This year’s conference was one of the best experiences for me. I knew what I went there to accomplish: networking, learning, and if all went well, pitching. I came away with some very encouraging feedback, finding out that the type of things I address in my novel definitely fall in to the literary category and that I am doing better than I thought. I got an invitation to submit my manuscript to the agent I came to meet with as well as feedback on what he would like to see changed before I send it.

I first met Bharti Kirchner at PNWA last summer. I took her short story class which was one of the most useful classes I attended at that conference. When I found out that she was doing manuscript critiques for this conference on Whidbey Island I was excited.  Her insight would go a long way toward making real improvements. When I met her and went over my manuscript I found her comments were both very constructive and surprisingly complementary which gave me a huge boost of encouragement.

Bharti Kirchner, Sarah Martinez, Priscilla Long
Photo credit: Loretta Matson

Terry Persun is an author I have spoken with at several conferences and always found extremely helpful and refreshingly realistic and honest about why we do what we do. I find at conferences, my goal is usually the same:  to weed out the people I really need to connect with and follow them until they talk to me. Unlike past conferences, this year I focused on authors and teachers.  This year I got to sit next to Terry at dinner and chat about literature, the current anxiety around who is reading and what they’re reading, and I got another good dose of perspective about what I am aiming for and what is most important to me.

Sarah Martinez, Terry Persun
Photo credit: Loretta Matson

On Sunday after Terry and a panel of other presenters spoke on independent publishing in general,  Jon P. Fine, Director of Author and Publisher Relations  for Amazon gave a presentation  to a very full house  about all the services Amazon offers authors. He fielded questions-- and there were many-- on  everything from free author websites, to various paid services to help you independently publish your book.

As a consumer I have been grateful  to Amazon for several reasons:  the biggest being they made it easy to track down all those obscure porn star biographies, religious, political, and historical texts, as well as the  books on brainwashing and cults that I needed for researching my  novels.  On top of it they saved me all that driving time and gas money when they offered to ship the books to me in two days! Unless you have small kids, and the understanding that you have maybe two minutes worth of time to make a decision in the store, you won’t understand what a huge gift all of this is.

Here again it looks like they are shaping up to be a one stop shop for a different type of consumer-- the independent author. (He also mentioned the many ways Amazon can work for the traditionally published author as well.)  I liked hearing about the option as a sort of fall back in case I do decide to go it alone. I find it interesting to see the turn out and wonder if it is half for the charismatic dude giving the presentation or if it is just as much for the interest in independent publishing. I remember the heated arguments I’ve watched unfold in a few other self-publishing workshops at previous conferences and wonder what has changed?

Also, as someone who has recently been annoyed with these big authors talking  about how no one is reading important books anymore, hearing him say he thought people were still going to keep reading and mentioning Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, and Phillip Pullman in the space of about a half hour had me jumping out of my seat with happiness.

Validation. Encouragment. Information. Reality Check. That was what this year’s conference was good for, and a much needed three days to reconnect with people who care as much about this work as I do and give me more to think about and work toward. This, I now believe is the real purpose of the writer’s conference, so I definitely got what I came for.