Atlanta Writers Conference (Nov. 2011)

The Conference has come and gone. It was on a much smaller scale than the Screenwriter's Expo I went to back in 2009. The Expo had a thousand people milling about, while the AWC Conference had maybe a hundred. Good information. If I do one of these again, I will have to attend the "Social" they have the day prior to the conference.

I liked how much access we were given to Chuck Sambuchino.  He is a well of information.  Unfortunately, other than the agent panel at the beginning of the day, he was the only one giving seminars all day long. I almost felt bad that he had to be up there for so long. Granted he covered a wide variety of topics, but the guy is only human.

It seems the view of agents towards self-publishing has begun to change.  The panel of six agents at the Conference now consider self-publishing a viable option for authors.  They weren't suggesting that everyone do it.  In fact, they advised everyone to try the conventional route to publishing first, but if a particular set of circumstances warrant it, then they felt self-publishing could be a good thing.  (One can always take their work down from Amazon if need be.)  This is a vast shift from what I had heard over the past year at AWC meetings.  With more and more success stories coming out of the self-publishing realm, everyone (from the readers and the writers all the way to the publishers) is attempting to adapt with the change. The book world is in flux due to e-Books. There is no solid ground and, for the moment, writers don't have to take the circuitous route to being published.  This is wonderful news for someone like myself.

Overall, the conference was informative and helpful, if not a little too intimate.  They could have used more than the one microphone for the Agent Panel.  Some of what was said went unheard.  Poor marks for that.  However, my agent pitch session went well and my chance meeting on the shuttle back to the airport with another agent put a shine on the whole experience.  

-aap