Episode 155 - The Benefits (and Costs) of Membership with Roland Denzel
October 11, 2022
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I talk with Roland Denzel about THE BENEFITS (AND COSTS) OF MEMBERSHIP in writer’s groups, including the importance of understanding your goals; factoring in opportunity costs and assessing if and how each opportunity gets you closer to those goals; finding your “medium point” group; the option of creating your own group; the downside of a wealth of resources; and giving yourself permission to let it go.
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Roland Denzel is a health and fitness author of over 10 books, and a printing and publishing specialist with over 30 years in the industry. Roland helps authors, small businesses, and even giant corporations put their messages out into the world via books, email, and digital publishing. In 2015 Roland created IndestructibleAuthor.com to help authors just like himself be more productive and write more books, all while staying healthy, happy, and sane. Roland grew up in Southern California, but now lives in Colorado, where he's experiencing seasons for the first time in his life.
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"Opportunity cost is when you do something that could be valuable, but because you're spending that time, energy, or money, you can't do something else, and that other thing was much more valuable. So I spend time on social media, but what is the actual value of posting something on social media versus spending that time writing more, or writing an email to my list?" —Roland Denzel
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Transcript
[00:00:00] Matty: Hello and welcome to The Indy Author Podcast. Today my guest is Roland Denzel. Hey Roland, how are you doing?
[00:00:05] Roland: Good, Matty, how are you?
[00:00:06] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you.
Roland Denzel is a health and fitness author of over 10 books and a printing and publishing specialist with over 30 years in the industry. Roland helps authors, small businesses and even giant corporations put their messages into the world via books, email, and digital publishing. In 2015, Roland created indestructibleauthor.com to help authors just like himself, be more productive and write more books while staying happy, healthy, and sane. And Roland grew up in Southern California, but now lives in Colorado where he's experiencing seasons for the first time in his life.
So, I invited Roland here to talk about a topic that we had started talking about on Mark Lefebvre’s Reflective Roundtable get togethers, which is where he invites his Patreon supporters to get together and we talk about various topics. And one of the topics we talked about was the benefits and costs of membership in writers' groups specifically.
And so I thought Roland had some really great perspectives on this. I think I had brought up that topic at the round table because it was something I was wrestling with. And so we're just going to talk about how you weigh those things. What are the pros and the cons?
So Roland, I'm going to throw out an example that I know we chatted about a little bit earlier just to get the conversation started. And that is that I was a member of the Maine Writers' and Publishers Association. And I did that, not because I'm from Maine, but because some of my books are written in Maine and I was trying to build up a network there. And there was a nominal membership fee, and they offered lots and lots of benefits to members, and I found that I was getting overwhelmed. So there were so many things to choose from that I was feeling overwhelmed, and every time I got communication from the Maine Writers' and Publishers Association, I would panic because I knew I was never going to take advantage of these. Is that something that you have experienced in your own writer life about the downside of a riches of resources?
The Downside of a Wealth of Resources
[00:02:00] Roland: Yeah, I would say yes, this is very common. So I run a health membership and we have, we like to think of it as like the Netflix of health and wellness. So we have all these different things that we give our members every month and we've been doing it for almost four, it'll be four years next month. So we have four years’ worth of monthly content.
And many people will go in there and they'll just feel like they're overwhelmed. And even though we try to organize it in a way that we think is easy for them, the fact that there's so much there and they feel like they're paying for this ongoing thing, and they can't use it all, drives some people nuts. Like they're just like, ah, I can't even, I can't take it. So what we have to do is sort of triage it or whatever. You have to sort of coach them in how to manage something like this.
And you get the same thing with something like an author summit, like one of those online summits where you go to the page and oh, there's 78 talks. And you'll be like, I'm just not going to be able to do those 78 talks, so I just don't even sign up.
So we teach people to think of what is their focus, their goal. Not how they're going to focus right now, but what is their focus? And if you can focus on that, then you can see what stands between you and that thing, that goal. And then you can look at all of these things, the 72 things in the summit or the year's worth of membership content, and you can say, which of these things actually serves me, will help me get me toward my focus and which of them will slow me down or stand in the way or distract me?
And it's very easy to go down that list at that point. And even sometimes I just tell people, make a list of them and then cross off the ones you're not going to. It's very satisfying. It's very satisfying to do that. And it's like the to-do list thing. Like you get a little dopamine hit when you like, ding, every time you cross one off, you're like, okay, doesn't matter that you've done it or not done. It's not even an option anymore. You're giving it up. You're giving yourself permission to let that go. And that's one of the things that can be a struggle.
So that's one of the things to consider also, is if you have a tendency towards that type of behavior or mentality, then you have to know that going in before you make these decisions on how to invest your time and your money and your emotional energy.
[00:04:18] Matty: Yeah, I had thrown that one example out to get the conversation started, but I think it makes sense to loop back on exactly what you're saying. What are your goals of your membership? And I think introducing classes into the conversation too, makes a lot of sense because in this case, there's a lot of overlap. So in that case, I was looking for a networking opportunity basically, and I shouldn't be turning down networking opportunities, but as you're saying, it's just one in the long line of incoming things to deal with on your to-do list.
I think another goal as you're talking about is the learning goal, which applies both to membership and writers' groups, as well as to classes. Is there any different advice you have depending on the goal the person has, if the person's goal is either networking or learning and they're going through the list and then crossing off the things that they know they don't want to do, any different perspective they should bring if their focus is more, let's say, craft-oriented than business-oriented?
Understand Your Goals
For sure, I mean, some groups have tried to do everything, or they have craft and marketing and productivity, all these different things. But sometimes the best groups might have a big overlap and you just have to know what it is you are trying to get out of that specific group. And sometimes you just have to put it on a post-it note or something and remind yourself until you get used to it. I'm here for this, right? And it's great that other people are enjoying it for that, but I'm here for this. And then you can more easily let that go.
[00:05:49] Roland: A very good example that many people have these days is streaming options. So one popular one is the trifecta of Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. So if you want all three, it's a good value, but it's also a good value if you just want two of them. So some people say, oh, I'm never going to watch. I don't have kids. And I don't like Marvel or whatever, and they're crazy, but they're like, why would I buy that because I don't want all three? Well, it's still a good value, even if you never even go into Disney+. It's still a good value even if you never open up ESPN or if you don't look at Hulu. So when you do the math and you say, even if I don't do this thing, is it still worth my money?
So for your Maine writers' group, if you just want it for networking, can you find a way to make it worthwhile just for networking and let the rest of those things go? And sometimes it requires like before you go into the group, assuming it's a Facebook group. Before you go into that Facebook group, you have to set an intention. You say, I'm here for the networking. I don't need to learn; I don't need to give them marketing advice. I don't need to take their marketing advice. I'm here to make friends and support them and things like that. So I can. I can make something of myself in the state of Maine.
