WRITING ON THE ETHER: ‘They’re Letting the Authors In!’

Writers in the Spotlight: Turn Your Readings Into Book Sales
with Porter Anderson

Join me in this spe­cial three-hour inten­sive Boot Camp ses­sion at Writer’s Digest Conference East (#WDCE) at 12:30pET on Fri­day, April 5. We’ll look at pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tion for the entre­pre­neur­ial author in an interactive, up-on-your-feet workshop format: come with two pages of your work in progress, ready to rock and read.

Click here for details.

Table of Contents

1. ‘They’re Letting the Authors In!’
2. Coinci-ferences: Those Timely Start-Ups
3. London Book Fair: Traded Shows
4. Books: Reading on the Ether
5. Conferences, Quickly

‘They’re Letting the Authors In!’

Authors—who once couldn’t get their noses under the tent—now are the newly prized camels of conference-time commerce.

Writer’s Digest Conference East, usually held in New York City during the frigid frights of January, had to be moved to early April this year because of a facility-availability issue.

How good, said we. We’ll see the Sheraton in our seersucker.

@jessicastrawser @Porter_Anderson I predict #WDCE will be warmer than last year.

— James Scott Bell (@jamesscottbell) April 3, 2013

Sure. We’re just lucky it’s not a romance conference. How is a Shirtless Man supposed to Kiss Beautiful Women in these temperatures?

As it turns out, there are hundreds of people wearing the wool again—sit down, Hugh, not that Wool—and heading back into the conference season: Winter Without End, Amen.

After #WDCE (watch that hashtag or visit our Epilogger), some of us head for the ice hotels that squat on the tundra around the London Book Fair and its Digital Minds Conference.

Then it’s back to Nome, sorry, New York, for paidContent Live, an event cool enough to ease the hot spring day we seem unlikely ever to see there again.

@kalenski @mathitak 38 degrees and very windy for the ChiSox here today. Just wrong.

— Don Linn (@DonLinn) April 3, 2013

Ethernauts know there’s not a promotional bone in my body. Somehow I found this link to the Tampa Convention Center website inexplicably rolling around the WordPress dashboard. Isn’t it remarkable what a phobia conference organizers seem to have to southern climes? …where the dolphins and the manatees play…without mufflers or gloves…upper 70s, lower 80s…sunshine and succulents…little umbrellas in things you drink…fond fronds in the moonlight…

Where were we? Ah. Right. Get out of that grass skirt. LGA, not TPA.

Headed to #WDCE tomorrow morning! My confirmation packet said "Do Not Touch the Agents". WTF does that mean? Can I not shake their hand?

— Leigh Baker (@LeighBones) April 4, 2013

The only thing not achingly cold about this endless conference season, in fact, is the shoulder presented to authors.

What I want to bring to your attention now is the quickening pace of accommodation being offered to authors by parts of the industry! the industry! 

I really need a night (day/week/decade) off. Just realised I haven't been to the cinema all year. ALL YEAR.

— Matt Haig (@matthaig1) April 3, 2013

If you’re writing—and I know better than to hope you’re not—check yourself in the mirror. Every writer is looking like a unit of potential profitability. And conferences and trade shows have become the places to see this happening, albeit by fits and start-ups.

We’re going to look at two dynamics here.

• First, the beautifully timed presentation of a new service or product for authors at a conference.
• Second, the broadening field of events and attractions added to trade shows specifically for authors.

I just sent an email with, no exaggeration, 15 attachments. The poor recipient.

— Ginger Clark (@Ginger_Clark) April 3, 2013

As you near each of these events, listen for a certain rustling—I did not say hustling—as the announcements are readied and the “all new!” programs are added.

“They’re letting the authors in!” one writer chortled to me in the privacy of a DM on Twitter.If it weren’t so damned cold outside, one might need to worry more about being yanked in. 

First, that growing phenomenon of the timely release. My goodness. Just in time for the confab.

An exclamation mark is the literary equivalent of canned laughter. Please leave them out of novels!

— Jonny Geller (@JonnyGeller) April 3, 2013

Coinci-ferences: Those Timely Start-Ups

Let’s warm ourselves by a couple of cases in point. And these are good-looking efforts, I like them. 

