Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Central Coast Writing Conference Report

This past weekend I've been in Morro Bay and San Luis Obispo. As part of the staff of the CCWC, hubby and I stayed at the La Serena Hotel overlooking Morro Bay. The conference was held on the Cuesta College Campus.

What was unique about this conference was the fact that what is happening today with publishing was the main theme. Huge example, Mark Coker, the founder of Smashwords was one of the keynote speakers at the beginning and the end.

The first day was begun with a talk about all the tech toys and demos.

Laurie McLean, an agent with the Larsen Pomada Agency, is now working with authors to promotr e-books.

Jonathan Maberry gave a rousing keynote about his path to publication, his writing habits, and lots more. He also taught a class on thriller writing.

One class was on blogging.

There were plenty of the usual classes, something for anyone no matter where they were in their writing career.

I taught a class on Mystery Writing 101 and another on The Importance of Setting. Full classes and great students.

This was the first time I've ever been to this conference and I was truly impressed: well organized, lots of topics to choose from, top-notch instructors, I felt honored to be one of them.

Marilyn
http://fictionforyou.com/

Jonathan Mayberry spoke and taught a class on writing thrillers.

7 comments:

sample thesis said...

very cool psot! thanks!

Marilyn Meredith a.k.a. F. M. Meredith said...

I should have added that though there were a lot of the usual topics, there were many unusual ones too. Lots of emphasis on e-pubbing and e-promoting, which was refreshing.

Marilyn

Morgan Mandel said...

Wow, that sounds like some great conference!

Maybe you could do a post sometime about what Mark Coker had to say. He's really on the cutting edge.

Morgan Mandel
http://www.morganmandel.com
http://morganmandel.blogspot.com

Marilyn Meredith a.k.a. F. M. Meredith said...

Mark was great, I could repost what I wrote on my own blog about him. By the way he's really young.

Smashwords has just bloomed into a huge business, was just he and his wife now he's had to hire people. I saw him working all through the conference.

Marilyn

essay writing said...

Thanks for this post! i really enjoyed reading it!!!

Regge Ridgway said...

Wish I could have been there. Next year for sure.

Micheal Alexander said...

Thanks a lot for sharing this amazing knowledge with us. This site is fantastic. I always find great knowledge from it. Writing classes Central Coast NSW