Narrow Down the Pool of Decisions
[00:07:11] Matty: I really like the analogy with the streaming services, because I was just having this conversation with someone, and we were mentioning things we were watching and where we were watching them. And I realized that my approach to streaming services is very applicable to writers' groups or all these other platforms that we're talking about, that I'll see something that I want, and I usually only have a couple of streaming services going at any one time.
So as an example, I noticed that lots of my guests were referencing the Marvel movies as examples of story structure, dialogue, or writing tropes or whatever. And I had never seen any of them. So I thought, really for business purposes, I should be watching the Marvel movies. So I subscribed to Disney+ until I'd watch enough Marvel movies that I thought I kind of got the idea and then I canceled it. And then I saw something on Apple TV. So I had Apple TV for a month or two, and then I finished that. I canceled that.
So I was narrowing the pool of things I had to make a decision about by only having one or two going into time, not having the full suite, because I think that's overwhelming. And similarly, I think I might do that with writers' groups too. Like, I can imagine at some point I might loop back to the Maine group because my schedule opens up, I find myself less involved in some other writers' groups, and then be able to take advantage of it more. So stepping in and out of those groups has its downsides, but it has its advantages, and it makes it less overwhelming.
And it also reminded me of my approach toward tools that I get as an author, as an authorpreneur that I have, the suite of tools that I use all the time, which are like, Scrivener and Vellum and Canva. And my goal is always to have as few tools as I can and use each of them to the fullest. So I don't want to get a social media scheduler because Canva actually has a tiny social media scheduler in it, which is good, because it saves me money, as would ratcheting down on writers' groups that have a membership fee attached to it.
But it also requires me to spend a lot of time learning each of the tools in the same way that if you want to make the best use of a writers' group, you need to spend a little time understanding what it has to offer, because they're not always as nicely laid out and triaged as you had described before.
[00:09:19] Roland: Yeah, well, you're already moving in the right direction because consider the tools you have. So you have Scrivener and you said you had Vellum, right? So you could be doing all of your formatting in Scrivener, but you've chosen to do something that's more in line with your goals. It's either easier, it gives you better results, or whatever. So you paid for an additional tool even though Scrivener can do it all. So you could use sort of the same thing for that.
Again, it's a similar, like there are these bundles of software courses and products that go around every year. And I often buy it because it has one tool that I want to buy. So I look at it and go, Hey, so it's $49. Are there $49 worth of things in there that I'm going to get? And then I don't even look at the other stuff. Like I might skim through them to see if there's other things of value and make notes of them, but then I just mentally let it go. And so you can do that as well.
But you're right, it's hard sometimes to know going in before you join a group, especially a Facebook group. And then if people in there, sometimes it's embarrassing to leave. Like, this isn't for me, and you're like, oh, I know all those authors and I want to support them, and so I don't want to just leave. So often what I do is when I want to take a break is I don't leave the group, but I do the unfollow on Facebook, so I don't see the notifications and things like that.
And then the groups that I'm actively working on, I'll actually do the old school thing and make bookmarks in my browser. So I'll have a folder of things that I'm currently using, groups that I'm currently in, Slack groups that I'm currently in and I'll go to that. And these are the ones that are in there. The ones that I'm currently not using, I'll drag to a different folder, bookmark folder. And it's really easy because then you don't have to go into social media and go into the search bar and type the thing and see all the other things that you've been trying to let go.
Assess What Each Group Offers
[00:11:07] Matty: Yeah, I realized that I use Facebook groups in particular, specifically to ask people who know more about publishing things than I do very specific questions about publishing. Like, I never go there for craft-related things, and I never go there for moral support. And I get bogged down by the people who are going there for moral support. Moral support is fine, but it's not what I'm looking for. It's easy for me to eliminate the ones that I don't want to go to because what I want is a small group of dedicated and knowledgeable people that I can ping for information. And ideally, see things that they're posting that I can help with, although I have to say that, truthfully, when I'm contributing back to the conversation, it's usually in the follow onto a question I post. I usually don't just scroll through the groups because that can be such a time suck and it's best not to even go there.
[00:12:02] Roland: Yeah. I think what you're ultimately, the ideal thing for you to find a mastermind group. So you have people with possibly overlapping skill sets, but you're all about the same level and you all have different skills, and you can bounce things off each other. You have the same mindset, similar goals, and you get together on a regular basis. So now you have a group of people whose advice you trust that you can go to and say, I have this problem, or I have this question and they may not know the answer, but you're not going to have to deal with a hundred comments of some people that are brand new and the comments that might be correct to the best advice often get lost in the shuffle. Like you can't even see them.
So big groups are great for some things, but sometimes, if you're trying to get something to answer quickly, it helps to have a network that you can go to of people that can either answer your question or point you in the right direction.
[00:12:58] Matty: Yeah, that's a great point. And I've stopped being active in some of the really large groups and shifted instead toward the smaller groups that have collected the knowledgeable people. And when I post, I do say, can anyone point me to the authoritative resource that will tell me whether or not I can quote customer reviews from Amazon in my promotional material? Not just post the question.
[00:13:22] Roland: I do it all the time.
[00:13:24] Matty: I do it all the time is not that helpful. Yeah. I want somebody to help me find the part in the terms and conditions that tells me whether I can do it or not. And then of course, sometimes you just want to ask people their opinion, but you frame it up that way.
[00:13:37] Roland: Yeah, yeah. I've done that too. Like you know the kind of answers you're going to get in a group, so you have to phrase your question in a very specific way just so you don't get the opinion, you get the facts.
Creating Your Own Group
One thing that this conversation is reminding me of is the idea of creating your own group. And I'll just use this as an opportunity to put a plug in for the ScribeCount Users private Facebook group, which I founded because I couldn't find good information for how to make the best use of ScribeCount. So if people are on Facebook, they want to go to ScribeCount Users, there are people from ScribeCount there and other affiliated groups like BookFunnel.
But it's a great point that if you're not really finding, or maybe even if you are finding sort of what you're looking for in established writers' groups, you can always form your own. Is that something that you have experience with?
I do have my own group, but it's mostly to answer questions about my own stuff. So I have been in some groups where there's just like 10 or 15 of us, other authors, and that sort of started off specific to a genre that we just wanted to bounce ideas off of each other. But then over time, it got to the point where we invited other people in different genres that had expertise in certain areas. And that particular group just got too big and too much and too many memes and stuff like that. No one was really in charge. We didn't have a charter when we started it. It was just like 10 friends starting a group with a specific goal, but we didn't keep it to that goal.
