Location, location, location
(It really matters for us writers!)
Folks in publishing love to give new writers advice about how to be successful. I find these columns and blogs in my Facebook feed and my Inbox at least daily if not more often.
But there's one subject they never seem to mention: location.
Despite the Internet, despite Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, TikTok and all the rest of the ways to reach, create, and seduce fans, where you park your laptop can be as important as what you write and how you promote yourself. Publishers are gaga about social media, but they're always touting something new. Before tweeting it was blog tours and before that book trailers.
Life as a writer can be very different in a city with lots of traditional media. Even though they're declining, newspapers can still give you inimitable coverage in reviews, features, and interviews.
Likewise, being able to appear on many radio stations still makes a difference in getting the word out locally to help build your audience before you break big.
And if you're in a media nexus like New York, you're more able to network with other writers, with reviewers, with editors and agents at work or parties, book signings and readings. These are precious face-to-face contacts that writers living in East Podunk just can't make happen for themselves. Random contacts at summer writing workshops and yearly conferences aren't the same thing. And meeting with your agent or editor in person can be way more effective than a Zoom call, and easier to arrange.
One best seller I know got her start because she was at the right party at the right time. When her host asked what she was working on and found out, she dragged her over to a big-league editor and her career was launched.
Being in a big city also means the presence of colleges and universities. They offer the opportunity of speaking gigs and something else: invitations to teach at writing workshops. That world is pretty much a series of closed circles. A writer I know who runs one in the New York area confided that she only invited her friends in the New York area. Other writers who make various circuits say they see the same people over and over. If someone breaks into that group, she's usually a star, not a newbie.
Of course, being born into a family of writers trumps everything: That's the ultimate good location.
Lev Raphael is a first-generation American who discovered after she died that his mother was a published author.
Image by Leonhard Niederwimmer from Pixabay
What you write here is true, I have no doubt. On a much smaller scale, Detroit was my 'literary city' long ago, and any career I might have had wouldn't have happened without that proximity to writers of note who helped me along the way, or often just gave me the energy to go on by grabbing some of their energy, osmosis-like.
It's that communal energy, that constant contact with more successful writers, that observation that they're real people, too. They all had to begin somewhere and their origin stories--how they got started--almost always involve lots of hard work, lots of disappointments, lots of doubt and threats to quit. All of those things we newbies were facing. And then we knew we weren't alone.
You can get that by reading about other writers' lives but you can't feel it in your gut like you can when you're talking to them face to face They look into your eyes and you know they remember just how you feel. Even if they're giving you a couple of minutes, it's enough. It's being plugged in, grabbing some of that energy, being able to go on because of it.
So, yes, location is important, but obviously not everyone can live in those cities with vibrant literary communities, and that's where these online communities come in. Second best, because we're not going to have those personal moments, but we can still talk about our challenges, our fears, our successes and give encouragement where we can.
Also, Lev, there's a typo in your very last line.
Living in the middle of a forest in Michigan is wonderful for its peacefulness and beauty, however, it doesn't give me much in-person contact with the literary world. I'm thankful for what you and others provide online. Reading about other writers' challenges and how they've learned to overcome them is so helpful. Thanks.