Have to echo that sentiment. I’ve attended the week-long Marketing Seminar and will be back in July to learn structure, and October for the Master Class.

Definitely, the best writing and industry-level teachings I’ve ever come across.

Thanks for the ‘Bathtub’ Illustration. Well done!

You’re also faced with the task of submitting to mostly-overseas markets.

Hmmmm…. Lots of Americans like to travel, and I know New Zealand is one place a lot of Americans express interest in seeing. Perhaps if you keep your ear to the ground on the internet, you can find out if/when somee of your favorite American or UK authors are traveling, and see if perhaps they wouldn’t be game to have a sit-down with you and other New Zealand writers during their trip?

How big is the local New Zealand fan base? Could a small convention of any sort be organized? Bring in some authors for that?

Again, you’re on an island of sorts. I wish I had better suggestions.

I live in New Zealand.

I think we have 0 best sellers. We have some authors that have local books, but thats about it. Nothing in the big time. The closest ‘con’ we get is australia.

Even that is too far away for me in my current situation (new baby girl, wife at home looking after her and not earning) So languishing away here, so to speak

That said, I’m happy to share what information I have about writing and publishing, but nobody should be paying that much attention to me, at least not until I’m getting published regularly. Learn from the experts. (I do have anecdotes that some might find interesting from a historical perspective — I’ve been around the field for a while as was my father before me — but any advice I might have at this point is secondhand.)

In truth, I am sorta keeping a lot of the K&D stuff close to the vest because I liked the weekend so much, I don’t want to deluge the web with my notes because then people who really need to go and experience the weekend will just go, eh, I have Brad’s notes, so why spend the time or the money?

But you’re right, DWS was probably just saying, please don’t blog about the weekend during the weekend itself.

You’re also right in that the biggest myth exploded, was the myth that there is no money in fiction. When they got done showing us cash streams on book deals, and we talked about working outside the SF&F genres, it became clear that there is gold in them thar writerly hills! All we need to do, as wildcat miners, is go out and dig it up.

Hard work, but for those who can stick with it, riches await. Riches!

Again, excellent points. Thanks for posting them here.

Much of it was stuff I’d heard them talk about before in their two one-hour sessions at Denvention, but this time in more detail, with elaboration and reasoning behind the advice, and more anecdotes. High points? Follow Heinlein’s Five Rules. Learn story structure (eg Algis Budrys’s seven elements). Only listen to advice from somebody further down the road you want to follow than you are. Take with a grain of salt anything a writer says in public (fiction writers lie for a living). Do the math. Writers are the worst judges of their own work.

But Brad’s right about it having to be experienced rather than read about. I took 19 pages of notes, in my own condensed form. That would have to double to even be intelligible to anyone else.

Biggest myth? Quoting K&D from Denvention, the biggest myth is “you can’t make any money in fiction”. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry (counting all genres – if you include non-fiction, it’s about $30B, figure fiction as about half that*), and for any given book, writers make most of the money (agents and publishers take a smaller piece of a lot more pies, er, books). But you have to work at it; an “overnight success” takes years.

(*I did some quick online research to find numbers, but the industry categorizes by e.g. trade, hardcover, etc regardless of whether it’s fiction or non-fiction. For consumer sales (which would exclude a lot of non-fiction sales, eg textbooks), the market is 55% fiction.)