[00:15:03] Roland: So if you do one of these things, make sure that you know, probably invitation only. That's not to sound mean, but that's just to keep it focused on what your goal is. And it's okay to grow, but make sure that you sort of keep it on track. And that's actually one of the problems with a Facebook group versus something like Slack, because if you have a Slack channel, you can have a section for off-topic. So if those 10 friends in that group had another area where they could joke around and post the memes, we still have the serious stuff over here. But in a Facebook group, it's harder to do that because there's no like subgroups or anything like that. And it just gets out of hand. But so there's pros and cons. Facebook groups are so easy.
[00:15:45] Matty: I actually do have a Slack community for my Patreon supporters and podcast guests, so right after this, you're going to be getting an invitation to that. And you're exactly right, you can segment the conversations and channels so that the people who just want to chat have somewhere to do that.
I'm realizing another sort of flavor of a writers' group is writing sprint groups. And I actually have two groups, one with a group of friends that I've known for a long time. We've scheduled a daily sprint every day, except Friday. And so from 12:30 to 2:00, a couple of us are usually on there, sprinting away.
[00:16:16] Matty: And then I instituted one for my Indy Author Crew Slack community as well. And I was very specific in the charter for that, that this was an opportunity to commit to not being on social media for an hour, and I said very specifically, this is not the place where you come to ask questions about plotting. It's not a discussion and it's not a place to get moral support, although the larger Slack community can be that. So it's not like I'm turning people away from getting that kind of support somewhere. But as you're saying, you define the purpose of that particular group. And the sprint group is specifically to have an hour where we all promise we're not going to be on social media or doing emails or any of that other stuff.
[00:17:01] Roland: Yeah, I think that's great.
[00:17:02] Matty: Getting back to the class example that you had brought up, I find that as a speaker in events, I often get the benefits of being an attendee without having to pay for them. So if I'm speaking at a virtual conference, let's say, or even an in-person conference, then I can take advantage of all the other speakers and topics. And so there again, I built up this huge queue of online classes I could take, but, yeah, I'm never going to be able to do it. And I think you're right, it is just a matter of making that listing going through and crossing them off.
Factoring in Opportunity Cost
[00:17:31] Roland: Well, there’s this concept. Have you heard of the opportunity cost?
Kind of, but explain it a little bit for me.
[00:17:37] Roland: So it's opportunity cost, and there's probably a dictionary definition that's better than mine, but we understand there's money and there's time, and a lot of authors are starting to recognize that there's an energy cost to things that we do. And here's an example of that. If you come to a writers' group discussion and they have it scheduled for Thursday afternoon at four, and you're mentally preparing a half an hour early, and then it kind of mentally exhausts you. So then you can't write at five because now your brain is fried because of the discussions you had, then there was an energy cost to that. That was bigger than the loss of that one hour that you spent in the writing group. So overall, it might have been a great value for you, but you have to weigh what is the energy cost of this thing that you're going to do versus the benefit you get out of it.
Opportunity cost is when you do something that could be valuable, but because you're spending that time, energy, or money, you can't do something else, and that other thing was much more valuable. So the common one, for me included sometimes, is I spend time on social media, like going posting things. But what is the actual value of posting something on social media versus spending that time writing more or writing an email to my list? So there's different things that we do, and those are all opportunity costs.
And that's how I teach people to manage their author platforms as well. You can do all of these things in your author platform, but you probably can't do them all. You should weight them differently in your priorities because each one of them has an opportunity cost. So you know that you always want to get people on your email list, versus spending that same amount of time on clever things on social media that go away right away, like you post that, you know, and it's gone.
[00:19:27] Roland: So those kinds of things, these opportunity costs, play into everything, whether it's your time spent learning, time spent writing, promoting, marketing.
[00:19:39] Matty: Yeah, I have a quarterly plan and each quarter I have sort of like the motto of the quarter, like for first quarter, this year it was, expect to invest. And then for this quarter, it's, no one is clamoring for my next social media post, readers are clamoring for my next novel. Allocate time accordingly.
[00:19:55] Roland: Yes.
How Opportunities Get You Closer to Your Goals
And the same could very well be true. if you're spending a lot of time participating in writers' groups activities, then I suppose you need to weigh each of those activities separately. So rather than thinking as a big chunk, is belonging to the Acme Writers' Group worth it, instead look more granularly and say, is going to the monthly meetings worth it? Is attending their book sale worth it? Is getting together with people for beers worth it? That could be a way to also make it less overwhelming, to be looking at the individual things they offer, not the whole thing all at once.
It's hard to put a value on all of these things, because there's hard values, there's soft dollar values. There's opportunity costs and all those kinds of things. But if you at least can acknowledge some of these things and look at these things and say, does this thing take me closer to my goal or my focus or get me farther away from it and in relation to other things. So you can rank these things and see where is this going to be. And all of these things will fall into that, whether it's a group or learning or speaking, blogging.
[00:21:02] Matty: Yeah, I think that it's also valid to factor in the fun you're going to get out of it. So there's a local, and since I'm saying nice things about them, I'll just say it's the Delaware Valley Chapter of Sisters in Crime. Which I belong to, have belonged to for years and love, because I know many of the people there personally, and I love having an opportunity to get together with them and we have lunch afterwards when we are able to, and it's just nice catching up with people. And I think of that more as a rejuvenating thing, not an exhausting thing.
[00:21:30] Roland: Yeah, the fun is an important thing. A lot of times people will ask me, I need to find a local writers' group to do these things. And I said, you need to find a local writers' group for moral support and things like that, but probably for your marketing and your writing tips and things like that, now that we have the internet available to us, you can find something that's more special purpose. So that's the other thing to consider is, I need these things. Is this specific group or the style of this group the best way to get that?
So I love going to local writers' events, but when the only thing that local writers have in common is that they're local. They write all different things. They are in different parts of their journey. They have totally different goals, and they know a lot, but they know so many different things. So like one may know everything about traditional publishing. One may know everything about indy publishing. And it's really hard to make decisions about your business in that type of group. But it's very easy to say, hey, I'm on this journey, I'm struggling emotionally, and I want to do a writing sprint or things like that. Or you want to meet somebody for coffee, then there's no better way than that. It's hard to meet somebody for coffee. You know, you can over Zoom, but it's not the same.
[00:22:42] Matty: I find cocktails are better over Zoom.
[00:22:44] Roland: Yeah, I agree.
Find Your "Medium Point" Group
[00:22:46] Matty: I do realize that I have gone in and out of writers' groups based on the alignment with my genre, and my definition of alignment has become more and more specific. And so Sisters and Crimes is very obviously aligned with the thriller, suspense, and mystery novels that I write. There are other groups that I've been part of that were not wildly different, it wasn't like some people were talking about memoirs and some people were talking about Sci-fi or whatever. They seemed on the surface to be sufficiently aligned with what I wanted to do, but then I was having to examine the advice I was getting in those groups with whether it really made sense for me. And there, again, it was not a clear answer. And just throwing out an example, like rapid release. I've been in groups where there've been a bunch of rapid release authors and they're all talking about, oh, I haven't published anything for three months. I'm like, oh my God, you're kidding me.
