Want to know how to make a good first impression with your writing? Let Robert Dugoni teach you. Robert's books have earned spots on the NY Times best selling list, as well as Wall Street Journal, Booksense, and Amazon's bestseller list. It's safe to say his books have made great first impressions on his readers.

This class will be a mixture of lecture and activities that exposes new and intermediate writers to the business of publishing: queries, agents, editors, publishers, contracts, debut publication, film/foreign rights and how writers make money/launch their careers. This class will focus on book-length fiction and non-fiction. Attendees can expect a crash course in talking and writing about their books in a professional way, identifying their markets, polishing their materials, targeting and querying agents, building on rejection, understanding the expectations of different publishers and the things to know to be savvy in early conversations with publishing professionals. The focus of exercises will include writing synopses, author bios and pitching.

The next step after writing a novel or memoir is to edit, ideally, with the help of beta readers and critique partners. But how do you go about choosing a critique partner? This presentation will explore two authors and their process for finding each other as critique partners, as well as their experience working with others. What worked, what didn’t, and everything in between.

Join agent Noah Ballard as he talks about creating a query letter that will help you get your book in front of agents and editors.

Simply said, content is information directed to an audience, usually to provide value and influence. As writers, we may need to participate in marketing ourselves and what we write. This means we may spend time and energy creating create written content used to connect with potential readers. This workshop reviews 5 tips for expanding the value of a single piece content, a blog post, for use on multiple social media sites.

There are many ways to organize your fiction writing. This PowerPoint workshop offers a guide to creating a notebook to arrange information such as: character images and descriptions, notes about the setting of your book and research materials, into an easy to use format.

You’ve written your memoir, or have an idea of what to write, now what? This presentation will explore the ways a memoir writer can get their names out there and begin to market themselves well before an agent asks for a proposal. Things like public speaking engagements, public readings, book fairs, smaller press literary submissions, becoming a regular contributor for small presses, and writing communities. It will explore social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and delve into how to use other genres, such as poetry, to continue building a writer’s platform. It will touch on the pros and cons of certain arenas as well as financial barriers and other real-life issues that may complicate platform building and how to navigate around them.

Have you saved an emergency fund to cover unexpected costs? If not, you're in good company! most people find the concept of saving several months of bills overwhelming. However, if 2020 has taught us anything, we've learned that having some money in the bank is important. In this short talk, Peggy Doviak offers a system to make saving an emergency fund easy!

Literary agent Elizabeth Kracht noticed that many manuscripts being rejected suffered similar, easy-to-solve problems. As a result, she began keeping a list, hoping to one day be able to share this feedback with writers struggling to understand why their work keeps receiving rejections. Based off her newly released The Author’s Checklist: An Agent’s Guide to Developing and Editing Your Manuscript, this workshop will cover over 100 points for consideration before submitting to an agent, editor, or indie publishing, such as how to sharpen dialogue and prose, improving characterization, complicating plot, and much more. Elizabeth will also provide a Q&A segment toward the end of the workshop.

What do you do once you have written a book. Sources for getting published, editing, sales and marketing of your work.