Going to a Writer’s Conference
WOW! I just came went to the San Francisco’s Writer’s Conference. I spent a lot of my time wo-manning the booth for the Woman National Book Association-San Francisco Chapter. It was great fun and extremely helpful and interesting.
I found that when you are at a booth, people come over to talk to you and networking is therefore very easy. The conference was international so we met people from all over the world writing in all genres. First, we told them about our 101-year-old national organization and our events and then asked them about their writing. Most people enjoy talking about their writing so it was a lot of engaging conversations. Almost everyone asked us about our work, further enhancing the networking.
I went to three talks, two on marketing and one on crime and punishment. The two on marketing were very overwhelming…The speaker said we need to develop an extensive twitter and blog following and add a quiz to our website where the respondents are put in categories based on specific content-driven answers. For example, there is a self-compassion quiz floating around that even made it to the New York Times where based on the answers the respondents’ self-compassion is categorized https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/02/14/well/mind/14compassion-quiz.html.
The second marketing talk we went to focused solely on these types of quizzes and introduced a type of software to make creating them easy.
For me, the crime and punishment talk was just for fun with an experienced prosecutor, a defender and an arms specialist talking about common mistakes in writing.
The conference hotel was gorgeous and the food in the snack bar was even good and affordable. I couldn’t believe they had tasty matzah ball soup.
All-in-all, the conference was well-worth it and I’ll probably work the booth again next year.