And it didn't help me to be in a group with people who are doing rapid release. And similarly, it wouldn't help me to be in a group of people who had been spending years and years on what they hoped to be the great American novel. Neither of those is really going to help me. There's a medium point. If I can find those kindred spirits in that medium point, that's going to be more helpful to me.
Give Yourself Permission to Let It Go
A lot of these things comes down to, like I said, what's your focus? How does this thing align with your focus? But also all the different kinds of clients I have, the marketing clients, the publishing clients, and I'm a weight loss coach too, and a health coach, I have many of those clients as well. Your best chance of succeeding is to give yourself permission to try something for a specific amount of time, and then reevaluate whether that's working for you at the end, and at the very beginning, you've given yourself permission to let it go if it's not working.
Because the biggest thing is like somebody might say, oh, I'm dedicated to the Keto diet. And then if it doesn't work out for you, if you don't like it after 30 days and you haven't given yourself permission to let it go, you feel like a failure at the end of those 30 days. When in reality, you should be feeling like a success because you gave it 30 days, just like you said, you made your list and reevaluated it and you decided it wasn't for you. Success. Now you can, now you're free mentally, emotionally, monetarily, to go on, to try the next thing, also with permission.
[00:25:01] Roland: And you can do that with everything. Try a group, you can try a genre, you can try a marketing style, you can try a newsletter service. All of these different things. If you give yourself permission ahead of time to try it for a specific amount of time and permission to let it go at the end if you don't like it, then you can't fail. And that's a success.
Joining Groups for the Right Benefits
That's a great point, and I kind of act on that. I'm not doing it so much on a month-by-month basis for memberships, but on a yearly basis, but I have a tickler list of all the things that I'm members of and then a reminder when one is coming up for renewal. And that's the moment that I say, do I really want to spend another $65? Did I get $65 worth of value one way or the other, whether that was monetarily or otherwise? I guess actually, the very nuts and bolts finances is another reason to join things. I've joined organizations strictly so I could get the IngramSpark coupon promo code to do free uploads, and I finally found The Alliance of Independent Authors, which I would've been a member of anyway, offers that. But if you're going for those kinds of things, where you have a very specific measurable goal like that out of your membership, then it always makes sense to do a search and make sure that you don't already belong to a group that is offering that.
[00:26:12] Roland: Yeah, but that's a great example of one where you join something for something very specific and all the rest of it's just, it's like free, like you get all this other stuff for free if you want it. So that's a great one.
[00:26:25] Matty: And I think sometimes, as we had alluded to earlier, groups are not necessarily good at laying all these things out very clearly. And so I found that if you can get someone who's very familiar with the group, like the president of the group or something like that, they're very often very happy to meet with you for half an hour and go through what the offerings are and they can say, oh, that’s over here on our website, and then this is over here on our website. And that's then not only giving you some better direction in what you're getting out of that time and money and energy investment, but also you get a chance to talk to the person who really knows their way around that. So that's a nice side benefit.
[00:27:00] Roland: Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Are there any other tips you had specific to writers' groups about examples of how you've made decisions about which ones to stick with, which ones to let go, maybe which ones to back burner and you think you might come back to later?
The Emotional and Energy Cost of Participating
[00:27:16] Roland: Yeah, part of the reason why I rarely leave them is because, hey, I don't want to have to join. A lot of times you have to answer questions and you have to join again. And you don't want to, oh, I have to answer questions. Like, weren't you already part of this group? Now you're back? So I just put 'em on the back burner. But there are also there's often, sometimes huge groups where I can go and search the content. And if you don't find it, you can still get an answer to the question. But just like you have to make it, you have to look at each answer you get with your focus in mind, right? Did it answer your thing strategically? Ask it strategically, read the answers.
One of the things about authors is they like to help each other. And if you're in a group with a lot of people, and you are one of the people that knows the answers, you might often feel obligated to answer those questions. And it's great to help people, but sometimes you have to look at something and say, if I answer this question and there's already 250 comments on this thread, is anyone going to even see, right? So my comment is one of 250. I might have the best answer, but the odds of being seen are probably not worth it. And that's when you come back to the emotional cost or the energy cost associated with that, because it can be very frustrating to give the right answer and have it not seen.
And so now I feel bad abandoning ship, but I want to make it as an author. I want to sell my books. I want my books to be read. And if I am constantly helping other people in an area where I can't effectively help them, then there's a huge emotional and energy loss that we can feel, that can really negatively affect our writing.
[00:29:03] Matty: Yeah.
Joining with People a Little Further Along the Path
[00:29:04] Matty: The question that made me think of is the fact that I think that for many people, the goal of a writers' group is to find a group of people who are of similar or slightly more advanced level than you are. So if I'm looking for a writers' group, I'm not looking for someone who's just thinking about writing their first book. And I'm also not necessarily looking to be in a group with Charlaine Harris. I'm looking for people whose experience are more like mine but are a little further along on the path.
I think the problem is that everybody's looking for that. So there are, I'm sure, people who are saying, I really want to be in a group of people who know less than I do so I can prove how much I know. But I think that in general, people are looking for that. They're looking for people that they can empathize with their goals, with their level of skill, their level of experience and so on.
Is that ringing true for you? And have you seen that play out in writers' groups that you've been a part of?
[00:29:56] Roland: Yeah, absolutely. And that's like, when it comes down to the mastermind thing. With the mastermind, ideally, you would want to be in a group where everyone's a little bit ahead of you so you can learn from them. But in a mastermind, everyone should be ahead of you in the areas where you need help. So that's where you can find a group where you might be ahead of John or Mary in one area, but John and Mary are ahead of you in other things, so you can work together.
But yeah, it is like that in a group. And that's where it helps to look to who the leaders are and look to see whether they are active as well, because people listen to the leaders. So if you want a leader that can lead you, at least in that area that you're looking for help with towards your goal, so they're a little bit ahead of you.
[00:30:40] Roland: So I join, there's the Wide for the Win group. So like you join that. Like if you don't know how to market wide, that's a great group to go to. And then you look to the leaders, like Mark, right? He's one of the leaders there, and Erin, I think she started the group. So they know, and what happens is like somebody will post something, but Erin or Mark or Monica, Leonelle, they'll come in and they'll post their comments, and you know that they have experience in those areas, and they will be listened to. So you, you can have a good thing there. But if it's a group where everyone's on the same level and no one's in charge, then sometimes it's hard to know what advice to listen to.
