Freeman Ng

During lunch at a recent SCBWI conference, I was telling some of my table mates about the big differences I’ve encountered in the nine SCBWI conferences or retreats I’ve attended in the past three years, when I realized I was now an expert on them. Though there are probably a lot of people who have been to as many as I have, I suspect there are few who have been to as many different ones, in as many different regions. I’ve never been to the same conference twice, and my travels have spanned eight regions, six states, and four time zones.

(If you’re interested in learning how I look for conferences to attend all over the country, you can read this sidebar.)

One of the common features of every SCBWI conference or retreat is the evaluation form we’re asked to fill out at the end. I wonder how much good information the organizers get from them, though. Many attendees might be at their first conference, and most of the rest might never have attended any other conference or gone to any other region’s. It can be hard to evaluate an event when you have nothing to compare it with.

Therefore, I’ve decided to write this guide to SCBWI conferences. Over the course of the next few blog posts, I’ll describe the best and the worst of the conferences I’ve attended, and everything in between. I won’t be naming names, but in every other way, I’ll try to be as detailed as possible, so even if I can’t help you avoid a bad organizer or critiquer ahead of time, you’ll at least be able to compare your experiences after the fact to see if they could have been better or worse. My hope is that this knowledge – awareness of where a given conference graded out on the curve – can help improve them all, as half the battle is often just discovering how something could have been done better.

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In this first installment, I’ll be covering four conferences that fall into a category I call The Big Event.

A Big Event is either a conference put on by a small region for which it is the only significant event of the year, or the big annual gathering for a cluster of regions. Either way, it’s special, and I think this causes the organizers to put more thought and energy into it than if it were one of several events put on by a given region in a year.

All the conferences in this group met what I consider to be the basic requirements for a SCBWI conference.

1. Advance online info provided plenty of detail about the topics, the schedule, the critique opportunities, and the faculty. (Including enough background information on the editors and agents to determine if they were good matches for my work.)
2. Questions sent to the organizers ahead of time were answered promptly.
3. Questions and requests put to the organizers during the conference were addressed.
4. Everyone got a critique from an editor, agent, or author.
5. It was easy to see what was happening next and to find the place where it was happening.
6. Guidelines for submitting manuscripts to the editors or agents after the conference were made clear.

These might seem like modest standards, but as we’ll see, they are not always met. The Big Events met them, though, and sometimes went beyond them.

One conference provided the opportunity for a second critique to a limited number of attendees who paid an extra fee. Two of them allowed more pages to be submitted for critique than the usual ten. One offered peer-to-peer sessions in addition to the editor/agent/author critique.

One of them had assigned seating at the first meal, which included the placement of at least one editor or author at every table: a nice way to get people to mix a little and to guarantee that everybody got at least some casual face time with an editor or agent.

One of the more recent of the four events in this group excelled at bringing the SCBWI conference into the computer age. This began even before the conference started, when they accepted pre-conference questions only through a public online forum, so that others who might have had the same questions could see any answers that were given. (Which also cleverly cut down on the organizers’ load, because they didn’t have to answer the same questions over and over again.) Then, at the conference itself, there were workshops on online presence, blogging, and social networking – a long overdue enhancement to the usual coverage of the business of publishing – and one on Photoshop techniques for illustrators. (I must report that much of this material was too advanced for many in the audience, but this may have been the first time anyone had attempted to present it at a SCBWI conference, so it could take some trial and error to find the right level.) After the conference, they emailed a spreadsheet containing the evaluation form to all the attendees, so that those who didn’t have a chance to fill them out on the last day (or who, like me, hate to hand write anything) could fill them out at their leisure.

Finally, these four conferences included among them not only the best material on the business of publishing I’ve ever encountered (described above) but two of the four best talks on the craft of writing, and two of the three best author keynotes.

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That these four conferences form the big bulge of normalcy in the bell curve of SCBWI event quality is a good thing. The average SCBWI conference is well run, provides all the basic opportunities for instruction, entertainment, critique, and contact with editors and agents, and usually excels in a few special areas.

If all SCBWI conferences were like this, there’d be no need for this guide. However, every bell curve has its outliers, and it is to these extremes, the good and the bad, that I will turn in my next two installments. I’ll explore the low end first, when I present to you The Quickie and The Organizer’s Vacation.