Writing the Rockies = awesomeness. If you haven’t heard of it, Writing the
Rockies is a conference that’s held on the campus of Western State Colorado
University in Gunnison, Colorado. This
year, it was July 25 – July 28. The
conference offers sessions on popular genre fiction, nonfiction, poetry,
screenwriting, and publishing. Attendees
can go to different sessions or focus on one area.
The college campus is beautiful. I wanted to take more pictures, but every
time I wasn’t busy, it was either dark or raining. It’s raining hard in this picture:
~*~
The conference came at the end of my two-week residency at
the school (I was there working on this.
Please submit). I didn’t get much
sleep during the two weeks because my on-campus apartment was loud, hot, and
buggy. By the time I got to the
conference, I was in exhausted zombie-mode.
However, the conference was amazing.
I loved it. I took about 6 pages
of notes, and some of them are actually coherent.
I went to all of the publishing sessions and all of the
keynotes. Here are a few of the things I
learned:
1.
Many
authors don’t understand what a publishing company does.
A publishing company usually doesn’t print
books. They hire book-printing companies
to do that. Publishing companies find
books that will stand out in the marketplace, provide authors with many
different types of editorial advice, design the cover and the interior of the
book, work with retailers and book distributers, help build the author’s brand,
market the book, and handle the legal stuff, such as copyright protection. Random House explains it all better than me. (I'm not sure why the videos aren't working on the mobile version of this blog).
This means that if you want to
self-publish, and you don’t want your book to look self-published, you have to
either learn how to do all of these things yourself, or you have to hire
somebody to do them. On a
slightly-related note, I also learned that the average self-published e-book
sells 75 copies.
2.
Social
media is important.
One of the authors at the conference said
that her publishing company required her to have a website, a blog, a LinkedIn
account, a Twitter account, and a Facebook account with at least 5,000 friends
or 5,000 “likes.” All of these social
media sites need to be updated regularly by the author.
3.
Press
kits are a thing.
I’d never heard of a press kit before. They can be created by an author or by a
publishing company. The press kit that I
saw was a folder which contained a flier that advertised the book, an author
bio, and author interview questions with answers. The press kit is given to anyone who is
reviewing the book or interviewing the author.
4.
Find your
people before you write.
Authors can start promoting their books
before the book is written. If you write
mysteries, go out in real life or on the Internet and find other people who
write mysteries. If you write about
cycling, go find cyclists. Make
friends. Get involved in conversations. Make some real connections. Don’t just try to promote your unwritten
book. That could get annoying. When you do write and publish the book, you’ll
already have an audience.
~*~
My favorite part of the conference was getting to hear
pitches for possible anthology stories and poems. We had an office (okay, it was a classroom)
with our names on the door (okay, the names were on a piece of printer paper
that was taped to the door), but it was still really cool. Authors came and talked to us about their
stories or poems, and we gave them feedback.
I enjoyed hearing everybody’s ideas.
There are a lot of creative people in the world.
I’m already looking forward to next year’s conference. If you’re in the Gunnison, Colorado area, I
highly recommend coming to Writing the Rockies.
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