The Colorado Gold conference was a wonderful experience, as usual. I came home both exhausted and energized with ideas to apply to my WIP and my promotion efforts. I was very pleased with how my "Top Ten Rules for Networking as a Writer" workshop turned out. I had an exercise at the end, where I paired up audience members with someone they didn't know and asked them to find out from each other: 1) name and what you write, 2) some information about an interest/hobby/day job, and 3) how you could help him/her in some way. I was very pleased when most pairs found some way to help each other, even if they wrote in different genres or were in different stages of their writing careers. The ways included providing an information source, a signing opportunity contact, a possible critique partner contact, an online review, agreeing to critique something of each other's, etc. etc. A great illustration of the power of networking!
My panel, "It Could Happen to You" also went well, and I hope the four of us who made our first novel sale in the last year provided useful information to the audience. I was thrilled to accept my published author pen award at the Saturday banquet and to cheer for my critique group buddy, Bill Mason, who finaled in the Science Fiction/Fantasy category of the writing contest. I talked to a number of published authors about the possibility of presenting workshops to the Pikes Peak Writers. I furiously wrote notes during the Agent Panel, so I could pass on the information to the agent questors in the Sisters in Crime Guppies online group. I learned some techniques for injecting humor and rhetorical devices into my writing and how to write faster. I enjoyed getting together with my acquisition editor, John Helfers, and with the ten other Five Star authors in attendance, to swap information about the publishing process and promotion techniques. And, of course, I made lots of networking contacts and renewed existing ones!
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