The Romance Writers of America, unique among writers organizations, allows unpublished writers the same membership privileges that it gives to published authors (other organizations, like the Mystery Writers of America, have a tiered membership system). The idea behind this policy, apparently, is to encourage aspiring writers to join a professional organization in order to have access to tools that would help them to hone their craft and eventually become published. However, one unanticipated result of this policy has been that the organization now has more unpublished members than published ones.

This wouldn’t be a problem, particularly, if those unpublished members all aspired to be published. If that were the case, they would be open to workshops, craft-oriented meetings, and critique groups. And, of course, many unpublished authors are involved in all these things. But surveys have indicated that other unpublished RWA members are perfectly happy to be unpublished. They have no particular aspirations toward publication, and, in fact, little interest in what it takes to make the leap from unpubbed to pubbed (RWA uses the euphemism “not career-focused”).

The problem here can be summed up in a simple question: is your RWA chapter a professional organization or a social group? The former is made up of people who are interested in the ins and outs of publishing, ways of making their work better, ideas for marketing and self-promotion. The latter is made up of those who want to hear from authors about their latest books and who want to talk to other members about what’s going on in their lives. But they don’t necessarily want to do much with their own writing careers.

Why is this a problem? It doesn’t have to be. However, sometimes those goals clash. For example, I heard one horror story of a “not career-focused” RWA member who scored a meeting with an editor at a national convention—as it turned out, she didn’t want to talk about her work (she didn’t really have anything anyway). She just wanted to tell the editor how much she liked her publishing house and some of the authors she worked with. Apparently, it never occurred to her that she was taking a spot away from a writer who really wanted to pitch her work to the editor.

I have nothing against social groups, necessarily, but as someone who moved from unpublished to published in part because of the advice and guidance I received from my RWA chapter, I’d say the needs and goals of the two groups are quite different.

The journey toward publication isn’t easy, as most of us can attest. It’s full of detours, disappointments, and occasional shots at glory. It also requires a lot of work, not all of it pleasant. I can understand why some writers decide to skip the whole thing, but I’m not sure they should be in charge of a professional group that’s at least nominally focused on the tough road.

The most obvious answer to this problem is for RWA to adopt a two-tiered membership system like other writers’ groups. The organization already has what’s called PRO status for members who have submitted manuscripts to publishers. Anyone who falls into that category can be safely considered “career-focused.” With tiered membership, the non-career focused would be in a separate category. But that solution is probably not going to fly with the current membership, given that more of the members are unpublished than published.

Giving the members what they want may change radically if most of those members aren’t really interested in publishing as a goal. Beyond potential problems in focus, there are also implications for RWA’s tax status, none of them good. It’s too bad RWA hasn’t focused on this problem before, but believe me, they’re focusing on it now.