But I want you to be aware of the mechanism here: New author-targeted products and services don’t just burst, willy-nilly, from the permafrost to provide a convenient spot of color. No, these crocuses pop up only after somebody has spent several sleepless nights madly trying to get them ready in time for an upcoming conference. Confabs make good deadlines.

Angry Birds helped Rovio double its revenues to £129m in 2012 http://t.co/ScreOIMhcN via @guardian

— Laura Summers (@LauraSummersNow) April 4, 2013

Here is, for example, Bowker’s SelfPublishedAuthor. What did we do before we jammed words together to name things? It’s just been launched this week in time for (conference!) Writer’s Digest East. It’s an informational site, free of charge.

Laura Dawson

You’ll find that its material has been created by our good colleague and friend Laura Dawson, queen of metadata, the knitting Madame Defarge of publishing, and star of many a conference stage and screen, herself.

Bowker, of course, is the US agency for ISBNs and, as I wrote at Publishing Perspectives in Bowker Intro’s 1-Stop ISBN Ebook Conversion Service, the company has also launched a new partnership for ebook conversion with New York’s Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL). It’s called Bowker eBook Conversion Service, and it offers format conversions as well as ISBNs for each formatted edition of a book.

And guess when the eBook Conversion Service was launched: conference! It was on Author (R)evolution Day, the great daylong conference for authors produced by O’Reilly Media’s Tools of Change on February 12.

“Douglas Rushkoff is right: traditional media are caught between the stream & the reservoir" http://t.co/KUgamSzXSZ

— Mathew Ingram (@mathewi) April 4, 2013

(If you’re interested, TOC has released a video from the Author Day event, and has it for sale here.)

Bowker’s new SelfPublshedAuthor has quick-read articles from Dawson on many aspects of self-publishing, from how to decide whether you should self-publish—don’t look at me, ask Dawson—to a list of author-service outfits, another list of ebook distributors, and so on. It’s clean, simple, and a good place for a beginner.

Do note that when SelfPublishedAuthor refers to services and companies, it does so in a studiedly non-evaluative way. In the article Self-Publishing Services, for example, we find FastPencil, Amazon’s CreateSpace, Lulu, Vook, and Author Solutions all listed without any critical comment. Writer, do thy homework and do not imagine that all these entities are created equal.

Please don't allow society to turn you into a person you are not

— سـاره وائل الحسن (@SarahW_Alhassan) April 4, 2013

In fact, many regular Ethernauts are perhaps too deep into the gas, more advanced than the main target of SelfPublishedAuthor. As I get it, however, this answers a real need: the Bowker folks found that a lot of new writers were turning up at their site to buy ISBNs and then hanging around asking, basically, what do we do next? If that’s you, a good place to start looking at SelfPublishedAuthor, in fact, is Dawson’s So Now That I’ve Finished My Book, What Do I Do? It links out to various responses to that rather essential question.

Kristen McLean

Meanwhile, in another association with Author (R)evolution Day, its faithful co-chair, Kristen McLean, and her company Bookigee, are releasing a large catalog of resources under the aegis of their product-in-development for authors, WriterCube.

The new offering is the WriterCube Book Marketing Database and it, too, is launching, pixels barely dry, just in time for (conference!) Writer’s Digest East.

Mind currently blown learning that Zoe Tamerlis (MS. 45) and Pamela Moore (CHOCOLATES FOR BREAKFAST) shared the same lover, 25 years apart.

— Sarah Weinman (@sarahw) April 4, 2013

I’ve had a chance to look at it early, and Bookigee’s overall WriterCube concept, itself, is one of the most ambitious author-aimed initiatives yet.

Still in development, a part of its eventual roll-out is meant to pull together large amounts of data so that an entrepreneurial author can tell, for example, where geographical hotspots of his or her book sales are located and respond quickly to capitalize on such interest. May they all be in warm, sunny spots.

An audience research tool component is in beta now, and free to those interested in checking it out.

The marketing database launching now for subscription is a major undertaking, pulling together what Bookigee says is more than 20,000 contacts. They include, for example, each public library and brick-and-mortar bookstore in the States. There are more than 700 book-related bloggers listed; an index of book designers, cover designers, publicists and other author-service providers; and specially written articles and tutorials. Searches can be made and saved using more than 1,000 tags.

The database’s pricing is structured on duration of use with four subscription plans running between a  three-day trial and a full year’s subscription, with price points from $7 to $300.

Pulling the ripcord on Wednesday. See you on the ground, Thursday.