[00:31:18] Matty: Yeah, totally makes sense. Well, Roland, thank you so much for talking through that with me, a little chat about writers' groups. Please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:31:30] Roland: Well, you can find most about me at IndestructibleAuthor.com, and I work with mostly on productivity, and also author platform, helping people with their author platform, because I think from a lot of people, the author platform is a huge time suck, but it doesn't have to be. There are so many things you can do, I call it putting your author platform on cruise control. Because you can't really put it on an autopilot because you kind of guide it. So it's sort of like cruise control with your car. So you can go over there, and I give you a link to a free course. It's only about 40 minutes of video with some downloads that you can get over there and give you a great introduction to that.
[00:32:13] Matty: Sounds great. Thank you so much.
[00:32:14] Roland: You're very welcome. It's great talking to you.
[00:00:05] Roland: Good, Matty, how are you?
[00:00:06] Matty: I'm doing great, thank you. To give our listeners and viewers a little bit of background on you.
Roland Denzel is a health and fitness author of over 10 books and a printing and publishing specialist with over 30 years in the industry. Roland helps authors, small businesses and even giant corporations put their messages into the world via books, email, and digital publishing. In 2015, Roland created indestructibleauthor.com to help authors just like himself, be more productive and write more books while staying happy, healthy, and sane. And Roland grew up in Southern California, but now lives in Colorado where he's experiencing seasons for the first time in his life.
So, I invited Roland here to talk about a topic that we had started talking about on Mark Lefebvre’s Reflective Roundtable get togethers, which is where he invites his Patreon supporters to get together and we talk about various topics. And one of the topics we talked about was the benefits and costs of membership in writers' groups specifically.
And so I thought Roland had some really great perspectives on this. I think I had brought up that topic at the round table because it was something I was wrestling with. And so we're just going to talk about how you weigh those things. What are the pros and the cons?
So Roland, I'm going to throw out an example that I know we chatted about a little bit earlier just to get the conversation started. And that is that I was a member of the Maine Writers' and Publishers Association. And I did that, not because I'm from Maine, but because some of my books are written in Maine and I was trying to build up a network there. And there was a nominal membership fee, and they offered lots and lots of benefits to members, and I found that I was getting overwhelmed. So there were so many things to choose from that I was feeling overwhelmed, and every time I got communication from the Maine Writers' and Publishers Association, I would panic because I knew I was never going to take advantage of these. Is that something that you have experienced in your own writer life about the downside of a riches of resources?
The Downside of a Wealth of Resources
[00:02:00] Roland: Yeah, I would say yes, this is very common. So I run a health membership and we have, we like to think of it as like the Netflix of health and wellness. So we have all these different things that we give our members every month and we've been doing it for almost four, it'll be four years next month. So we have four years’ worth of monthly content.
And many people will go in there and they'll just feel like they're overwhelmed. And even though we try to organize it in a way that we think is easy for them, the fact that there's so much there and they feel like they're paying for this ongoing thing, and they can't use it all, drives some people nuts. Like they're just like, ah, I can't even, I can't take it. So what we have to do is sort of triage it or whatever. You have to sort of coach them in how to manage something like this.
And you get the same thing with something like an author summit, like one of those online summits where you go to the page and oh, there's 78 talks. And you'll be like, I'm just not going to be able to do those 78 talks, so I just don't even sign up.
So we teach people to think of what is their focus, their goal. Not how they're going to focus right now, but what is their focus? And if you can focus on that, then you can see what stands between you and that thing, that goal. And then you can look at all of these things, the 72 things in the summit or the year's worth of membership content, and you can say, which of these things actually serves me, will help me get me toward my focus and which of them will slow me down or stand in the way or distract me?
And it's very easy to go down that list at that point. And even sometimes I just tell people, make a list of them and then cross off the ones you're not going to. It's very satisfying. It's very satisfying to do that. And it's like the to-do list thing. Like you get a little dopamine hit when you like, ding, every time you cross one off, you're like, okay, doesn't matter that you've done it or not done. It's not even an option anymore. You're giving it up. You're giving yourself permission to let that go. And that's one of the things that can be a struggle.
So that's one of the things to consider also, is if you have a tendency towards that type of behavior or mentality, then you have to know that going in before you make these decisions on how to invest your time and your money and your emotional energy.
[00:04:18] Matty: Yeah, I had thrown that one example out to get the conversation started, but I think it makes sense to loop back on exactly what you're saying. What are your goals of your membership? And I think introducing classes into the conversation too, makes a lot of sense because in this case, there's a lot of overlap. So in that case, I was looking for a networking opportunity basically, and I shouldn't be turning down networking opportunities, but as you're saying, it's just one in the long line of incoming things to deal with on your to-do list.
I think another goal as you're talking about is the learning goal, which applies both to membership and writers' groups, as well as to classes. Is there any different advice you have depending on the goal the person has, if the person's goal is either networking or learning and they're going through the list and then crossing off the things that they know they don't want to do, any different perspective they should bring if their focus is more, let's say, craft-oriented than business-oriented?
Understand Your Goals
For sure, I mean, some groups have tried to do everything, or they have craft and marketing and productivity, all these different things. But sometimes the best groups might have a big overlap and you just have to know what it is you are trying to get out of that specific group. And sometimes you just have to put it on a post-it note or something and remind yourself until you get used to it. I'm here for this, right? And it's great that other people are enjoying it for that, but I'm here for this. And then you can more easily let that go.
[00:05:49] Roland: A very good example that many people have these days is streaming options. So one popular one is the trifecta of Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN. So if you want all three, it's a good value, but it's also a good value if you just want two of them. So some people say, oh, I'm never going to watch. I don't have kids. And I don't like Marvel or whatever, and they're crazy, but they're like, why would I buy that because I don't want all three? Well, it's still a good value, even if you never even go into Disney+. It's still a good value even if you never open up ESPN or if you don't look at Hulu. So when you do the math and you say, even if I don't do this thing, is it still worth my money?
So for your Maine writers' group, if you just want it for networking, can you find a way to make it worthwhile just for networking and let the rest of those things go? And sometimes it requires like before you go into the group, assuming it's a Facebook group. Before you go into that Facebook group, you have to set an intention. You say, I'm here for the networking. I don't need to learn; I don't need to give them marketing advice. I don't need to take their marketing advice. I'm here to make friends and support them and things like that. So I can. I can make something of myself in the state of Maine.
Narrow Down the Pool of Decisions
[00:07:11] Matty: I really like the analogy with the streaming services, because I was just having this conversation with someone, and we were mentioning things we were watching and where we were watching them. And I realized that my approach to streaming services is very applicable to writers' groups or all these other platforms that we're talking about, that I'll see something that I want, and I usually only have a couple of streaming services going at any one time.
So as an example, I noticed that lots of my guests were referencing the Marvel movies as examples of story structure, dialogue, or writing tropes or whatever. And I had never seen any of them. So I thought, really for business purposes, I should be watching the Marvel movies. So I subscribed to Disney+ until I'd watch enough Marvel movies that I thought I kind of got the idea and then I canceled it. And then I saw something on Apple TV. So I had Apple TV for a month or two, and then I finished that. I canceled that.
