The dispensing of basic advice about writing query letters, formatting and submitting manuscripts, researching market trends, seeking representation, making time to write, and so forth, is hard to get wrong or do poorly. If you’re new to the children’s publishing world, you can be pretty confident that the first conference you attend will get you up to speed on these basic matters just fine. The only thing to be careful about is that you don’t pick an event intended for more advanced writers. They sometimes don’t touch on the business of publishing at all, while even the most elementary of conferences will still offer some material on craft.
The one area where things can go somewhat wrong is panels, a common method of answering questions about the business of publishing.
At its best, a panel combines the strengths of all the panelists, as if you had a single speaker, but with five times the experience and insight. At its worst, it’s like having that one speaker translate every answer into five languages before moving on to the next question!
The problem is that a panel has to work together well to be good. Members need to feel free not to say anything if they don’t have anything significant to add, and those who do have something valuable to say need to come right out with it. This is not easy to do, especially for a group of relative strangers who have had no chance to prepare together.
Whether delivered by a panel or an individual, the content of these elementary presentations is usually very similar. Twice, though, it has exceeded my expectations.
The first time was when an agent, in the midst of giving the standard advice about researching the market, emphasized that the research should center on a certain major bookseller, and then revealed some really profound inside industry info about the power this bookseller had over whether a publisher buys a book, based on what they say in advance about whether they would carry it.
(I’m sorry I can’t give more details about it here, but I’m still waiting for permission from the agent to share everything she said. Maybe in a future blog post.)
The second occasion was the computer-savvy conference mentioned in the main post. I expect to see more conferences begin to cover the online aspects of being an author or illustrator, but I somehow doubt that these presentations will ever exhaust the subject and become humdrum!
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This is a sidebar to my three-part Guide to SCBWI Conferences.
Other sidebars:
