Thoughts from the Writer's Conference

On Saturday I attended the Avondale Writer's Conference. It was just a one day event, but I felt like I learned a great deal from it.
I think the most I got out of it was from my personal bias' haha! But, it was interesting to hear what the agents had to say about the current publishing market.

The first session everyone attended and had an agent speaking about Publishing Successfully in Today's Market. He was very interesting as he spoke about how he became an agent and how even as an agent he has to deal with rejection. He told us about a memoir he represented that he picked up in 2008 and only just had it published a month ago. It was rejected by 65 publishers! He said he was about to start advising the author on how to self-publish. This led him into talking about self-publishing and how writer's don't necessarily need agents anymore. WOW right??? He said with the hundreds of publishing options available in today's market, there is only two of those that need an agent, and even then an agent isn't a guarantee to be published.My mind was BLOWN!
My second session was about time management, and an author spoke to us. She advised that first we need to read more, and also, watch movies because they too can teach us how to construct an effective storyline and character development. She also said that you are writing even when you aren't sitting down putting words to paper. If you are thinking about your characters and conjuring up scenes you are writing.
Then I went to "The Ideal Query Letter". I have some notes I will scan, but mostly it was stuff I'd already learned through GUTGAA etc.
After lunch, I had a long session about Two Keys to Succeeding as a Writer. We had an agent speak to us in this class and he was VERY good. Our hand out was practically a novel, but was extremely informative. The main points I got from him were regarding Small House Publishers. He said that the Big Six may not be the best way to publish for a first time author. First time authors can be more successful through the smaller companies because they can spend more time and energy focusing on the individual authors because they aren't pumping out an average of 2 new titles a day! He said small houses can make new authors very successful and gave several examples. I found this exciting because I'm signed with a small house publisher. It made me feel reassured that my decision to sign
with CQ was the right thing for me to do.
Next I went to a Cover Design class. It ended up being for self-publishers, but it was interesting to see what he said about what was and wasn't effective.
The last class I totally tuned out of and started thinking about my NaNo WIP haha! It wasn't very interesting anyway.
So that's it. If you have any questions or want any of my notes let me know. I'd be happy to go into more detail. These are just my thoughts from the event.

P.S Check out today's Typlings post. It was written by me :-)