Very quiet on this list--I hope everyone is hard at work. I attended one day of the Willamette Writers Conference in Portland, Oregon last weekend (I got to go because of my award for the writing contest) and I was amazed. I'd been to and taught for many writing conferences but they were all for a Christian market. This was my first regular conference.
The biggest difference was the huge emphasis on screenwriting and "pitching." Another freiend/editor (from Multnomah) was also there and we can't understand what pitching a novel or nonfiction book tells anyone about the writing. Yes, it's important to be able to describe your story succinctly and it's good to have a nice story line to get the agent interested, but what does it say about the actual written story? I suspect screenwriting is more conducive to a pitch. Five of my writing students came away with multiple requests for either pages or full mss. I hope they get their agents, but I wonder if they'll get anywhere with these requests because a lot of writers were on the ceiling saying an agent asked for some or all of their mss. Anyone else want to weigh in on the subject of agents requesting mss. at conferences?
At any rate, it was an eye opening day and I took a great workshop on book promotion in TV and radio. Speaking of promotion, my publicist is doing a fabulous job on our new book, Revealed. Saturday, our book was the lead story on Lifeway.com, which has 500,00 subscribers and supposedly, 2 million hits per week on the site. My co and I are possible guests on a talk show in Dallas/Ft. Worth area this fall--anyone live there? And we'll be on radio in Miami-Palm Beach, FL. And in 2007 we're teaching at the Florida Christian Writers Conference about (what else?) collaboration. If anyone wishes more details on what I learned at the conference, email me or maybe one of you could show me how to post that info in one of the folders.
Thanks,
© 2005 Linda Clare