As with any new venture, you need a base and a solid foundation to keep you sturdy and help climb your way up from the bottom, give your voice room to be heard, and provide a platform where you can share your works and engage with an already existing audience before you gradually begin to pick and choose yours.
Author networking will help you figure that out.
Creating a brand on social media without a proper networking plan will cause a stunted growth rate for your brand and make it harder to find a soft landing in the community which has to be avoided at all costs.
Networking as an aspiring author should not be taken for granted and here are the top 10 reasons why networking is important to grow your author brand as an aspiring author.
1. Networking Creates Room For Massive Exposure
Connecting with the right individuals within your genre/niche market is a great way to hit the ground running as an aspiring author. Make plans to properly utilize the communities within your niche market on social media like the #writingcommunity on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. The #bookstagramcommunity on Instagram. The authors/writers forum on Twitter. Aspiring creator’s communities on Facebook and many more.
On more personal grounds, seek out authors and creatives within your genre/niche, begin a conversation, watch stories, view ads, and engage with the content of creatives relating to your niche and promote each other.
Doing it all alone is slow, exhaustive work but working hand in hand with members of your community will create room for explosive exposure of your brand.
2. Networking Creates Room For Recognition
It takes hard work, dedication, grit, staunch perseverance, and networking to gain recognition as a brand. It’s not all about writing and leaving the rest to luck; it’s about playing your cards right, engaging the right people in the process to help shake things up a bit, engaging the services of relevant personnel that can help move your brand along, and taking our time to reciprocate efforts in return.
Recognition comes with exposure. Exposure gets people curious about you and draws them into your circle, it feeds their minds on what to expect from you and creates an air of anticipation around your passion and what you have to deliver.
When your deliverables are top-notch, then comes the reviews, then the associations and collaborations, and eventually, your voice has gained autonomy and people want to hear and know more about you.
3. Networking Creates Room For Knowledge Expansion
Learning is an evolving process and no man is a wealth of knowledge or an island of his own. You’d be surprised at how fast-paced the world is running and the rate at which what we know changes for something better or is entirely wiped off as irrelevant in the modern-day world.
Keeping tabs with like-minded individuals in the community will expose you to a whole new world. I can vouch that there are things you’ll unlearn and relearn as you grow in your craft, things you will learn and hear about for the first time, things you will learn about their different variation and dimensions and how important they are to your craft and in general, you will grow a little every day.
4. Networking Creates Room For Collaborations.
When you decide to stay hidden, great benefits and opportunities will stay hidden from you too. One of such benefits is a collaboration with others in the community.
It could range from agreeing to cross-share posts from both parties to accepting an invitation to Instagram or Facebook live, making collaborative posts for your Youtube channels. It could also lead to writing a book together, creating content for a larger audience or simply working on a project together.
The benefits of collaboration are endless, and while some collaborations might come with small benefits others have the potential to catapult you to greater heights.
In all, treat each collaboration like a new project, engage with it, and deliver awesomely well because despite the reward, people are watching and your audience and visibility are increasing as well.
5. Networking Creates Room For Growth
Each new individual that connects with your brand, your content, and your works, is an automatic plus on your growth scale.
Networking allows you as an aspiring author to tap into the network of others. It allows you to advertise and showcase your brand to a newer audience.
It helps spread the word about who you are and what you do, thereby creating a chain link back to you.
Growth is important for success. It opens doors to opportunities that came to be because your networking plan was right on track.
6. Networking Creates Room For Advancement
With growth comes advancement and an increase in net worth.
Imagine stumbling across a great, life-changing opportunity, breaking through unimaginable barriers beyond the national borders, or snagging a lucrative deal for your work because the right connections clicked in all the right places and your work found its way into that goldmine.
Imagine the huge smile on your face at the moment and think back to how it all began, you’d find that it was attributable to the little amounts of effort you employed while first starting, along the process, and even more so, when you’ve had a solid footing.
Do not shy away from putting yourself out there, you’d never know what awaits until you at least, try.
7. Networking Creates Room For Increased Net worth
Growth and advancement bring about an increased brand and personal net worth.
Net worth is relative to advancement. A positive tip of the scales in the upward curve from growth to advancement automatically increases your net worth. Brand exposure and recognition bring about steadily increased growth which acclimatizes into advancement.Take it like promotion; every new stage added to your level, comes with additional benefits. Example: If as an aspiring author or budding creative, you make only five sales a month, then when you begin to break through the ice and gain ground through recognition, your net sales per month increase to fifty, that’s a huge difference.
A commendable one.It is necessary to point out here that these changes will occur over time and isn’t an immediate quick fix to blow through the roof. You need to be patient and put in the work to get the right results in due season.
8. Networking Creates Room For Constructive Criticism
Life isn’t a bed of roses, so, never expect your creative journey to be rosy and thorn-free the entire ride.
If you find yourself in a community where all you do is right, find a new community and take flight from them.
When you put yourself out there and ask for an honest opinion about your work, you’d get it. The essence of constructive criticism from your network isn’t to pull you down or tarnish the image you’re trying to build; No, it is to help you improve in your craft and learn from the highlighted mistakes.
No one is out to get you, but you should also remember that the truth is a bitter pill to swallow and a sucker punch to the gut sometimes.
In truth, you cannot grow without criticism because you’d never evaluate yourself as wrong but someone on the outside and merely looking in will give you a good analysis of the faults and flaws we fail to see ourselves.
These criticisms could present themselves in the form of reviews, recommendations, and different opinions on issues.
Do not take the negativity to heart, rather, sieve out the essential parts needed to get you back on track and discard the rest for your peace of mind.
9. Networking Creates Room For Cross Promotion
As earlier said, networking gives you access to cross-promote your brand between audiences and sets you on the right path from exposure and recognition.
The beauty of networking is that everyone involved has something to gain and the pool of resources is larger unlike when you want to achieve that feat alone.
Tap into the power of networking with others in your sphere, keep an open mind in the social space and encourage yourself to seek out opportunities that will invariably help you grow your brand as an aspiring creative.
10. Networking Creates Room For Interconnection of Like-Minded Creatives
There are people, events, and places you’ll come encounter and be privileged to attend during this process that will leave you in awe.
Networking provides you with the opportunity to meet and greet these individuals, learn from them, and connect with new creatives and legends in your niche market.
It exposes you to another level of mastery and allows you to learn from these gurus and when the time is right, work with a few of them as you progress.
Begin with creating connections with the people in your immediate circle, show up for their events, engage in their activities, celebrate their wins, encourage your community as you grow, give back as much as you have received, share your honest opinions when asked, and watch in awe as these little efforts return in thousandfold with bountiful positive results.
Plan your networking strategy as an aspiring creative and scale up by building the right connections.
See also: 7 Greatest Fears of Every Aspiring/Budding Author
8 Simple Productivity Hacks For Aspiring/Budding Authors