Your panelists have dealt with big publishers, small press publishers, packagers, editors, and agents. They have wisdom to impart on deadlines, galleys, self-publishing, and more. They understand how advances, royalties, and reserves for returns work. They've written query letters, attended pitch sessions, schmoozed at con parties, and written work-for-hire. They've authored, edited, and critiqued. Best yet, they're willing to dish about it.
You’ve finished your novel and have started on the next one. You have a stack of short stories to sell. What’s the next step? How do you get your prose into print? How can you go from wannabe to published author? We’ll talk about publishers, editors, agents, slush piles, and the proverbial nuts and bolts of getting noticed and getting a contract.
We’ve been published by major New York houses as well as small press companies and have had varying degrees of success with both. We’ll discuss the differences between writing for a large publisher versus a small one, and the advantages and disadvantages of both.
We'll teach you how to turn an ordinary hero into an extraordinary one. Spend an hour focusing solely on your main character, a good guy who doesn't necessarily have to wear a white hat. We'll tackle the villain in a later panel.
A short story isn't a miniature novel, and a good, meaty novel needs to be more complex than a tale in a magazine. Our panelists discuss how they approach different length works and what tools you need to be successful at writing the short story, novella, and novel.
This Pen's For Hire: Finding Work in Shared Worlds
Description:
There’s work to be had in the writing world if you’re willing to play with someone else’s property. Tie-in projects include books based on television shows, movies, comic books, role-playing games, computer games, and more. So where do you look? How do you land the projects? And what are the pros and cons of shared-world writing?
Time Travel, Parallel Universes, & Quantum Physics
Description:
In a parallel universe somewhere, you've already attended this session and know all about how wav theory, super-strings, quantum entanglement, and things like noetics bear on frequent sci-fi concepts like time travel and mirror Earths. But since you're not in that universe, you might want to attend this panel and get some insight into actual physics ... or just enough gobbledy-gook to make your next story sound credible.
Planes, trains, automobiles, griffon chariots, horses, teleporters, dragons, and trolleys . . . how your characters move from one chapter to the next should be interesting and reasonably accurate. We'll give you tips for writing about modes of transportation so that they add spice to your fiction rather than bog it down.
New York Times Bestselling author Michael A. Stackpole walks you through the twenty most common 'first novel problems' (which plague more than just first novels) and provides a host of solutions for them. If you dread hearing someone say, 'I liked your novel, but...,' this workshop is guaranteed to erase the sorts of problems that lead to just such a statement.
Readers find demons, vampires, and other urban fantasy denizens scary and compelling and will buy book after book after book filled with them. What can you as a writer do to provide more of those craved-for characters and settings while carving out your own niche on the bookstore shelf?