I spent the weekend in North Carolina. I had the pleasure of attending the Carolinas Writers Conference in Wadesboro, which attracted somewhere around 150 writers.
Have members of your writers’ group ever thought about putting on something like this—an event that offers information for hopeful authors and supports literacy in your area? Maybe you don’t believe you could pull it off because you have no money in your treasury or because you lack wo/man power. Let me tell you that this successful, well-attended conference was organized by a writers group of ten members. They went out and got sponsors and were able to rent a conference hall, do some advertising, arrange for a little food, pay keynote speakers’ fees, compensate their workshop leaders and even take care of the cost of housing for out-of-town presenters.
Ten enthusiastic, hard-working men and women pulled off a highly successful program in a very small community and managed to help fellow writers to become more informed, meet other writers at all stages of their craft and, hopefully, make fewer mistakes along their publishing paths. And registration for these writers and hopeful authors was free.
It was a good group of people. The presentations and workshops were varied and valuable. There was even one young man of 16 who talked about his experiences as a published author. He published his first in a series of fantasy stories when he was 14.
Omar Tyree spoke eloquently about his publishing path and on behalf of literacy. Robert Macomber talked about authorship. There were workshop leaders speaking on how to become number one at Amazon, history writing, memoir writing and many other topics. I held the attention of a group totaling around 40 for nearly two hours as I spoke about steps to successful publishing. (By the time I had completed my talk, there were around 120 in the room.
Today, while sitting around at the court house with other members of the jury pool (yes, I’m doing jury duty today), among other things, I’ll be writing a note to the members of the small club who made a big difference for many hopeful authors in North Carolina over the weekend by providing them with the information, networking opportunities and resources they need in order to succeed. Thank you Karen, Beverly, Rufus, Sandy, Katherine, Dorothy and the other hard-working members.
If you would like to have a copy of the handout I present for my presentations, let me know: PLFry620@yahoo.com.
Also visit my websites, sign up for one of my online courses, buy a book (I wrote them for YOU), sign up for a FREE copy of 50 Reasons Why You Should Write That Book, check out my resources pages…
What a lovely article! We had our first meeting today to work on the featured speakers for 2012. We enjoyed having you.
Karen