So I was narrowing the pool of things I had to make a decision about by only having one or two going into time, not having the full suite, because I think that's overwhelming. And similarly, I think I might do that with writers' groups too. Like, I can imagine at some point I might loop back to the Maine group because my schedule opens up, I find myself less involved in some other writers' groups, and then be able to take advantage of it more. So stepping in and out of those groups has its downsides, but it has its advantages, and it makes it less overwhelming.
And it also reminded me of my approach toward tools that I get as an author, as an authorpreneur that I have, the suite of tools that I use all the time, which are like, Scrivener and Vellum and Canva. And my goal is always to have as few tools as I can and use each of them to the fullest. So I don't want to get a social media scheduler because Canva actually has a tiny social media scheduler in it, which is good, because it saves me money, as would ratcheting down on writers' groups that have a membership fee attached to it.
But it also requires me to spend a lot of time learning each of the tools in the same way that if you want to make the best use of a writers' group, you need to spend a little time understanding what it has to offer, because they're not always as nicely laid out and triaged as you had described before.
[00:09:19] Roland: Yeah, well, you're already moving in the right direction because consider the tools you have. So you have Scrivener and you said you had Vellum, right? So you could be doing all of your formatting in Scrivener, but you've chosen to do something that's more in line with your goals. It's either easier, it gives you better results, or whatever. So you paid for an additional tool even though Scrivener can do it all. So you could use sort of the same thing for that.
Again, it's a similar, like there are these bundles of software courses and products that go around every year. And I often buy it because it has one tool that I want to buy. So I look at it and go, Hey, so it's $49. Are there $49 worth of things in there that I'm going to get? And then I don't even look at the other stuff. Like I might skim through them to see if there's other things of value and make notes of them, but then I just mentally let it go. And so you can do that as well.
But you're right, it's hard sometimes to know going in before you join a group, especially a Facebook group. And then if people in there, sometimes it's embarrassing to leave. Like, this isn't for me, and you're like, oh, I know all those authors and I want to support them, and so I don't want to just leave. So often what I do is when I want to take a break is I don't leave the group, but I do the unfollow on Facebook, so I don't see the notifications and things like that.
And then the groups that I'm actively working on, I'll actually do the old school thing and make bookmarks in my browser. So I'll have a folder of things that I'm currently using, groups that I'm currently in, Slack groups that I'm currently in and I'll go to that. And these are the ones that are in there. The ones that I'm currently not using, I'll drag to a different folder, bookmark folder. And it's really easy because then you don't have to go into social media and go into the search bar and type the thing and see all the other things that you've been trying to let go.
Assess What Each Group Offers
[00:11:07] Matty: Yeah, I realized that I use Facebook groups in particular, specifically to ask people who know more about publishing things than I do very specific questions about publishing. Like, I never go there for craft-related things, and I never go there for moral support. And I get bogged down by the people who are going there for moral support. Moral support is fine, but it's not what I'm looking for. It's easy for me to eliminate the ones that I don't want to go to because what I want is a small group of dedicated and knowledgeable people that I can ping for information. And ideally, see things that they're posting that I can help with, although I have to say that, truthfully, when I'm contributing back to the conversation, it's usually in the follow onto a question I post. I usually don't just scroll through the groups because that can be such a time suck and it's best not to even go there.
[00:12:02] Roland: Yeah. I think what you're ultimately, the ideal thing for you to find a mastermind group. So you have people with possibly overlapping skill sets, but you're all about the same level and you all have different skills, and you can bounce things off each other. You have the same mindset, similar goals, and you get together on a regular basis. So now you have a group of people whose advice you trust that you can go to and say, I have this problem, or I have this question and they may not know the answer, but you're not going to have to deal with a hundred comments of some people that are brand new and the comments that might be correct to the best advice often get lost in the shuffle. Like you can't even see them.
So big groups are great for some things, but sometimes, if you're trying to get something to answer quickly, it helps to have a network that you can go to of people that can either answer your question or point you in the right direction.
[00:12:58] Matty: Yeah, that's a great point. And I've stopped being active in some of the really large groups and shifted instead toward the smaller groups that have collected the knowledgeable people. And when I post, I do say, can anyone point me to the authoritative resource that will tell me whether or not I can quote customer reviews from Amazon in my promotional material? Not just post the question.
[00:13:22] Roland: I do it all the time.
[00:13:24] Matty: I do it all the time is not that helpful. Yeah. I want somebody to help me find the part in the terms and conditions that tells me whether I can do it or not. And then of course, sometimes you just want to ask people their opinion, but you frame it up that way.
[00:13:37] Roland: Yeah, yeah. I've done that too. Like you know the kind of answers you're going to get in a group, so you have to phrase your question in a very specific way just so you don't get the opinion, you get the facts.
Creating Your Own Group
One thing that this conversation is reminding me of is the idea of creating your own group. And I'll just use this as an opportunity to put a plug in for the ScribeCount Users private Facebook group, which I founded because I couldn't find good information for how to make the best use of ScribeCount. So if people are on Facebook, they want to go to ScribeCount Users, there are people from ScribeCount there and other affiliated groups like BookFunnel.
But it's a great point that if you're not really finding, or maybe even if you are finding sort of what you're looking for in established writers' groups, you can always form your own. Is that something that you have experience with?
I do have my own group, but it's mostly to answer questions about my own stuff. So I have been in some groups where there's just like 10 or 15 of us, other authors, and that sort of started off specific to a genre that we just wanted to bounce ideas off of each other. But then over time, it got to the point where we invited other people in different genres that had expertise in certain areas. And that particular group just got too big and too much and too many memes and stuff like that. No one was really in charge. We didn't have a charter when we started it. It was just like 10 friends starting a group with a specific goal, but we didn't keep it to that goal.
[00:15:03] Roland: So if you do one of these things, make sure that you know, probably invitation only. That's not to sound mean, but that's just to keep it focused on what your goal is. And it's okay to grow, but make sure that you sort of keep it on track. And that's actually one of the problems with a Facebook group versus something like Slack, because if you have a Slack channel, you can have a section for off-topic. So if those 10 friends in that group had another area where they could joke around and post the memes, we still have the serious stuff over here. But in a Facebook group, it's harder to do that because there's no like subgroups or anything like that. And it just gets out of hand. But so there's pros and cons. Facebook groups are so easy.
[00:15:45] Matty: I actually do have a Slack community for my Patreon supporters and podcast guests, so right after this, you're going to be getting an invitation to that. And you're exactly right, you can segment the conversations and channels so that the people who just want to chat have somewhere to do that.
I'm realizing another sort of flavor of a writers' group is writing sprint groups. And I actually have two groups, one with a group of friends that I've known for a long time. We've scheduled a daily sprint every day, except Friday. And so from 12:30 to 2:00, a couple of us are usually on there, sprinting away.
