Conferences are a great place to network--you meet agents, publisher reps, other authors. You do learn a lot even from those seminars that don't quite fit what you're looking for. I've found some good info bits in some of them.
A writing buddy of mine, James Rafferty recently attended a writer's conference shared some of it with me.
Recently
I attended two conferences, one for my work in telecommunications and the
second for my work in writing. The conferences were in very different
fields, but I observed several common themes that applied to both
events. At the conferences, I invested time in learning new things,
networked with other professionals in the field and promoted my current
projects.
I'm
not a newcomer to conferences. I've probably attended 4-5 telecom events for
the past 15 years. My participation in writing conferences is mostly much more
recent. I attended a few SF conferences as a reader and fan many years back,
but my participation at Boston area conferences the past two years has been as
a writer. Why should writers attend conferences?
I view
conferences as an investment. It's a chance to step out of the normal day to
day routines and find out what's going on in the rest of the world. Publishing
is undergoing a sea change which has much in common with the changes the high
tech industry experienced during the past ten years. Business models are
changing, there are new ways of getting products to the market and the roles of
industry participants are shifting before our eyes. In this kind of
environment, it makes sense for individuals to study up on the new trends,
perfect one's own areas of craft and expertise and make contacts with the
shakers and movers of your industry.
Muse and the Marketplace,
sponsored by Grub Street of
Boston, offers a breadth of possibilities for aspiring writers. The conference
took place over a weekend and I chose to attend the Saturday portion of the
event. From among a plethora of sessions, I decided to focus on a mix of craft,
marketing and promotion.
Boston-based
author Gary Braver conducted
a session on ten essential elements for writing thrillers. A key point was that
the mission of the thriller writer is to establish an atmosphere of dread and
then build up tension throughout the novel. I'd previously read Braver's book
Flashback and really enjoyed it, so he was a credible source for this kind of
information.
Next
up, I attended a session on promotion, which was useful, but tending toward
being repetitious. The key point was an emphasis on the need for author to be
ready to promote their work at all times and along the way, builds up a
platform. Most of this information was familiar for me and the leader offered a
useful reminder that we needed to be ready with an elevator pitch on our
projects.
One of
the unique parts of Muse was the chance to participate in their Power Lunch.
For a reasonable fee, we could choose a lunch table and chat with four members
of the publishing industry. I chose a table with two agents, a publisher and an
editor. Three other conference attendees joined me at the table and we all had
chances to talk with everybody at the table by changing seats a couple of
times. I found this to be the best part of the day. My fellow authors and I
each pitched our current projects and I even had enough time to chat a bit
about a work in progress with a couple of my lunch mates. I put the prior
session's emphasis on the elevator pitch to immediate use and got enough
interest so that I've got a couple of action items to pursue in the wake of the
conference.
In the
afternoon, I shifted gears and went to a session called Agents on the Hot Seat.
Agents are the gatekeepers for the traditional publishing industry and tend to
be very knowledgeable about the market, so getting a chance to listen to four
pros talk about how they chose authors to represent and how the agent's role is
evolving was enlightening.
I
concluded my day by participating in a Manuscript
Mart session. This is
another unique feature of Muse, since an author can prepare a submission in the
form of a query letter, synopsis and a 20-page excerpt of one's work, and then
get detailed feedback from an agent or editor. In my case, I submitted an
excerpt from my first novel, Growing
Up Single. The agent
I chose had done her homework and offered a detailed review of both the
query and the excerpt.
I had
several takeaways from this session. One key point was to sweat the details on
the query. The agent really wanted to get a clear idea about the book in just a
few lines and offered her thoughts about whether I'd accomplished that. She'd
also done a line by line review of the excerpt and gave me her take on what
worked and what didn't. When I had a chance to take a fresh look at her
feedback a couple of days later, I found myself agreeing on some points and not
on others, but felt the overall critique was useful in giving me some direction
on where I'll go with this project.
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| James Rafferty |
- If you're a writer, what steps are you taking to advance in meeting your goals?
- Do you feel conferences are the right investment of your time and money, or would you recommend a different approach?
