AuthorHouse Blog

Michael Steven Gregory and Wes Albers pulled of yet another successful writers conference in Palm Springs at the 3rd Annual Southern California Writers Conference last weekend. An estimated 120+ writers came in from all over to the Hyatt in downtown Palm Springs.

Friday was a bit slower than I thought it would be with about half of the attendees coming in to attend the afternoon sessions. The conference didn’t officially start until 3:00 pm, so when I closed the doors on my 3:40 self publishing workshop, there were only about 7 attendees in the class. The upside was we had a great session that took the entire 90 minutes and then some.

Saturday rolled around and activity was certainly increased. I had lunch with an old friend whom I had met at the San Diego Writers Conference, Frank Thornbourgh, from the Sacramento area. Frank is a long-time short story writer and avid writers conference junkie. He visited AuthorHouse last summer on a road trip to the Midwest and met with Scott Walters, one of our esteemed Author Services Representatives. Frank and I recruited several writers to go out after the evening keynote by Kathryn Jordan, author of “Hot Water“.

My afternoon session was full, and I mean full. We had at least 40 attendees covering every facet of the publishing spectrum from aspiring authors just beginning to think about a story to published authors frustrated with their current publisher. Surprisingly, I spent most of the 90 minute session talking about the business side of publishing: royalties, pricing of books, how advances work, and the growing number of titles coming into the system each year. After presenting the case for self publishing and the economics behind it, several authors were anxious to talk more after the session and into the evening.

Kudos to Michael and Wes, I’m anxious to come back in February to San Diego.