I am hoping all of you have made it home successfully after the recent RWA contest. If you are not home yet, I am betting you are out having a great "after trip" relaxation time. Regardless, I am hoping all of you, like myself, felt that this conference was a great success.
I personally want to say that I felt this year was one of the best conferences ever. As I pointed out on a post a couple of days ago, were there some glitches? Sure. But to be honest, every conference, will have those. In this case, however, those hiccups were well over-shadowed by the quality of the production.
As I looked over the conference, the one thing that stood out to me, as an agent, that made this one of the best conferences ever, was the increase in CRAFT sessions available to the writers. If you have followed my blog in the past, this is one of those things I have complained about a lot. Conferences had backed off of the craft sessions and ran more on marketing side of things. I do believe this has led, partially, to the decrease in quality writing we see on our end.
There are a lot of writers out there who still need to learn those basics, and RWA stepped up this year and helped out that population. BIG CONGRATULATIONS.
A second area of success from this year came from the support the staff provided to the attendees. From the moment of check-in and well in to the conference, people were there to help. I don't know if this stemmed from the RWA or the hotel, but I especially loved the people standing in the lobby of the hotel there to answer questions of how to find meetings and sessions. Small touches like this were great.
Carol Ritter and her team also need to be commended for their work on trying out the new approaches to the pitch sessions and the Industry Marketplace. Again, were there glitches? Sure. But these were really small. These were new approaches and obviously, a first run of these ideas is never likely going to be perfect the first time around. I did talk to Carol and the team and the Board of Directors are already looking to find some new approaches to fine-tune these ideas.
We live in a society where there are a lot of people who want to do nothing but complain. Hearing a compliment is not something we hear very often. I am personally going to step up here and send out that big congratulations! Well done.
I also want to end with one additional note. This came from a tweet I saw from the amazing Sarah Maclean. "If you like the direction #rwa2018 is heading, or have ideas on how it can keep going strong, you should run for office!" I 100% agreed with her on this, but added one more idea. If there were things you did not like, and I know there were authors who had complaints, do not just sit around on social media and complain. Do not sit in your writing chapters and complain. Go volunteer. Step up. Do something. Tessa Dare noted in the tweet that Sarah added to stating: Several board members are terming out this year, so there are more spots "up for grabs" so to speak. Also, there's still time to declare candidacy! Open until the end of the month.
Regardless of that, I am again ending by saying GREAT JOB!!!!
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