You Don’t Have to Do This Alone—And You Shouldn’t
The writing life was never meant to be a solo endeavor.
I know we romanticize it. The solitary writer at her desk, wrestling words into the world by sheer will and candlelight. And yes, there is something private and holy about the act of writing itself. But everything around the writing—the development, the discernment, the decisions about where your work goes and who gets to shape it—that part was always meant to be done in community, with people who are genuinely for you.
For women writers and writers of color especially, this isn't just encouragement. It's strategy.
Publishing is an industry that has historically not been built with us in mind. The statistics are what they are—decision-makers are still overwhelmingly white, gatekeepers still carry assumptions about whose stories are "universal," and the authors most likely to walk into a bad deal are the ones who walked in without an advocate. I've watched it happen too many times. A writer with a large platform, a clear message, and no one in her corner gets approached directly by a publisher. The offer looks good on the surface. She signs. And then the real work of the book—the marketing, the promotion, the visibility—falls almost entirely on her, because no one was at the table to negotiate otherwise.
She did everything right except one thing: she went in alone.
The right support doesn't just protect you from bad deals. It protects your voice. I've seen manuscripts come back from editorial processes almost unrecognizable—stripped of the cultural specificity, the syntax, the very texture that made them worth reading in the first place—because there was no one in the room who understood what was at stake. Getting the right people around you isn't a luxury. It's the difference between a book that sounds like you and a book that sounds like what someone else decided you should sound like.
So what does that team actually look like? You don't need everyone at once, and you don't need to build it all before you write a single word. But here are the people worth knowing about and eventually recruiting into your corner.
A literary agent is your primary advocate in the publishing process—the person who negotiates your contract, pushes back on terms that don't serve you, and stays present through the moments when publishers make promises that need to be held to. A good agent doesn't just pitch your book. She develops your career, understands the layers you navigate as a writer of color, and makes sure your voice and your vision are protected at every stage. If you are considering a traditional publishing deal, please don't walk in without one.
A developmental editor is the person who helps you shape your message before the manuscript goes anywhere. She's a big-picture thinker—the kind of reader who can tell you whether your structure is serving your argument, whether your reader can find herself in your pages, and whether your voice is coming through clearly and consistently. The key word here is culturally competent. An editor who doesn't understand your community, your cultural syntax, or the audience you're writing for can do real damage to a manuscript while thinking she's helping it. Find someone who gets both the craft and the context.
A publishing strategist or coach is particularly valuable in the seasons before you're ready for an agent—when you're still developing your proposal, clarifying your hook, or trying to understand how the industry works so you can move through it with confidence. Think of this person as your industry translator: someone who knows the language of publishing and can help you learn it too, so that when the opportunities come, you're not easily confused or dismissed.
A writing community—peers, a cohort, a serious writing group—is the part of the team that keeps you in the work over the long haul. These are the people who hold you accountable, celebrate your wins, and tell you the truth about your pages when you need to hear it. Writing is solitary work, but the writing life doesn't have to be a lonely one. Find your people and stay close to them.
You may not be able to build this team all at once. Start where you are. Be honest about where you need guidance and be willing to invest in getting it. Seek out the spaces—conferences, cohorts, masterminds—where writers doing the kind of work you want to do are already gathering. And when it comes time to take your work into the world, don't go in alone if you can help it.
Your words deserve people around them who will fight for them the way you have.
Who’s in your corner right now—and is there a gap you need to fill?