NRW Conference and Stephanie Bond

On Saturday I attended a conference hosted by Nebraska Romance Writers (Lincoln, Nebraska). Great bunch of folks! I just recently joined and this was my RWA PROLoop. My new best friend, Jeanne Kern (half the writing team of Jeanne Bruce, author of TRIPS AND WHALES AND PUPPY DOG TALES) even posed for a picture with me!

Stephanie Bond was the featured speaker and gave a refreshingly honest assessment of the business of writing. I loved it - probably because far to often I'm in the minority when it comes to discussing writing as a business. To my mind (saturated with years in marketing) a manuscript is a product and agents/editors are one of the target markets. Basic marketing and business management principles apply. My muse likes to keep one eye on the "bottom line".

My favorite "take aways" were her tips on writing clean. Her writing process includes outlining the story (yeah! a fellow plotter!) and editing as she goes along. All of which has helped her manuscripts go through the pipeline faster (because they require much less editing) and has helped her become a "go to" person for her editor when another author drops the ball by missing a deadline.

I loved what she had to say about branding yourself, too. Imagine, being able to articulate your brand and be so confident of that brand that you have the confidence to turn down projects that don't feel right to you.

And get this for a great marketing strategy -- Stephanie has a deal with Amazon.com to sell her articles as part of their Amazon Shorts offerings - a set of articles (she said usually three or four to a set) goes for $0.49.

It was great to hang out with fellow writers. There's nothing like walking into a room and instantly knowing everyone else there has people inside their heads that talk to them.

So, anyway, now I'm all fired up for Nanowrimo! Like my published friends Kim Louise and *lizzie star say - don't look down!

NaNoWriMo

November is National Novel Writing Month. There's a web site run by The Office of Letters and Light (whoever they are) where you can sign up and join writers from all over the world in trying to reach a writing goal of 50,000 words in the month of November. The website helps you keep track of the number of words you're writing, shows you how many words others have written and provides all kinds of forums so you can hang out with other writers.

This is my first year. Already I'm hooked into a forum of other writers from Nebraska discussing getting together before the big 11/1 kick off. And I've got several writers from my RWA Chapter - Heartland Writers Group - on my buddy list.

There's nothing quite like the energy generated by a bunch of writers gathered in one place.

Poll Results So Far Give Food For Thought

Sorry - I slipped in to quasi-journalist mode there for a moment when I came up with the title of this post. But it does describe what I've learned so far from the results of my "book buying behavior" poll.

I plan on leaving the poll open for quite a while and see what happens.

The poll results so far show a fairly even split between "read the back cover blurb" and "read a few pages". Kerry Blaisdell noted that she tends "to read a few pages, to get a feel for the author and the story" and then wondered if that's what editors and agents do too.

That got me thinking. I've always put agents and editors in a different target market than ordinary people buying books. But maybe they're really not two separate target markets.

I'm coming to see that they're all readers. What grabs an agent or editor about the story is likely to be the same thing that grabs the bookstore customer.

I don't know why this is such a revelation to me but it's given me a whole new appreciation of the importance of the synopsis and having "hooks" in your story.