Quick reminder that you can join us for one of our scheduled Discussion Meetings tonight (Thursday) at 5:30p Eastern. Just reply to this email and I'll send you the info!

I had a conversation with an author last week that made me realize there's something we don't talk about often in publishing.

We talk about how hard the writing and publishing is, of course. But we rarely talk about how hard it can be to feel as if you actually have a place with other authors in publishing. To feel like you've found your people. Rather than feeling like you're always hovering on the edges, waiting to be invited it.

So I want to talk to you for a minute if you've ever felt out of step with other writers.

If you've sat in a group chat or a Facebook thread or a conference meet & greet and thought, these are not quite my people anymore. Or these were never my people and I was just hoping they would be. Or everyone here is moving in a direction I'm not moving in, and I feel so out of place. Or even, no one notices me/pays attention to me.

These types of experiences are common to just about everyone who writes. And it almost never gets talked about, because it feels a little embarrassing to admit. Like you're the problem, or you're not enough. Like everyone else figured out how to make their writing friendships work and you didn't.

First I need to say something clearly: you don't get out what you don't put in. Relationships of any kind take work to make, grow and maintain. Whether it's marriage, your best friend, or a writing buddy or group. You have to put in the work.

But maybe you did that or you never quite found a group that fit in the first place and once you find that group, you're all in on making it work.

Or maybe you've been writing in your own corner, looking at other writers' communities from the outside, wondering what it would feel like to have people who actually get it, and you're ready for to have that.

Or possibly you just outgrew your group of writing friends (or they outgrew you). Writing lives change. The group you found when you were querying your first book is not necessarily the group you need when you're on book six. The friends who were deep in the trenches with you during your debut year may have moved on to a different kind of career, or stepped back from writing entirely, or just gotten busy with their own lives. Sometimes you outgrew them. Sometimes they outgrew you. Sometimes you both just drifted, the way people do.

All of these mean you're searching for something for yourself. None of them means anything is wrong with you.

What I hear from writers all the time, though, is some version of this: I want a place where I don't have to explain myself. I want people who are like me. I want to feel seen by other writers, not performed at by them. I want new friends, or I want to feel embraced by a community that already has its own rhythm and is happy to make room for me.

That's what I built The Acknowledgments to be.

It's intentionally small, so you can actually know the people in it. It's genre-agnostic, so you're not boxed into one corner of the writing world. Brand-new writers sit alongside members with 60+ books out, and both of them belong there. It's not a place you have to perform in. It's not a place where your question gets buried under twenty other people's questions in an hour. It's a place where other people (not just me) do pay attention.

If any of this sounds like you, come take a look. And if you want to talk through whether it's a fit before you join, you can reply to this email or book a quick call.

~Angela