Click on Presenters to learn more about our conference faculty.

Saturday Schedule (pdf)

Class Handouts

For 2007 we are continuing our tradition of offering great sessions by editors and agents, well-known authors and experts in law enforcement and many other fields. We're also adding new-to-us topics like poetry, historical fiction, and creating web pages. Click on "Presenters" in the menu bar on the left to see more about our outstanding faculty.

8:00am-8:30am Registration

8:30am-9:45am Keynote Speech: Ralph McInerny

10:00am-10:50am Concurrent Sessions

0101 The Ghost that Got into My House: Lucia St. Clair Robson--In the 1700's, resurrectionists were men who stole recently-interred corpses to sell to medical schools for anatomical study. Become literary resurrectionists and learn how to dig up historical characters to bring them to life in your writing.

0102 Effective Writers' Websites, Part 1: Getting the Most from your Website: Ginny Stibolt--You don't need to be rich or a technical wizard to create a website. Learn about domains and website focus--author, book, or issue. Develop a critical eye for design, and strategies for long-term maintenance (class handout).

0103 Processing a Crime-Scene... How do they do that?: Andy Garrison, Director/Manager of the Georgia Public Safety Training Center Regional Police Academy in Athens.

0104 Building Your Freelance Portfolio: Chuck Sambuchino--This session will discuss how novice writers can best break into magazine freelancing, and how published writers can start to contribute to higher-profile publications (class handout).

0105 Bookends: Writing Good Beginnings and Better Endings: Alan Gratz--It's as old as Beowulf - making the beginning of your story mirror the end. Join Alan Gratz for a discussion about crafting deliberate, meaningful bookends to your short story or novel.

0106 NO MORE CREATIVE WRITING BLOCKS: Robert Alan Black, PhD, CSP--Need to generate more creative characters, scenes, stories? Need to increase your creativeness on demand? Need ways to respark your creativeness on dull days? This session has been designed to provide you tools and techniques to: 1) respark, 2) increase, 3) enrich your creativeness and 4) make your writing more creative and more fun to do (class handout).

0107 Working with an Agent: Chip MacGregor--A workshop to help authors know what an agent does, how to go about finding one, and how to maximize the relationship. Taught by an agent who has had a #1 New York Times bestseller.

0108 Selling Your Book, Marketing It, and Understanding The Publishing World from the Writer's Perspective--Bob Mayer: A writer-friendly approach to selling your book efficiently and then understanding the flow of a query at a publishing house and how decisions are made whether to buy a book. Cover letters that grab the reader, how to do a one page synopsis, and other practical matters will be covered. After publication, we will discuss what you can do marketing-wise to be a success in this business and cover a variety of techniques from book-signings, media outlets, publicists to other innovative ways. Then on to the business: Fee-charging agents; sell-through and sales numbers; E-books; print-on-demand; shrinking mid-lists; corporate mergers; self-publising; what does all this mean to the writer who often feels on the outside? You hear agents and editors talk about the business but it's important to understand a writer's point of view. (class handout)

0109 PICK AN AGENT'S BRAIN... : Cherry Weiner--Ask anything and everything you want to know about publishing.


Break


11:05am-12:00pm Concurrent Sessions

0201 The Devil Is in the Details: Lucia St. Clair Robson--Canned foods were available almost fifty years before the invention of the can opener. How can that affect a story? Lucia will discuss how to find and use the obscure and fascinating facts that make the past real for your readers (class handout).

0202 Effective Writers' Websites, Part 2: Creating a Sticky Website: Ginny Stibolt--An effective website is one of the most useful marketing tools a writer can have, but you must tell a compelling story to entice your website visitors (surfers) to return again and again. Learn how to entangle those surfers to make your website sticky (class handout).

0204 Protecting what you create: Copyright basics for writers: Wally Eberhardt--You don't have to be a lawyer to know the essentials of copyright law, complicated though it may be. We'll cover the essentials of the law from a writer's perspective. What are my rights? How can I protect my precious words? What's in those pesky contracts? How much can I borrow from another's work without worrying about being sued? When should I call the lawyer? (class handout)

0205 Words And Pictures: Novels Go Graphic: Bobby Nash--Graphic Novels utilize story and art to tell astonishing tales that range from the most human moments to the farthest reaches of the universe. Graphic Novels are in the spotlight today moreso than ever as other media have begun utilizing them to enhance their products. Today we see television shows such as Heroes, Ghost Whisperer, and Battlestar Galactica using graphic storytelling to compliment their filmed episodes while movies based on graphic novels such as 300, Road To Perdition, Spider-man, Sin City, Batman, and Superman continue to score big at the box office. This presentation will explain many of the opportunities, limitations, pitfalls, and successes in the field of graphic novel, comic book, webcomic, and comic strip writing as well as explain the collaborative process between writer, penciller, inker, letterer, colorist, and editor to show how it all comes together into its finished form.

