Dear friends,
As many of you know, for the past several years I have been teaching a seminar once a year on the business of being a professional writer. This is a three-day seminar that I do with Kevin Anderson, Rebecca Moesta, Dave Wolverton (who often writes under the name of David Farland) and various special guests who vary from one year to the next.
This is not the usual writer’s workshop. We assume that those people who take the seminar have the skills to be professional writers. What we spend three days doing is teaching you everything you need to know about the business of becoming a writer. That includes strategies for getting published, the use of agents, electronic publishing, how to read and understand contracts and royalty statements, and so on.
People who’ve taken this seminar in the past have uniformly told us that they found it very helpful. Many of them take the seminar a second or even a third time—so many, in fact, that we now have a special lower rate for alumni.
This year, in 2013, we will be holding the seminar on May 14-16 in Colorado Springs, Colorado. (Past venues have includes Pasadena, California; Salt Lake City, Utah; and Las Vegas, Nevada.) Special guests will include Jim Minz, the chief editor for Baen Books; Joan Johnston, a bestselling romance author; James Owen, a bestselling storyteller and illustrator; and Mark Leslie LeFebvre, the Director of Self Publishing and chief of author relations for Kobo.
If you’re interested in looking further into the seminar, please look at our URL: http://superstarswriting.com/
POST HOC: I also participated in a different sort of seminar this year for the first time. This was a more traditional writers workshop, although it also covered aspects of the business of publishing. The workshop was held on a Caribbean cruise liner to the Bahamas and lasted for four days: December 2 through December 6. Shahid Mahmud of Arc Manor books was the sponsor. The web site is here.
Aside from myself, the instructors included:
â–º Toni Weisskopf (my publisher at Baen Books)
â–º Mike Resnick (author)
â–º Kevin Anderson (author)
â–º Rebecca Moesta (author)
â–º Nancy Kress (author)
â–º Jack Skillingstead (author)
â–º Eleanor Wood (head of Spectrum Literary Agency)
At the request of the seminar organizers I did a class specifically oriented toward writers interested in working in the 1632 series.