A to Z Challenge: H is for Helping

The A to Z challenge is a challenge in which bloggers post every day during the entire month, and each day has a post starting with a different letter of the alphabet. The first day, the post features “A”, the second day “B”, and so on. It’s much better explained on the Blogging from A to Z website, so I’ll just refer you there.

I wanted to talk about helping today. Because too often, I see authors complaining about other people’s success. I see them envious, wanting some success of their own. Nothing wrong with wanting to be successful, but for some reason, a lot of authors think that one person’s success takes away the success of others. But the thing is, success doesn’t work like that. It’s not because author A got a book deal, that author A is taking away my chances of getting a book deal.

Sure, there are tons of authors and aspiring authors out there, and we all want the book deal. But our success doesn’t depend upon other people’s failure. It depends on having a good book, finding the right agent or publisher for your book, and a ton of hard work.

So, since we’re all in this together, and we’re all struggling to make it in a tough economic climate, and we’re all trying for the same dream, here’s a suggestion. Instead of being envious of other people’s success, I suggest we do the opposite. We help others.

Instead of bombasting twitter followers with promos for my books, I often retweet things that might help them  – articles I think are interesting (either written by me or someone else), or helpful tutorials. Sometimes I tweet about other people’s books, just for the sake of helping them, or because their books look like fun reads.

And I’m sure that helping out others, in a way, helps me too. Because if you help someone out, when you need them, they’re much more likely to come to your aid too.