— Will Hindmarch (@wordwill) April 4, 2013

McLean tells me that initially she’s looking for “hardy passengers” on the Marketing Database’s “inaugural voyage” and hopes subscribers will give the company feedback. As the Writer’s Digest conference rolls in—and Bookigee’s new product rolls out—you can get a 25-percent discount on any subscription with the code WD25Promo until it expires on April 15.

The key to how McLean sees the WriterCube suite of tools is in her observation that the emerging entrepreneurial author “never stops marketing.” The Bookigee answer is to centralize every advantage such writers need.

@Porter_Anderson data data data data analytics analytics. @Goodreads @PhilipdsJones @TheFutureBook

— Hugh McGuire (@hughmcguire) April 3, 2013

And, oh look!

Just as I was about to move on to trade shows, an email has arrived announcing that a new service called James Scott Bell’s Knockout Novel is ready. And—good God, what a coincidence, man—Scott is a keynote speaker at (conference!) Writer’s Digest East.

Knockout Novel. Literary pugilism.

James Scott Bell

Oh, no, wait. No, this one is Bell’s and Mike Fleming’s put-together of an online “personal, interactive writing coach,” promising to let you “take your novel to the next level!”

Priced at $49, it’s a brainstorming bit of software meant to walk you through various exercises to develop your ideas.

It promises to take you from titles and alternative titles to “Why Write This Story?” (if only more people would just ask that), and issues of vulnerability, bonding, “Imminent Trouble,” “What Is Your Novel About?” and a “Doorway of No Return #1 Strength Check.”

It’s based on one of Bell’s how-to books, Plot & Structure, which is highly regarded in the field. And that’s saying something, considering that the field of how-to books for writers has widened to match almost exactly the expanse of the Serengetti. (That’s a Bowker statistic, isn’t it?) Have you published your how-to book yet?

One knovel aspect of Knockout is that as you work through this program, you can capture your answers to the exercises’ questions in Fleming’s Hiveword Online Fiction Organizer. This means it’s all online. So chic these days, natch.

Update: Fleming tells me he’ll extend the initial 10-percent discount to those who’e like to try Knockout Novel until Monday, April 8. Just go to this link.

A belated very good morning to one and all – especially you 🙂

— Philip O'Rourke. (@PiperHawk) April 3, 2013

London Book Fair: Traded Shows

Joanna Penn

Now, quickly, before another new release for (conference!) Writer’s Digest East falls on us, I want to turn to Joanna Penn, an Ether sponsor and self-published author. No stranger to readers of this column, Penn is one of the writers who has made her own career pathway the subject of her online presence.

Her site, The Creative Penn, is one of the stations of the cross now for self-publishing enthusiasts and for many traditionally publishing writers and hybrids. She hopes to be a hybrid, herself, at some point, and has an agent working on that as she goes through revisions on a fourth novel, Desecration.

The London Book Fair—opening with the Digital Minds Conference on April 14 and then running its trade floor April 15 to 17—is making a serious play for authors.

I’m a media partner with #LBF13 (an Epilogger for that one is here), and in becoming familiar with the show’s programming, I’ve asked Penn to speak with me about it. She’s giving a talk there, “Advanced Online Marketing for Authors,” on April 17 at 2:30 p.m. London time (7:30 p.m. Eastern).

@dinoboy89 @samatlounge @ornaob it's good to know my esteemed colleague has created a climate of fear!

— Amy Webster (@AmyWorldwide) April 4, 2013

Penn tells me:

The best place to hang out is in the Digital Zone. I spent time there last year hanging out with Kobo, Kindle, Amazon publishing folks, and BookBaby, and it’s where most of the action is happening for indies as well as the forward thinking apps, start-ups and more.

To explain briefly, in the past, the great trade shows in publishing have been just that—for the trade. They were primarily show-floor events in which publishers went in, set up extensive pavilions, and met there with distributors and retail buyers, showing off the season’s catalogs and tchotchkes for upcoming publications, and handing out what might seem like 42 tote bags per person. 

Blink isn’t a rendering engine for WebKit, it’s Google’s fork *of* WebKit *for* Chromium/Chrome.

— Baldur Bjarnason (@fakebaldur) April 3, 2013

Authors weren’t absent, but they were usually there only to appear at their publishers’ booths, maybe to speak at a breakfast event or on a panel, and to sign books. In short, the trade shows weren’t for authors. Authors who were there were part of the exhibits, and the events themselves and the programming were for the business side.

