Scheduled as 9am-3pm, I arrived at 8.50 and spent 40 minutes kicking my heels until the event began at 9.45. I saw no one I knew in the milling crowds, almost too many for the space allocated and I kept moving around the halls and corridors as I knew I would be sitting for a long time.
Darren (I never knew his surname) kicked off and introduced panelists - Louise Ross, David Leadbeater, Paul Teague and Margaret Skea.
Paul represented The Alliance of Independent Authors and Margaret the Society of Authors. David and Lousie represented highly successful authors to tell us "how they did it."
Entertaining, informative and interesting. A lot of people were already published but many were not. I met some people I know at the coffee and lunch breaks, observed far more men in the audience than I expected and happened to be sitting next to someone for 5 hours who never volunteered a word, never shifted from her seat and made copious notes in miniscule writing on a clip board. Some authors are just loners. I first saw her sitting on the floor in a corner, writing on her clipboard and that was at 9am while everyone else milled about talking and scoffing breakfast.
It seems that to be mega successful a writer also needs to ne a technical wizard these days, or be prepared to pay lots of money for outsourcing. £800 pounds sounds a lot of money to me for editing, and I hate to think what might be paid out for designing and establishing websites. There seems to be an industry following indie writers now. Cover artists, web designers, societies that charge a joining fee; ISBNs, formatting charges to convert an ms into a Kindle book; some people claim several different kinds of editing are required, all at a cost.There are pitfalls, too. Some editors charge £200 and are not good at what they do. I suspect that cost is as much a gatekeeper these days as agents ever were. Not everyone can afford such costs when there are no guarantees a book will ever sell.
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