Writing Conferences 101: The Basics

Writers should go to writing conferences.

Aspiring and novice authors should go to dispel the illusions they have about the industry, and to learn the basic terminology, structure, and skills involved in success. Experienced writers  should go to create the connections and networks they need to accomplish their goals. Veteran writers come to present, to give back to the community, and to expand their own network through sharing their hard-won knowledge. 

All that begins with your first conference. It’s a significant investment, so today we’ll talk about how to do it well, how to prepare, and some of the best ways to act on the things you learn and the connections you make. 

Keep Some Realities In Front of Mind

Going to a full writing conference is going to cost you hundreds of dollars, and at least one hundred hours of your time. It will mean time away from family, maybe time off from your job, and a surprising amount of stress (especially for introverts, who tend to be thick on the ground in this profession of ours.)

Make that investment pay off by arriving at the event with some goals clearly in your mind. 

You should set up a main goal for yourself, one specific thing you want to accomplish that’s in line with where you are in your writing career right now. Some examples might include:

• Meet and interview 5 proofreaders who can help me get my book ready for publication
• Develop a marketing plan for my books and platform
• Find a critique group in my local area who will have me as a member
• Pitch my book to five agents or editors for purposes of getting constructive feedback
• Attend one class each in three things I’m ignorant about

Only you know the best goal to get you set up for success in the next stage of your writing journey. Use the above for inspiration, to use as-is, or to cross off a list of possibilities until you drill down into what you really need at this point. 

Regardless of your goal, a few tips, tricks, hacks, and habits will help you accomplish that goal as well as make the best possible impression and enjoy the experience as much as possible. 

Writing Conference Success: 10 Top Tips

1. Stay at the Hotel

Even if you live locally, a lot of the best things at conferences happen after hours when the bar, restaurant, and lounges are full of writers, editors, agents, and other professionals sitting around with time on their hands. Stay at the hotel, and stay up visiting with people until it’s your bedtime. 

Be on your best behavior — drink a little less than you normally do, avoid talking about politics and religion, listen more than you talk, and be friendly. This is your chance to make connections, friends, colleagues, and first impressions. 

2. Go to All The Things

Conferences have a lot going on, and you get the most if you go to all of them. Go to a class in every break-out session. Eat at every meal, arriving early and staying until it’s done. Come to the mixers, networking sessions, and other official events. Even if you’re tired, feeling disappointed or intimidated, or a little socially overwhelmed, show up; you won’t have a second chance to do these things. 

If you came with a friend, make plans to do many of the things separately. One of the main benefits of coming to conferences is to meet new people and have new experiences. That’s harder to do if you show up with a pre-made clique.

3. Wear Layers

HVAC at conferences is notoriously tricky. Crowds form and disperse, so the heating and cooling rarely keeps up with the body temperatures. You’ll arrive at a session cold, only to feel boiling hot after twenty minutes packed into a hotel conference room with eighty other bodies. Many conference areas have a single temperature control, so the giant rooms are on the same air-flow as the tiny packed in rooms.

The solution: wear a t-shirt and an overshirt, and have a sweatshirt or jacket handy. That way you can put on and peel off as reality demands. 

4. Bring Your Kits

Bring a conference success kit that includes business cards, printed first pages of your best work, a notebook, and pens. Bring a personal care kit with some cough drops, ibuprofen, and whatever personal medications you might need for a weekend away from home. 

Bonus points for bringing a small first aid kit (maybe the one from your car.) You’ll never know when a major publishing executive might have a headache or need a splinter removed…

5. Think Carefully About Pitch Sessions

Many writing conferences make money off of pitch sessions, where aspiring authors pay between $10 and $100 or more for a few one-on-one minutes with an agent or editor to pitch their manuscript. These are exciting, and preparing for them can be an excellent way to tighten your message and think deeply about your work. 

That said, they have a poor track record for actually getting a manuscript sold, and many industry professionals suggest you’d get more benefit from that money buying drinks for people in the evenings. My personal recommendation, and your mileage may vary, is to go to at least five in your career for the practice…but to find your agents and editors through networking.

6. Drink a Little

Publishing is a boozy profession. It’s not as gin-soaked as it once was, but imbibing alcohol as a group remains a strong trend. If you don’t drink at all, don’t sweat it. Folks aren’t as judgmental as they once were about this and you’ll be welcome. If you do drink, make sure you tip a couple back with folks over the course of the weekend. 

