A while back, I attended my first Novelists, Inc. conference in Albany, NY. One of the panels featured a "Lifeboat Team" – a group of authors who had decided there was value in working together on the 'non-writing' aspects of being a writer. I recapped their findings on my blog, and had several people respond that they were interested in joining a team. At the time, I had no intention of joining one, much less starting one, but after more inquiries from others, we decided to give it a shot, and formed Booklover's Bench . I blogged about it here over a year ago. I thought I'd share what we've learned. 1. Know your goals. Other groups have set goals of hitting the major best-seller lists. These require a much greater investment of time and money. They've produced boxed sets, sold them for a pittance, but generated enough sales to hit those lists. Our goal was, and still is, to expand our reach , because in this publishing climate, marketing is vit...