Tag: Giving and Taking Advice: How it can help?

#MFRWauthor Giving and Taking Advice: Helpful or Not?

Posted at 5:22 pm by Mary J. McCoy-Dressel, on February 15, 2019

Week #7 #MFRWauthor

Giving and Taking Advice: How it can help?

Oh, hi, I’m back for this week’s challenge. I seem to have lost my blogging mojo. After missing a few weeks, I thought I better find a way to jump back into the 52-Week Blog Challenge this week. It’s only February, so I’ve already blown it if I thought I could make the whole year. Sheesh, I’m even late with this post.

How can giving and taking advice be helpful? You know, we can give and take advice about lots of things, but I’m assuming this topic is about writing.

Taking Advice:

To me, taking advice must be weighed and measured against what we already know. Let’s face it. There is good and bad advice out there.

Here are a couple of writing related examples of how taking advice helps us:

I haven’t used a blog tour company before; however, if I did, it’s been too long ago to remember, so let’s say you want to do a blog tour. Getting advice from others who have used a tour service can help lead to your decision. This is helpful because your advice comes from others who have been there. Their advice might also suggest new blog tour companies you never heard of, or sway you away from one you don’t want to use. It’s the same with doing other book promotions. We can seek advice before handing over our hard-earned money. This is helpful.

A year ago, when I did the major revision on a series starter, I wasn’t sure which way to turn or if I should unpublish and revise the book. After discussing this with friends and hearing what they thought, I went to an author who had talked about this in a workshop. I needed to know if this was right for me. Her sound advice helped me in my decision.

Not every piece of advice works for each person.

Have you ever had too much advice leave you more confused? I have. What do you do when there is too much advice? In this case, too much isn’t helpful at all. I try to weigh the options and consider the sources of the advice.

Giving Advice:

That said, I’m careful about giving advice because I don’t want to offend someone who knows more than I could advise. Surely, I don’t want to come off as trying to sound like a know-it-all when I don’t. I fear I might’ve recently stepped over the line not too long ago.