Convention Recap: Alabama/Atlanta Writing Workshop 2024

The past two days have been an absolute blast as I got to be a presenter at the Alabama Writing Workshop in Birmingham, and then the Atlanta Writing Workshop! So let me dish on how it went!

I attended the Alabama Writing Workshop three times in the past, twice pre-covid and then once virtually during covid. The primary focus of these events is to get you face time with actual working agents looking for clients, and to teach you how to better prepare yourself for the travails of the publishing process. I learned a lot the years I attended, and all told had...six? agents request samples of my work. Then ended up passing (rightly so, that book needed work), but the experience on the whole was great (and don't feel bad, I reworked that book and now Falstaff Dread will be publishing is in 2025).

So you show up, take a days worth of classes taught by experts, and sporadically go to pitch meetings with agents. Fun stuff! Since I was going though I have learned a ton, and mostly outgrown these events (I don't need an agent). So when I got the email seeing if I wanted to attend, I was just going to delete it. But then I thought to myself 'wait, I do presenting a lot these days. Maybe I should see if they need a presenter.' So I asked, and what do you know! They wanted someone who could speak on Organic Marketing and Branding! I was in like flint!

How did it go?

It was too much fun! I was a lot less busy than the agents, and since I didn't attend the classes (beyond my own) I got to hang out with the volunteers, help them where I could, and chill with Brian Klems (the organizer) as well as a few of the other presenters/agents. A few times I got to speak at length with attendees for whom my brand of swimming against the tide was helpful (mostly talking about the viability of novellas). Plus they fed me, and fed me well, which is always a plus when you invite a portly lad like me to an event.

My presentation, for which this was the first time I gave this specific class, went really well in my opinion. I had a ton of great questions from the attendees, and I think I did a pretty good job presenting my material. I had a few folks tell me that they really appreciated my transparency and said I came across as very genuine. That really meant a lot to me. Several folks lingered for a long time after talking to me, and since I was the last panel of the day both times, I was able to really take my time answering their questions. I have also had a good number of folks reaching out via the contact form on my website, which is most welcome.

People could also sign up to have ten pages of their work critiqued by certain presenters. As sort of the odd man out, being more genre focused, I ended up being the person that most of the genre fiction minded folks requested to have critiques done by. So I went over their submissions in the days before the event, and then met with them for at least 20 minutes each to go over them. Most of them I was able to do closer to 30 minutes. I also made it very clear that they should keep in touch, and ask me follow up questions in the weeks to come. I don't know if everyone does that, but I wanted to make sure they felt like they got their money's worth.

What I found, is more than the critique, these folks were looking for some sort of validation on whether or not they were wasting their time writing. They needed a stranger with no bias towards them to take a look, and let them know if they were on the right path. I was happy to be able to give them that. Each of the five I worked with, with varying degrees of work, could find themselves published I feel. There was one work in particular that I was like....damn, I wish I had written this, haha.

If you want to check out my presentation, go to my EDUCATION page. There are copies of the PowerPoint and hand out, and soon there will also be a video presentation to go along with it.

Sales/Money

The perk of workshops over panels is this: you get paid to be a part of workshops usually. So here are how the numbers broke out:

• I will be getting paid for presenting, critiquing, and helping out. If I did my math right, I think it comes to around 450 bucks.

• I sold 190 dollars worth of books. To be clear, this isn't really a book selling event. I was the only presenter that really came with a "I'm gonna try to move some books" mindset. I guess because most of the other folks are trad published? Not sure. But as soon as registration was over each day I took over a little bit of the table to try and make some sales.

• I had to pay for gas, two breakfasts, two suppers, and one hotel room. Call it around 240 in expenses.

So this is not exact, but at this moment I reckon I cleared around 400 bucks.