The Welsh Academy’s Writers’ Fair 3/11/2012

A valuable day of informative and creative sessions and the chance to meet fellow writers, industry professionals and publishers from Wales.

These are the main points I took away from the Welsh Academy Writers' Fair, sponsored by Literature Wales.
 

Promote your work by intelligent use of social media.

Author and arts critic Jasper Rees, social media consultant Emma Meese and poet Osian Rhys Jones gave advice about using:-

Twitter

• Build or join a community of interest around your writing. 50 followers you keep communicating with is worth more than touting for 1000s with no guarantee they will contribute or seriously comment on your work.
• Devise profiles for your characters to maintain interest in your story
• Use nostalgia as a tool for arousing interest.

Facebook 

• Use lists to target your audience.
• Beware sharing tweets with FB which treats them as spam.
• Use a quote of the day & photo to support it.

Promoting your work abroad – Wales Arts International have grants for attending workshops & conferences abroad. Nia Davies from Welsh Literature Exchange will handle translations of your work.

Genre Writing – don’t be slavish to what conventions are expected. Write what pleases you and you will be able to argue about genre when you have the ear of a publisher, says science fiction author Jasper Fforde and crime novelist Belinda Bauer.

Getting an agent. Enter your work in competitions. Publishers and agents will contact you if you are shortlisted.

Jasper Rees (Jasper.Rees@btconnect.com) & writer Angela Graham offered this advice on how to pitch your creative ideas, in person or in writing, to a publisher or agent.

Angela's 7 Key Points of Pitching                                                                               

1. What EXACTLY are you pitching? What exactly do you want? To convince an industry professional first convince yourelf by answering the question “Why does this book need to be written?”
2. Who is your catcher? What does the catcher want?
3. The right ball for this game?
4. Designing a pitch –matching what you and your catcher offer and want
5. Structuring for maximum impact. Start the pitch with a para stating why the book must be written and a log line of the story. 2^nd para should be an outline of the plot to give reader a desire to turn the pages
6. The catcher sees and sees why 
7.  Pitch to be catchable

Mention must be made too of Jon Gower's contributions, anecdotes of his encounters abroad and poetic readings from his book Too Cold for Snow. Also from Christine James who read in Welsh with those of us non-speakers being provided with headphones and a live translation service (thank you Christian). Such was welcome lubrication for the drier mechanics of information exchange, useful as it all was.