Orna Ross

“Last year I went to one of the author presentations” at LBF, Penn tells me, “and it was a panel of trad authors supposedly talking about marketing. They basically said, ‘This is how you RT,’ and, ‘I was the first author to tweet as a character’ (and she was not). I left after 10 minutes as it was so basic as to be unbelievable.”

This year, however, Penn says, the program looks bigger and better:

When the pitch opened for LBF sessions I pitched ‘Advanced Marketing for Authors,’ hoping to step up the marketing angle to a more appropriate level. I’ll be talking about email marketing, paid promotions, using multimedia, and how networks can be important for opportunities that lead to marketing, rather than direct marketing itself. I will be also tackling the question of whether authors should blog or use social media or just focus on the writing.

"If you won't grieve for the dead, how can you love the living?" [John LeCarre]

— Julieta Lionetti (@JulietaLionetti) April 3, 2013

Here is the LBF portal page, Events for Authors. As you can see, there are three key components of author-directed programming:

1. An “Author Lounge” area with events organized by an author-services company called Authoright; that area, in turn, includes both “The Seminar Room” with a busy schedule of speakers, and “The Pitch,” a kind of scheduled pitch-slam, now fully booked, in which writers pitch agents.
2. An extensive “Love Learning” program of speakers in many areas of the show. To American sensibilities, “Love Learning” sounds like a difficult form of relationship therapy, but the intent there is to say that one loves to learn. It’s in this series that Penn will speak, as will Orna Ross, who leads the UK-based Alliance of Independent Authors. Ross talks on April 15 at 10 a.m. London time on “Going Indie: Lessons from ALLi” and on April 17 at 11 a.m. on “The Author as Entrepreneur” with author Polly Courtney. The Alliance has also scheduled a launch of its own first book to coincide with the Fair (conference!) at 5 p.m. GMT on April 15, with a first-year party to follow at 7 p.m.
3. 

   Polly Courtney

   The third element of author interest here is the “New Title Showcase”—very familiar to BEA-goers, as well—in which authors can buy a spot on a display shelf an an entry in an official catalog.

Another Ether sponsor, author Roz Morris, is speaking at LBF, as well. Her appearance at the Kobo booth is set for April 17 at 2:30 p.m. local time.

Roz Morris

And the Seminar Room programming in the Author’s Lounge area features such conference stalwarts as The Bookseller’s Philip Jones, Foyles’ Sam Husain, Penguin’s Eric Huang, Pottermore’s Charlie Redmayne, Kobo’s Mark Lefebvre, Smashwords’ Mark Coker, and more.

While welcoming the fact that “year has definitely felt like authors and indies are more accepted,” she says, Penn adds, “I don’t see that they are advertising to authors particularly, so it is still an industry dominated event.”

Penn says international rights is a subject authors need to know more about and an area that LBF might consider helping on:

I would particularly like an entry into the foreign rights fair that seems to go on behind the scenes. Savvy indie authors would love to be able to pitch publishers from all over the world with their projects, and right now, that entire floor is closed to authors.

Wow, ace comments on what publishers can do for writers/illustrators! http://t.co/m90x4fZVrA Big thanks, @AbieLongstaff! @Booktrust #LBF13

— Sarah McIntyre (@jabberworks) April 4, 2013

And while the London show and other trade fairs may stay dominated by the industry, a growing presence for authors will attract, just as conferences do, the author-service and -product outfits that want to reach writers. Penn knows this can mean exposure to aspects of the business she’d rather didn’t get so close to authors.

What I am hoping not to see is a large Simon & Schuster / Penguin/ Random House booth with Author Solutions vanity press hawking their wares at authors who think they’re getting the kudos from an established name.

https://twitter.com/mehmet_caliova/status/319556900725325825

Obviously, it’s not an automatically easy fit when authors are welcomed into an industry space of this kind. Penn recalls how unsettling it can be for independent authors getting their first look at the main floor:

Walking around in the ‘main’ publishing section is quite strange and I found that quite intimidating because of the huge billboards with uber-famous authors who make you feel inferior, but it’s also educational to see the hierarchy of publishers. The biggest ones are in the middle and the smallest on the outside.