0206 How to Write a Best Selling Cookbook: Peter Reinhart--Cookbooks are one of the most popular genres in publishing. In this workshop we will examine what a publisher looks for in a new cookbook and also what the public looks for. These are not always the same thing, but sometimes it all comes together and the book just flat out sells! From concept to proposal to execution, we'll look at them all to help you join the growing ranks of the many successful cookbook authors, as well as the growing sub-genre of food-related story writers (class handout).

0207 The Perfect Manuscript: Getting that agent and editor to say, Yes!: What it takes to succeed in publishing today: Susan Mary Malone

0208 The State of the (Small) Publishing Industry and You: Brian Seidman--Learn about the unique challenges facing today's smaller book publishing companies, and how those challenges affect today's querying author. Brian's presentation is full of valuable tips to keep in mind when sending out your work, and features an "Ask the Editor" question and answer session.

0209 Don't Murder Your Mystery - or Any Other Fiction: Chris Roerden--Learn from an award-winning editor why most submissions go directly to the NO pile, and what you can do to keep your first reader hooked until your plot and characters can be fairly judged on their own merits. Includes an interactive mini-workshop on voice and body language.


Lunch


2:00pm-2:50pm Concurrent Sessions

0301 The Power of Babel: Lucia St. Clair Robson--What does "prigging a peter" mean? Not what you might think it does. Learn how to spice up historical dialogue with the vivid and often outrageous vocabulary and wit of our ancestors. (In 18th century English slang, to "prig a peter" meant to steal a trunk). (class handout)

0302 Ergonomics and Injury Prevention for the Serious Writer: Rhett DeVane--A fun, hands-on workshop on proper stretching techniques, work placement design, and self-massage from a licensed massage therapist who knows exactly where writers hurt (class handout).

0303 What constitutes good poetry, and how do I get mine published?: Elizabeth McGlaun--the poet and Editor of UGA’s Mandala Journal will give a lecture on the major schools of poetic thought from the traditional to the absurd, to help frame the question of what constitutes good poetry. This session will also cover general tips on how to get your poetry published. Elizabeth welcomes all who attend to bring in poetry to be critiqued in a peer run workshop. Please bring 5-10 copies of your best work. A sense of humor and an open mind are required for this class.

0304 Making a Living at Writing: Chip MacGregor--This workshop will focus on how to create a plan to begin writing regularly, selling your pieces, and moving your career forward. Taught by a busy agent who has helped numerous authors get their careers kick-started.

0305 You CAN Write For Children: Bettye Stroud--This workhop will cover the techniques and fundamentals of creating children's books and articles. Bettye Stroud will discuss the importance of creating book characters children will care about. Plot, dialogue, voice and the building of suspense will be covered as well as the creation of satisfying endings. Writing non-fiction and writing for children's magazines will be included. Finally, she will discuss the important business of finding publishers for one's work.

0306 Screenwriting--Howard Berk--Learn to write the kind of screenplay that can become the next great big sexy movie from a screenwriter who's been there, done that.

0307 What You Need to Know about Getting an Agent: Chuck Sambuchino--This session will discuss the basic need-to-know information about agents, and how nonfiction and fiction writers can best go about securing a good representative to shepherd their work (class handout).

0308 Make the Editor Happy With Your Submission. (What to do and NOT to do when submitting work for publication.): Tony Burton--When you submit your work to an editor, do you feel like you've just bought a lottery ticket, with the odds of being accepted perhaps worse than those of winning PowerBall? Here are some ways to increase your chances of a win, by submitting your (well-written!) work in a way that will please the editor. Learn how to pick the right numbers to have a fair chance of winning publication. (class handout)

0309 How To Write a Best Selling Nonfiction Book: Nancy Love--Here are some of the ingredients you'll need to try for a really "big" book--a platform, an original idea or a new spin on an old one, an arresting voice, a great title, a winning marketing program--and useful tips on how to get them.

Break


3:10pm-4:00pm Concurrent Sessions

0401 Villainous Smells: Lucia St. Clair Robson--The olfactory bulb or sense of smell is connected with emotion and memory in the primitive part of our brains. In this session we will discuss how to coax readers' five senses into creating vivid images of the world your historical characters inhabited.

0402 Money for Nothing and the Clicks for Free: No-cost web solutions for production and publicity: Amy Watts--Get yourself and your books into your readers' "top eight" with Blogger and MySpace; do more with Google than just web searches (class handout).

0403 SLAM!: David Oates--This interactive workshop will include some background about the Slam, and will concentrate on learning to perform poetry and short fiction for an audience. Bring something that you think will move an audience--to laughter, tears, thought or action. This is not just for Slammers, but for anyone who would like to improve at sharing his/her own work.