all, and it’s taking my focus]) decided to follow the feminist model: Don’t demand respect; earn it.  The women of RWA became experts at the business of writing.  They used statistics, knowledge, negotiation, and guts to take on the publishing industry.  Even  now, when I teach new writers, I tell them to get a membership in RWA whether they write romance or not. They’ll learn the business, and how important it is.  Only one other writer’s organization teaches business, and that’s Sisters in Crime, who followed the same model for the same reason.

Has RWA had infighting and strife?  Oh, yeah.  I missed most of it either by joining too late the first time or by being in science fiction for the tough middle years.  But just a few years ago, there was another major battle, one that led to the tightening of the organization’s rules.

Unlike the early battles, though, later battles in a group rarely lead to the group’s demise.  The early battles can kill a group.

This trajectory I’m discussing doesn’t just happen in writers’ groups. It happens in all groups. Recently, I talked with someone who used to run the local chamber of commerce in our small town.  Our town was so tiny that it didn’t have a chamber for many years. When it formed a chamber, it did so with enthusiasm and joy. Then came the problems, the strife, and the splintering.  Now, in our town of 7,000 people, there are several business organizations, some of which seem very chamber of commerce-like.  And of course, the chamber still exists.

I’m discussing all of this in a very rational, cold-blooded fashion.  But my cold-blooded rationality is hard-earned.  I’ve been kicked out of groups that I’ve started (remember my comment about not being politic? That’s…um…me).  I’ve been kicked out of groups that I didn’t have much invested in, including one group that threw out a block of members because the group didn’t approve of our day job.  (We were writers and editors; it was a writing organization, and it felt that editors were the enemy—even if some of the editors were writing more books per year than the so-called writers.)

I’ve been the hatchet man for more than one organization—or, if you prefer a different analogy, the canary in the coal mine.  I get annoyed at bad behavior faster than most, so people expect me to blow first—and are relieved when I do so.  I have learned that I don’t play well with others, so now, when I join a group, I don’t get involved with the day-to-day politics of that group.  I remain a rank-and-file member.

And the groups I start?  I run them—or we do, Dean and I—with an iron fist.  I’ve told more than one group member if they don’t like the way we run the group, they have two choices: they can suck it up and get used to our method or they can leave.  Most stay. Over the past five years in more than one group, only two people have left.

What does all of this mean for you, the freelancer?  Quite a bit, actually.  Once you’ve figured out that you need or want to belong to a certain group (last week’s post), now you must decide how you fit into that group.  Because I have a strong personality, I tend to lead groups, whether I want to or not.  So I have to figure out how to mute my personality to remain rank and file. Often that means avoiding any policy at all and staying away from mass meetings.

So how does the group benefit me?

I generally join groups for knowledge.  I want to learn something. So I become part of an organization.  In those groups, I remain quiet and I stay as uninvolved as possible.

In the groups that I start, I remain in control, and the groups stay relatively small.  They also have strict rules that everyone in the group knows about, and those rules are enforced.

Mostly, though, I don’t join many groups.  It’s safer that way, for me and for the group.

But you’ve chosen to join a few groups.  What can you do with the knowledge of the pattern that I gave you above?

1. Know that the pattern exists.  Figure out where the group is in its trajectory, and stay out of the infighting. Realize that groups, like individuals, change.  The things you joined for may disappear.  Or they may grow stronger.  Or the group might improve in ways you hadn’t expected at all.

2.  Keep your involvement to a minimum.  Remember that you’re in the group to help your business, not to help the group.  If you keep that rule firmly in mind, you’ll stay out of 90% of the problems that come up inside the group.

3. Remember that infighting is normal.  Wait for the fights to pass.  Remain silent.  If you can’t remain silent, then drop out of the group.  You can always rejoin later.   Remember that you joined the group to make connections, not to make enemies.  If you keep that as your golden rule, you’ll gain a lot from the groups you join.  If you forget that one piece of advice, you’ll lose half your life to battles that, on the scheme of things, mean nothing at all.

4.  Reevaluate your memberships in all of your groups once a year.  Figure out if you’re getting anything from the group.  (And remember that structured time off has worth.) Figure out how to maximize the benefits while avoiding the problems.  If you can’t avoid the problems and they’re taking over your life, then quit.

5.  Evaluate the groups themselves.  Some groups become toxic. They started with noble purpose, but got hijacked by the worst personalities inside the organization.  Sometimes those people tarnish or destroy the group’s reputation.  You don’t want to be painted with that same brush.  If your group is known for terrible behavior and has an awful reputation, then you need to leave the group—even if it had a great reputation once upon a time.

6.  Remember that loyalty has a price, and is sometimes misplaced.  Your first loyalty should be to yourself, your family, your business and your beliefs. The groups you join may have your loyalty only if those groups do not, in any way, interfere with those four things.  The moment those groups do interfere, then you need to leave the group.

7.  Limit the number of groups you belong to and/or the number of hours per week you spend in your various groups.  For example, I know a lot of writers who belong to a dozen writers organizations and who never miss a meeting, but haven’t written a word in years.  Those writers have their priorities in the wrong place.

I suspect the same thing happens in other organizations.  I do know that a few organizations I belonged to when I had other professions used those types of people mercilessly, running them ragged because they were the only ones who had time to work for the organization.  Every other member of the organization did paying work that took time away from the organization—which is as it should be.

8.  If you joined a group to network, then network.  Talk to the other members of the group.  Find out who they are, what their interests are, what they do in their own businesses, what their spouses do, and what their hobbies are.  If you want them to do you a favor, make sure you do favors in return.  Be nice, be polite, and be reliable.

9.  Remember that a group is only as good as its members.  If you don’t  like the other people who belong to the group, ask yourself why  you belong.  If you think highly of them, then stay and try to be worthy of their respect.

Groups can be extremely beneficial to your freelance career. They can also destroy it.  The key is to find the balance.  Figure out which groups will benefit you, and which groups will harm you—and realize that next  year, some of the groups that benefited you might harm you and vice versa.

Be smart and (this part is a do-as-I-say, not-as-I-do) be politic.  If you’re all of these things, then you should have pretty smooth sailing in any group that you chose to join.

By my count, this is post 52.  So next week will mark an entire year that I’ve been writing the Guide without a miss. Thanks to topic suggestions—I got two new ones this week alone—I’ll continue the Guide for a while yet.  I will give everyone who donated a full e-copy when I’m done.  To all of you who have supported the Guide this past year, either with comments, forwarding, and/or dollars, thank you ever so much.  You’re great.

“Freelancer Writer’s Survival Guide: Groups Continued (Networking Part Four)” copyright 2010 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.

The mystery imprint of Delos Books has just published my novel Hitler’s Angel in Italian.  The book had a strange run in the U.S., which resulted in a tiny edition, almost a limited edition.  It’ll reappear in English, in my preferred version, from the British publisher MaXcrime in June.  In the meantime, enjoy the lovely Italian cover.