Sisyphos GmbH pic.twitter.com/ER9XelVANy

— Sebastian Posth (@posth) April 3, 2013

But to writers going to London Book Fair for the first time this year, she offers this advice:

There are some beautiful books there, so taking a camera/smartphone to get cover art and marketing ideas is a good idea. Take business cards to network with other authors as well. And try to get over the introversion for a day.

Back to Table of Contents

Freelance writers spend 27% of their time trying to connect to cafe’s wifi.

— Jeff Wilser (@jeffwilser) April 1, 2013

Books: Reading on the Ether

As each week, the books you see below have been referenced recently in Writing on the Ether, Ether for Authors, or in my tweets. Books by our much-appreciated sponsors are in bold, in gratitude for their support. I bring all thee titles together in one spot each week, to help you recall and locate them, not as an endorsement. 

Note: Books with an asterisk by their titles are currently on author M.J. Rose’s list of titles that Barnes & Noble is not carrying in its brick-and-mortar emporia because of a dispute with publisher Simon & Schuster. See her write, Have You Seen These Books? for more.

@paulbogaards would it help or harm the proposal if said rigatoni pieces had been included?

— Carolyn Kellogg (@paperhaus) April 2, 2013

• All That Is by James Salter
• The Art of Immersion: How the Digital Generation Is Remaking Hollywood, Madison Avenue, and the Way We Tell Stories by Frank Rose
• * The Best of Us by Sarah Pekkanen
• * The Book of Lost Fragrances by M.J. Rose
• The Book of My Lives by Aleksander Hemon
• Broken Piano for President by Patrick Wensink
• My Call to the Ring: A Memoir of a Girl Who Yearns to Box by Deirdre Gogarty with Darrelyn Saloom (Glasnevin)
• The Confusions of Young Törless by Robert Musil
• Dark as Night by Mark T. Conard
• Don’t Leave Me by James Scott Bell
• The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman
• Drinking Diaries: Women Serve Their Stories Straight Up by Caren Osten Gerszberg & Leah Odze Epstein
• Everything Begins & Ends at the Kentucky Club by Benjamin Alire Saenz
• Friend Grief and Anger: When Your Friend Dies and No One Gives a Damn by Victoria Noe
• How Do I Decide? by Rachelle Gardner
• Handmade Memories: Poems and Essays, 1997-2011 by Guy LeCharles Gonzalez
• How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
• The Humans by Matt Haig
• The Indie Author Revolution: An Insider’s Guide to Self-Publishing by Dara Beevas
• Inspired: Eight Ways To Write Poems You Can Love by L.L. Barkat
• Killer’s Coda by Mark. T Conard
• Knot What It Seams by Elizabeth Craig
• Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg
• The Last Will of Moira Leahy by Therese Walsh
• * The Mapmaker’s War by Ronlyn Domingue
• My Memories of a Future Life by Roz Morris (Red Season)
• The Mistress of Nothing by Kate Pullinger
• Nail Your Novel by Roz Morris
• * Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger
• Pentecost by J.F. Penn
• Perfect Skin by Nick Earls (Exciting Press)
• The Poisoned Pilgrim by Oliver Pötzsch
• The Prodigal Hour by Will Entrekin (Exciting Press)
• Prophecy, An ARKANE Thriller by J.F. Penn (The Creative Penn)
• Rumors of Water: Thoughts on Creativity & Writing by L.L. Barkat (T.S. Poetry Press)
• Seasons in Love by Dave Malone
• The Shift Omnibus (Shifts 1-3, the Silo Saga) by Hugh Howey
• To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov
• The Stars Fell Sideways by Cassandra Marshall
• Under the Carib Sun by Ro Cuzon
• Under the Dixie Moon by Ro Cuzon
• View From the North Ten: Poems After Mark Rothko’s No. 15 by Dave Malone
• Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
• Wool by Hugh Howey
• A Writer’s Guide to Social Media by Dan Blank
• Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald by Therese Anne Fowler

Back to Table of Contents

In case you missed it earlier, I wrote a blog post for our new Penguin blog: Great reads for Doctor Who and GoT fans! http://t.co/ft03CZS66k

— Colleen Lindsay (@ColleenLindsay) April 3, 2013

Conferences, Quickly

Are you producing a publishing or writing conference or trade show? Feel free to let me know, and I’ll be happy to consider it for listing here and on my Publishing Conferences page. Here’s an abbreviated edition of that listing.

