Hosting a Shared Multi-author World

Part 2

Being a host of a shared world means being a strong communicator and a good team leader. It also requires a word that I am leaning into a lot this year. Grace.

One thing I have learned is it is important to meet people where they are and work with them and not against them. This doesn’t mean breaking or bending rules to give special treatment. I do my best to treat everyone equally but am flexible because life happens and we just gotta roll with it.

You never know what is going on with people behind closed doors. You can have rules and expectations while being kind and professional. Does that mean everything is sunshine and rainbows? Of course not. But you have to be ready to problem solve.

One of the best pieces of advice I received years ago that has stuck with me is not to make business decisions based on emotions. When problems arise as they most certainly always will I take a moment to chat with my partner in crime before I respond to anything. But more than anything I try to remember that at the end of the day we are all trying our best. Your best may not look like my best and that’s okay. I will meet you where you are. This doesn’t mean I let people walk over me.

It means I give grace and respond how I hope I’d be treated, with respect and understanding.

Sarra Cannon (Heart Breathings) whom I adore on both a professional and personal level (she’s good people). I highly recommend following her YouTube channel and her courses for organizing your professional life. She has a saying when setting goals. What’s my good, better, or best outcome for this goal? I apply this to so many parts of my life.

How does that apply to hosting a shared world?

The more authors that you have participating the more chances there are for things to go awry.

I call up my business partner, and we talk things through.

An example of this would be:

Author B needs to move their release date but the date they need is Author A’s chosen release day in this shared world.

We pull up our shared Google Sheet that is home to everyone’s release dates. We check the dates to make sure the information is current.

We look at the dates around that release. Is there another date that could work? Would the other author be willing to swap dates with the other? What happens if they already moved their book without checking the sheet? Will they lose their preorder ability with retailers? Will the other author get upset?

What is our good, better, best in this situation?

I’ve been in other sets where the host has threatened to kick people out and talked down to them for the simplest of mistakes. That’s now how I want to be treated and not how I want to approach situations with my peers.

There are delays with retailers that also impact release days. Lately we’ve had authors experience issues with Amazon moving their release date on them without asking or notifying them until after they move it and say it is due to delays with reviewing submitted files. When this happens, it is out of the author’s hands.

So how do we respond? We problem solve.

What are the possible outcomes? Author B moves to an available date. But what if they can’t move their date again? We can ask Author A if they are willing to move theirs, but we cannot expect them to do so. We can also ask them if they’d be willing to share that release day but again, we can’t expect them to. So what do we do?

If nothing can be done, we simply wait until the next day there isn’t a release, and we promote Author B then and we promote Author A on their date business as usual.

At the end of the day what matters is that our readers and our authors have a good experience.

Without them there wouldn’t be anything to organize.

Until next time,

Glenna