[00:16:16] Matty: And then I instituted one for my Indy Author Crew Slack community as well. And I was very specific in the charter for that, that this was an opportunity to commit to not being on social media for an hour, and I said very specifically, this is not the place where you come to ask questions about plotting. It's not a discussion and it's not a place to get moral support, although the larger Slack community can be that. So it's not like I'm turning people away from getting that kind of support somewhere. But as you're saying, you define the purpose of that particular group. And the sprint group is specifically to have an hour where we all promise we're not going to be on social media or doing emails or any of that other stuff.
[00:17:01] Roland: Yeah, I think that's great.
[00:17:02] Matty: Getting back to the class example that you had brought up, I find that as a speaker in events, I often get the benefits of being an attendee without having to pay for them. So if I'm speaking at a virtual conference, let's say, or even an in-person conference, then I can take advantage of all the other speakers and topics. And so there again, I built up this huge queue of online classes I could take, but, yeah, I'm never going to be able to do it. And I think you're right, it is just a matter of making that listing going through and crossing them off.
Factoring in Opportunity Cost
[00:17:31] Roland: Well, there’s this concept. Have you heard of the opportunity cost?
Kind of, but explain it a little bit for me.
[00:17:37] Roland: So it's opportunity cost, and there's probably a dictionary definition that's better than mine, but we understand there's money and there's time, and a lot of authors are starting to recognize that there's an energy cost to things that we do. And here's an example of that. If you come to a writers' group discussion and they have it scheduled for Thursday afternoon at four, and you're mentally preparing a half an hour early, and then it kind of mentally exhausts you. So then you can't write at five because now your brain is fried because of the discussions you had, then there was an energy cost to that. That was bigger than the loss of that one hour that you spent in the writing group. So overall, it might have been a great value for you, but you have to weigh what is the energy cost of this thing that you're going to do versus the benefit you get out of it.
Opportunity cost is when you do something that could be valuable, but because you're spending that time, energy, or money, you can't do something else, and that other thing was much more valuable. So the common one, for me included sometimes, is I spend time on social media, like going posting things. But what is the actual value of posting something on social media versus spending that time writing more or writing an email to my list? So there's different things that we do, and those are all opportunity costs.
And that's how I teach people to manage their author platforms as well. You can do all of these things in your author platform, but you probably can't do them all. You should weight them differently in your priorities because each one of them has an opportunity cost. So you know that you always want to get people on your email list, versus spending that same amount of time on clever things on social media that go away right away, like you post that, you know, and it's gone.
[00:19:27] Roland: So those kinds of things, these opportunity costs, play into everything, whether it's your time spent learning, time spent writing, promoting, marketing.
[00:19:39] Matty: Yeah, I have a quarterly plan and each quarter I have sort of like the motto of the quarter, like for first quarter, this year it was, expect to invest. And then for this quarter, it's, no one is clamoring for my next social media post, readers are clamoring for my next novel. Allocate time accordingly.
[00:19:55] Roland: Yes.
How Opportunities Get You Closer to Your Goals
And the same could very well be true. if you're spending a lot of time participating in writers' groups activities, then I suppose you need to weigh each of those activities separately. So rather than thinking as a big chunk, is belonging to the Acme Writers' Group worth it, instead look more granularly and say, is going to the monthly meetings worth it? Is attending their book sale worth it? Is getting together with people for beers worth it? That could be a way to also make it less overwhelming, to be looking at the individual things they offer, not the whole thing all at once.
It's hard to put a value on all of these things, because there's hard values, there's soft dollar values. There's opportunity costs and all those kinds of things. But if you at least can acknowledge some of these things and look at these things and say, does this thing take me closer to my goal or my focus or get me farther away from it and in relation to other things. So you can rank these things and see where is this going to be. And all of these things will fall into that, whether it's a group or learning or speaking, blogging.
[00:21:02] Matty: Yeah, I think that it's also valid to factor in the fun you're going to get out of it. So there's a local, and since I'm saying nice things about them, I'll just say it's the Delaware Valley Chapter of Sisters in Crime. Which I belong to, have belonged to for years and love, because I know many of the people there personally, and I love having an opportunity to get together with them and we have lunch afterwards when we are able to, and it's just nice catching up with people. And I think of that more as a rejuvenating thing, not an exhausting thing.
[00:21:30] Roland: Yeah, the fun is an important thing. A lot of times people will ask me, I need to find a local writers' group to do these things. And I said, you need to find a local writers' group for moral support and things like that, but probably for your marketing and your writing tips and things like that, now that we have the internet available to us, you can find something that's more special purpose. So that's the other thing to consider is, I need these things. Is this specific group or the style of this group the best way to get that?
So I love going to local writers' events, but when the only thing that local writers have in common is that they're local. They write all different things. They are in different parts of their journey. They have totally different goals, and they know a lot, but they know so many different things. So like one may know everything about traditional publishing. One may know everything about indy publishing. And it's really hard to make decisions about your business in that type of group. But it's very easy to say, hey, I'm on this journey, I'm struggling emotionally, and I want to do a writing sprint or things like that. Or you want to meet somebody for coffee, then there's no better way than that. It's hard to meet somebody for coffee. You know, you can over Zoom, but it's not the same.
[00:22:42] Matty: I find cocktails are better over Zoom.
[00:22:44] Roland: Yeah, I agree.
Find Your "Medium Point" Group
[00:22:46] Matty: I do realize that I have gone in and out of writers' groups based on the alignment with my genre, and my definition of alignment has become more and more specific. And so Sisters and Crimes is very obviously aligned with the thriller, suspense, and mystery novels that I write. There are other groups that I've been part of that were not wildly different, it wasn't like some people were talking about memoirs and some people were talking about Sci-fi or whatever. They seemed on the surface to be sufficiently aligned with what I wanted to do, but then I was having to examine the advice I was getting in those groups with whether it really made sense for me. And there, again, it was not a clear answer. And just throwing out an example, like rapid release. I've been in groups where there've been a bunch of rapid release authors and they're all talking about, oh, I haven't published anything for three months. I'm like, oh my God, you're kidding me.
And it didn't help me to be in a group with people who are doing rapid release. And similarly, it wouldn't help me to be in a group of people who had been spending years and years on what they hoped to be the great American novel. Neither of those is really going to help me. There's a medium point. If I can find those kindred spirits in that medium point, that's going to be more helpful to me.
Give Yourself Permission to Let It Go
A lot of these things comes down to, like I said, what's your focus? How does this thing align with your focus? But also all the different kinds of clients I have, the marketing clients, the publishing clients, and I'm a weight loss coach too, and a health coach, I have many of those clients as well. Your best chance of succeeding is to give yourself permission to try something for a specific amount of time, and then reevaluate whether that's working for you at the end, and at the very beginning, you've given yourself permission to let it go if it's not working.
