If, like me, you’re willing to go anywhere in the country to attend the conference best suited to your needs, you can learn here how to go about finding them.
On the national SCBWI site is a resource you can use to find the websites of every regional SCBWI chapter. The page is a bit clumsy to navigate – it was meant primarily for someone needing to find their own local chapter, not someone wanting to get to them all – so what you should do is bookmark each chapter’s site once you get to it. That way, you won’t have to go through the main SCBWI site again.
Once you have your list of all the regional chapters’ websites, it’s just a question of visiting each of them from time to time to see what events are coming up. This might seem like a lot of work, but after your first pass or two, it will get easier, because you’ll begin learning that some small regions never put on events big enough to draw your interest, while others might only host one per year. You can start deleting entries from your list, or making notes about when you need to check a site for news of an impending event.
(Note: the national SCBWI website also has a central calendar that is supposed to list every event occurring anywhere in the country, but I’ve found it to be pretty inaccurate in the past. I haven’t looked at it in a while, though, so if anyone can report that it’s gotten better, please let me know. It would obviously be the ideal solution. Note #2: some chapters have mailing lists that you can join to receive announcements about upcoming events. However, most of them only allow members from that region to join, because they’re discussion forums in addition to announcement lists.)
A good way to begin collecting data on which editors or agents might be worth seeking out in this way is to subscribe to email newsletters like the Publishers Weekly “Children’s Bookshelf”. This weekly newsletter contains information about book deals and publishing events, and the idea is not so much that you read them every week and commit the parade of names and book titles to memory, but that you save them rather than deleting them from your email program. Then, when you want to learn more about an editor appearing in an upcoming conference, one of the things you can do is search your archive of saved newsletters for information about that editor. (Most email programs have some kind of search function you can use.)
If you can’t wait to build up an archive of email newsletters to search through, you can go to the Publishers Marketplace site, where, for a monthly fee, you can directly access their database of editors, agents, and book deals.
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This is a sidebar to my three-part Guide to SCBWI Conferences.
Other sidebars:
