This article was first published in The Author, Winter 2024
Buzz, buzz, insists my WhatsApp. The four members of the SoA Warwickshire group planning team are arranging a café date. We meet once or twice a year to review our local group’s activities, generate new ideas and plan ahead.
My phone buzzes again. This time, it’s the main chat for everyone in the Warwickshire group: SoA members and those hovering. An author asks what to do when a literary agent is made redundant. Those longer in the tooth pitch in. ‘Phone the Society of Authors!’ someone urges him, and he goes away braver.
Other questions current on this thread involve relationships with a local Waterstones branch and how to hold book launches. Congratulations are also arriving for someone spotted in The Bookseller.
What did we do before WhatsApp, apart from having peace and quiet? For the Warwickshire group it acts as a hub. We promote our events on the Warwickshire SoA Facebook page too but the WhatsApp keeps the all-things-writing conversation going.
Not all Warwickshire’s activities happen on WhatsApp, though. In the past year, we’ve held monthly Friday meet-ups for 10 to 15 people in a (forgiving) café, a joint event with the Leamington Literary Society on historical fiction, and a ‘Getting the Word Out’ evening on self-promotion with a three-author panel. A collaborative morning with Warwickshire Libraries asked, ‘How can we work together to promote reading?’ In the summer, we picnic outdoors and at Christmas huddle indoors to swap ideas and share aspirations.
And that is what it is all about. The SoA’s local groups facilitate connections – something stressed by the SoA website, which states that they make it possible to ‘connect, get together, support, listen and learn’. Those are the overarching aims, but of course not all local groups are the same.
Knowledge sharing
I contacted four group coordinators to compare experiences. I’m clearly lucky to be part of a committee. Three respondents go it alone (one noting that it’s easier to fall out with a committee than with yourself) and one respondent has a deputy.
Steve, who ran the Chilterns group until recently, kickstarted it by asking participants to write a paragraph introducing themselves and their writing, then collated these for the group, providing ‘a springboard into relational sharing’. He also asked several members to review SoA resources about self-promotion then present their learning to the wider group. At another successful event, members brought an object important to their writing and told its story.
Marilyn runs a group which meets one month on Zoom and the next for lunch in a pub. She asks for ideas from group members and selects activities accordingly. The Zoom meeting to which she invited a publisher and agent was particularly popular.
The East Anglian group, run by Vicky, has an established history of social gatherings. ‘For many years, Ann and Anthony Thwaite [the literary couple] hosted a summer party at their garden by a river … there would often be quizzes or games and always punting on the river.’ More recently, Pizza Express lunch socials have been busy and a presentation on a Joseph Roth biography, open to the public, attracted over 50 people. Helena, Chair of the Cornish chapter, says, ‘One of our top priorities is to encourage as yet unpublished local authors by inviting them to our lunches so they can chat to [more experienced] authors who provide them with much advice, especially about literary agents.’
SoA support
Of course, those running a group alone aren’t truly alone, because the SoA offers assiduous support. The ‘local groups’ section of the SoA website includes how-to guides on setting up and organising meetings and advice on funding as well as a list of group coordinators – from which I filched my respondents’ email addresses. There’s also a monthly Zoom chat for group organisers, a buddy scheme and a Facebook discussion group.
Marilyn has certainly appreciated the back-up. ‘[The SoA] are always on hand to help with meetings, they pay for a couple of speakers a year, they contact the members and ask them to register [and] they have offered to help with a survey to find out what the members of my group want.’
Vicky points out that they can help with finding speakers on certain subjects or with developing ideas for the future. Steve notes that the SoA is our common ground. ‘Our [local] group came from many walks of life,’ he says, ‘and we would not have otherwise crossed paths.’ Membership sees us ‘rubbing shoulders with other creatives’ and being encouraged as we ‘share insights, challenges, triumphs and disappointments.’ Vicky too values ‘the sharing of information’ – a key benefit of belonging to a local group – as well as the ‘potential for friendships’. Joan agrees, listing advantages as ‘friendship, being able to share experiences, learning new things [and] the support of the main SoA people.’ Helena says that several local members are bestselling authors and filmmakers, which makes learning from the experts so accessible.
Our own Warwickshire group is eclectic, comprising novelists, screenwriters, poets, children’s authors, short story writers, translators and more, plus a successful YouTuber. So, when someone asks, ‘Can you run a session on how to market butterfly themed poetry?’ the answer can’t always be yes. But, within the local group, perhaps via WhatsApp, there’ll be someone to ask.
The importance of local groups
Local Groups Manager Elsa Woodmeade writes:
The aim of the SoA’s local groups is to create supportive communities. We all know writing can be an isolating profession, so I think having the space to meet other writers who ‘get it’ is invaluable. The groups are also a great way to get informed about the issues and pitfalls of publishing, and to feel more confident navigating the professional side of writing. They can reveal new avenues for your work too – our members and group organisers are brilliant at sharing expertise and experiences. Having a diverse professional portfolio is one of the best ways to sustain a career as a writer, and by engaging with a local community you discover writing opportunities and events that may be more accessible than national counterparts. A strength of the local groups is the wide range of writing that members do, but this can also be a challenge. Any member from the area can join their local group. This can make finding common ground more of a task, but it also gets you out of your niche. At a time when earning a living as a writer can be difficult, it’s useful to see the breadth of the writing profession, and heartening to see other people making a career in writing work for them.
It can also be tricky to find a balance between keeping groups local while still reaching as many of our members as possible. Fortunately, our wonderful group organisers tend to be highly knowledgeable about the area they’re in, so wherever you are in the country there is likely to be something for you. We’re lucky to have so many engaged members willing to put their time and effort into their local community.