But…do not get drunk, or even tipsy. That’s a good way to make a really bad impression. I recommend cycling through drinks with one alcohol, one drink with caffeine (like cola or iced tea), then one water, then back to one serving of booze. It keeps you the kind of sociable loose that alcohol is good for while keeping you from going overboard…and it saves you money on that final tab. 

7. Ask Questions

You’re not on site to just passively consume information as it comes to you. People get the most out of writing conferences when they actively participate. Set a goal to ask at least one intelligent question in every break-out session you attend, and follow up with more after the session for at least one presenter each day.

Practice the same during the social mixers. Make a habit of asking at least two questions for every thing you say about yourself. You’ll be surprised how much that makes you stand out in the writing industry.

8. Go to at Least One Random Session

When you look at the class schedule for your conference, you’ll find a lot that fit exactly what you want to learn, and meld well with your niche. You should go to those for the most part, but also attend at least one random session. Sit in on a talk about a genre you don’t write, or a business class you think you’re already strong on, or a craft detail you’ve never heard of. 

Some of the best lessons are the ones we didn’t know we needed before we heard them. At a writing conference, this is the best way to encourage those lessons to show up. 

9. Practice Approaching High Enders

At some point in your writing career, you are going to need to speak with somebody in power. That might be an agent, a publisher, a big-name reviewer, somebody in charge of doling out art and writing grants, or any of a hundred other roles that can be downright intimidating. 

The conferences will be thick with people working in those roles. Very few of them will be in a position to help you today, but you can still walk up and talk to them. Ask them what they’re working on, and then tell them about what you do. Repeat this enough times, and you’ll be calm and collected when you approach somebody for real. 

10. Take Notes 

I promise you, you will not remember half the things you tell yourself you’ll remember. Take notes in the breakout sessions as you normally do in classes, but that’s just the beginning. During a quiet moment during the day, write down three key takeaways from each session you attended that day. They will form the backbone of your followup work once the conference is over. Practice the same technique for meals and other social events. 

Pro tip: If somebody gives you a business card, write three brief notes about them on the back as soon as the conversation is over. 

It’s Not Over

Once the conference is over, your conference is far from over. The real benefit from this investment of time, money, and energy comes from how the conference changes your writing career. Take a day or two to recover, then do three things for each of three categories of your writing career. 

Social

Make contact with three people who are your peers in writing, three people you can help in their writing journey, and three people who can help you. It’s up to you whether this is via email, over social media, or across the table at a pub or coffee shop…but make those connections and follow up on them. You will be surprised how far they can lead. 

Professional

Based on what you learn, who you meet, and how you think about your writing path after the conference, set three goals for your writing career you can meet within 12 months. These might include self-publishing your first novel, completing a draft of a book to pitch at next year’s conference, accumulating 1,000 social media followers, completing a long-form course a speaker offered, or anything along those lines. Be aggressive but realistic, and stick to those goals as well as you possibly can. 

Craft

Every writer’s craft can improve, and you will have come out of the conference having “drunk from a fire hose” of craft advice. It can be hard to put it all in motion, but I recommend the following. Rewrite one page of your existing manuscript with an eye for a detail-oriented thing you learned. Write a chapter or a short story applying something you learned with broader strokes. Finally, take a high-concept idea and apply it to your WIP as a whole. The other details will come and go as you write, but focusing on these three things will make sure the most important stuff you learn doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.

One Last Little Thing: Virtual Conferences

Virtual conferences started in the late 2010s, using platforms like Zoom and Discord to assemble writers for services and education. They blew up during Covid, and are still going strong – in many cases stronger than in-person conferences, which are even now just beginning to recover. 

Virtual conferences can be valuable, especially for people who live a long way from a city that hosts a conference, or who aren’t sure they can afford the more expensive “in person” options. They offer good instruction, and a chance to network virtually.

But the best things that come out of conferences happen “in the corners” – who you sit with at dinner, what you overhear in the bar, a chance encounter in the hall to the restroom. Those things can’t happen in a virtual space. Attend a few virtual conferences for the educational aspects, but also go to at least one in-person event each year. There’s no replacing that experience.