Because the biggest thing is like somebody might say, oh, I'm dedicated to the Keto diet. And then if it doesn't work out for you, if you don't like it after 30 days and you haven't given yourself permission to let it go, you feel like a failure at the end of those 30 days. When in reality, you should be feeling like a success because you gave it 30 days, just like you said, you made your list and reevaluated it and you decided it wasn't for you. Success. Now you can, now you're free mentally, emotionally, monetarily, to go on, to try the next thing, also with permission.
[00:25:01] Roland: And you can do that with everything. Try a group, you can try a genre, you can try a marketing style, you can try a newsletter service. All of these different things. If you give yourself permission ahead of time to try it for a specific amount of time and permission to let it go at the end if you don't like it, then you can't fail. And that's a success.
Joining Groups for the Right Benefits
That's a great point, and I kind of act on that. I'm not doing it so much on a month-by-month basis for memberships, but on a yearly basis, but I have a tickler list of all the things that I'm members of and then a reminder when one is coming up for renewal. And that's the moment that I say, do I really want to spend another $65? Did I get $65 worth of value one way or the other, whether that was monetarily or otherwise? I guess actually, the very nuts and bolts finances is another reason to join things. I've joined organizations strictly so I could get the IngramSpark coupon promo code to do free uploads, and I finally found The Alliance of Independent Authors, which I would've been a member of anyway, offers that. But if you're going for those kinds of things, where you have a very specific measurable goal like that out of your membership, then it always makes sense to do a search and make sure that you don't already belong to a group that is offering that.
[00:26:12] Roland: Yeah, but that's a great example of one where you join something for something very specific and all the rest of it's just, it's like free, like you get all this other stuff for free if you want it. So that's a great one.
[00:26:25] Matty: And I think sometimes, as we had alluded to earlier, groups are not necessarily good at laying all these things out very clearly. And so I found that if you can get someone who's very familiar with the group, like the president of the group or something like that, they're very often very happy to meet with you for half an hour and go through what the offerings are and they can say, oh, that’s over here on our website, and then this is over here on our website. And that's then not only giving you some better direction in what you're getting out of that time and money and energy investment, but also you get a chance to talk to the person who really knows their way around that. So that's a nice side benefit.
[00:27:00] Roland: Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Are there any other tips you had specific to writers' groups about examples of how you've made decisions about which ones to stick with, which ones to let go, maybe which ones to back burner and you think you might come back to later?
The Emotional and Energy Cost of Participating
[00:27:16] Roland: Yeah, part of the reason why I rarely leave them is because, hey, I don't want to have to join. A lot of times you have to answer questions and you have to join again. And you don't want to, oh, I have to answer questions. Like, weren't you already part of this group? Now you're back? So I just put 'em on the back burner. But there are also there's often, sometimes huge groups where I can go and search the content. And if you don't find it, you can still get an answer to the question. But just like you have to make it, you have to look at each answer you get with your focus in mind, right? Did it answer your thing strategically? Ask it strategically, read the answers.
One of the things about authors is they like to help each other. And if you're in a group with a lot of people, and you are one of the people that knows the answers, you might often feel obligated to answer those questions. And it's great to help people, but sometimes you have to look at something and say, if I answer this question and there's already 250 comments on this thread, is anyone going to even see, right? So my comment is one of 250. I might have the best answer, but the odds of being seen are probably not worth it. And that's when you come back to the emotional cost or the energy cost associated with that, because it can be very frustrating to give the right answer and have it not seen.
And so now I feel bad abandoning ship, but I want to make it as an author. I want to sell my books. I want my books to be read. And if I am constantly helping other people in an area where I can't effectively help them, then there's a huge emotional and energy loss that we can feel, that can really negatively affect our writing.
[00:29:03] Matty: Yeah.
Joining with People a Little Further Along the Path
[00:29:04] Matty: The question that made me think of is the fact that I think that for many people, the goal of a writers' group is to find a group of people who are of similar or slightly more advanced level than you are. So if I'm looking for a writers' group, I'm not looking for someone who's just thinking about writing their first book. And I'm also not necessarily looking to be in a group with Charlaine Harris. I'm looking for people whose experience are more like mine but are a little further along on the path.
I think the problem is that everybody's looking for that. So there are, I'm sure, people who are saying, I really want to be in a group of people who know less than I do so I can prove how much I know. But I think that in general, people are looking for that. They're looking for people that they can empathize with their goals, with their level of skill, their level of experience and so on.
Is that ringing true for you? And have you seen that play out in writers' groups that you've been a part of?
[00:29:56] Roland: Yeah, absolutely. And that's like, when it comes down to the mastermind thing. With the mastermind, ideally, you would want to be in a group where everyone's a little bit ahead of you so you can learn from them. But in a mastermind, everyone should be ahead of you in the areas where you need help. So that's where you can find a group where you might be ahead of John or Mary in one area, but John and Mary are ahead of you in other things, so you can work together.
But yeah, it is like that in a group. And that's where it helps to look to who the leaders are and look to see whether they are active as well, because people listen to the leaders. So if you want a leader that can lead you, at least in that area that you're looking for help with towards your goal, so they're a little bit ahead of you.
[00:30:40] Roland: So I join, there's the Wide for the Win group. So like you join that. Like if you don't know how to market wide, that's a great group to go to. And then you look to the leaders, like Mark, right? He's one of the leaders there, and Erin, I think she started the group. So they know, and what happens is like somebody will post something, but Erin or Mark or Monica, Leonelle, they'll come in and they'll post their comments, and you know that they have experience in those areas, and they will be listened to. So you, you can have a good thing there. But if it's a group where everyone's on the same level and no one's in charge, then sometimes it's hard to know what advice to listen to.
[00:31:18] Matty: Yeah, totally makes sense. Well, Roland, thank you so much for talking through that with me, a little chat about writers' groups. Please let the listeners and viewers know where they can go to find out more about you and all you do online.
[00:31:30] Roland: Well, you can find most about me at IndestructibleAuthor.com, and I work with mostly on productivity, and also author platform, helping people with their author platform, because I think from a lot of people, the author platform is a huge time suck, but it doesn't have to be. There are so many things you can do, I call it putting your author platform on cruise control. Because you can't really put it on an autopilot because you kind of guide it. So it's sort of like cruise control with your car. So you can go over there, and I give you a link to a free course. It's only about 40 minutes of video with some downloads that you can get over there and give you a great introduction to that.
[00:32:13] Matty: Sounds great. Thank you so much.
[00:32:14] Roland: You're very welcome. It's great talking to you.
I’d love to hear your thoughts!
I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Roland! Did our conversation lead you to rethink your memberships in writer’s groups, and if yes, what actions will you take as a result? I’d love to hear your thoughts!
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