How Writers Start Communities

Writers often think that marketing is about throwing your work into a void of hostile strangers, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Successful authors build communities of like-minded people engaged with the niche they write about. We had the honor of speaking with Laura Best, from the Passion Collective, on how exactly to start a community.

A community is similar to a platform—it’s a way to attract people to your work. However, a community differs from a platform in the high level of audience participation. In a community, the interactions between creators and readers are conversational, and your readership becomes passionate about the overall mission of your work.

At its core, a community is a group of people that gets value from chatting about the topics in your book. If you’re writing about grief and loss, this could look like starting a Facebook group to help people heal from their own losses, like author Kristy Boike. The people you want to help become so invested in your mission that they start to feel like acquaintances rather than strangers.

Going viral only happens after a creator has built a small fanbase organically. Any influencer, thought leader, or expert with visibility in their field is using community building to elevate their mission and grow their audience. Without feeling connected to you, your audience has no incentive to like, comment, follow, or buy.

Laura started a community for professional women in 2014 called the Passion Collective, a project she started alongside her corporate marketing job. After a few years of hard work, she quit working in corporate marketing to focus on the Passion Collective full time. Rallying the first small group of engaged people started with defining her values. “In corporate marketing, I’d spent so long speaking for others that I wasn’t sure who I was or what I believed,” she said. “So the first step of branching out to create a business centered on community was defining my values. A tip from Kieran Foillard is to start by defining what makes you really angry. Your values are the opposite of that.” Laura’s values are kindness, generosity, imagination, and always doing your best, so her group needed to recruit people who felt the same way.

Once you define the values of your community, the next step is to start reaching out to people who live those same values. For Laura, this looked like starting a happy hour group. The first time she hosted, she paid for everyone’s drinks because she wasn’t sure if anybody would come. It’s terrifying, but “when your group is small, there’s plenty of room for experimentation. Learn to see it as freeing, a chance to experiment with your writing, your messaging, your photos, your events, and anything else you want to do.” Laura found inspiration from authors who simply go on Facebook live and banter with people about what they’re doing over the holidays. It doesn’t need to be polished, it just has to be interesting and align with the values you champion.

A common space for people to interact gives room for natural conversation and highlights your personality, not a brand, product, or agenda. This is the best way to grow organically. While conferences and events are traditional, natural communities thrive online too. They look like conversations in the comments section, Tweeting about topics that make you passionate, responding to what others have said, and listening. It means sharing opportunities, ideas, and tools in a generous spirit. Laura quoted Tony Robbins who said, “What you get will never make you happy in the long term. Who you become and what you contribute will.” Growing a following means finding a way to contribute to the world that centers connection.

Gradually, Laura realized that she didn’t have to pay for people’s drinks—they would show up anyway because they enjoyed it. Growing a following didn’t happen in an anonymous void. Strong connection happens slowly, one by one, and over time, that collection of people becomes a movement.

As an offering for the Wise Ink community, you can now join the Passion Collective and get your first month free, with discounts on annual pricing: https://passion-collective.mn.co/