April 5-7 New York City Writer’s Digest Conference East: Author James Scott Bell, who knows the value of coffee, gives the opening keynote address this year at “one of the most popular writing and publishing conference in the U.S.” Writer’s Digest Conference 2013 is coming back to New York at the Sheraton New York Hotel. (Note that this year’s hashtag is #WDCE. I have an Epilogger running.)

Registration is open, information is here.
Use code PORTER to save on your registration.
Live-tweet coverage from this conference.

At WDCE: Public Speaking for Writers: How to Turn Your Readings into Book Sales – Join me in this special three-hour intensive Boot Camp session I’m teaching at 12:30pET on Friday, April 5. We’re going to look at public presentation for the entrepreneurial author. How do you learn to deliver your work with impact—with your text in your hand and a live mic in your face? Drop me a note or flag me down on Twitter (@Porter_Anderson) with any questions. (Hashtag #WDCE. Epilogger here.)

Information is here.
Some live-tweet coverage from this event, as I teach.

April 5-7 New York City Screenwriters World Conference East: Led by the tireless Jeanne Bowerman, Editor and Online Manager for F+W Media’s ScriptMag, this is the East Coast iteration of the Los Angeles conference held last fall. (This conference’s hashtag is #SWCE. I’ve started an Epilogger on it,  which you might find useful in keeping up with materials in one spot.)

Information is here.

April 14 London Digital Minds Conference at the QEII Conference Center: Author Neil Gaiman gives the keynote address in this fifth year of the Digital Minds program. Also: Richard Nash, Safari’s Pablo Defendini, Osprey’s Rebecca Smart, Dosdoce’s Javier Celaya, Valobox’s Anna Lewis, Perseus’ Rick Joyce, Penguin’s Molly Barton and Eric Huang, Poetica’s Blaine Cook, and more. (Hashtag: #DigiConf13. Epilogger here.)

Registration is open, information is here.
Live-tweet coverage from this conference. 

April 15-17 London Book Fair at Earls Court.  “The London Book Fair encompasses the broad spectrum of the publishing industry and is the global market place and leading business-2-business exhibition for rights negotiation and the sales and distribution of content across print, audio, TV, film and digital channels.”
(Hashtag: #LBF13. Epilogger here.)

Registration is open, information is here.
Live-tweet coverage from this book fair.

April 17 New York City paidContent Live: Riding the Transformation of the Media industry Brisk and bracing, last year’s paidContent Live conference was efficient, engaging, and enlightening, not least for the chance to see many of the talented journalists of Om Malik’s GigaOM/paidContent team work onstage. (Hashtag: #pclive)

Use my link to save 25 percent on your registration now. 
Live-tweet coverage from this conference.

May 2-5 Oxford, Mississippi Oxford Creative Nonfiction Writers Conference & Workshops Susan Cushman follows her Memphis Creative Nonfiction confab with this year’s gathering at the shrine.

Registration is open, information is here.

May 3-5 Boston The Muse & the Marketplace 2013 is a production of Eve Bridburg’s fast-rising non-profit Grub Street program, comprising 110 craft and publishing sessions. (Hashtag: #Muse2013)

Registration is open, information is here.
Live-tweet coverage from this conference.

May 28 New York City Reaching Readers: Book Marketing Conference 2013 is a production of Publishing Perspectives and the Frankfurt Academy. An early-bird rate of $365 runs to April 15. After that, regular price is $415 for the day.

Registration is open, information is here.

May 29 New York City Publishers Launch BEA is May’s installment of the daylong conferences programmed by Mike Shatzkin of Idea Logical and Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch.

Registration is open, information is here.

Back to Table of Contents

Frankly, I'd rather not talk about Sheryl Sandberg.

— Brett Sandusky (@bsandusky) April 4, 2013

Writers in the Spotlight: Turn Your Readings Into Book Sales
with Porter Anderson

Join me in this spe­cial three-hour inten­sive Boot Camp ses­sion at Writer’s Digest Conference East (#WDCE) at 12:30pET on Fri­day, April 5. We’ll look at pub­lic pre­sen­ta­tion for the entre­pre­neur­ial author in an interactive, up-on-your-feet workshop format: come with two pages of your work in progress, ready to rock and read.

Click here for details.

Main image – iStockphoto: akit