California Crime Writers Conference – Part 2

 Today, I am writing about the second day of the California Crime Writers Conference 2019.

Day two of the conference was jam packed with lots of learning opportunities. Larry and I chose different workshops for the first period.

I went to the presentation on Your Author Website. I was pleased to see that we were doing everything the presenter recommended, thanks to our fabulous webmaster, our son, Toshi. Several years ago, he offered to redesign it. Actually, he begged to do it. I must admit my former quick-and-dirty one was terribly old-fashioned looking. The new one is beautiful, and we love it. He promised he’d keep it updated, and he has. I can’t ever thank him enough!

Larry attended the presentation on Creating Audiobooks. Since we have most of ours on audio, he wanted to know what we should think about. He discovered ACX/Amazon dominate the field. It takes about six hours for each hour of completed narration. You can either pay up-front or share royalties. (We always do the latter.) However, if you are a major author with lots of sales, paying up-front makes sense. (The cost is $200-$400 and can go up to $1000, based on the length of the book and the reputation of the narrator.)

We both attended the panel on Cozies on the Edge: Meeting and Subverting Reader Expectations. This one was fun because each of the panelists writes books which differ from traditional cozies. Yet they meet some of the criteria: the incident (murder, etc.) happens offstage and they usually feature an amateur detective. Several friends were on this panel, so I thoroughly enjoyed it.

The next one was on A Winning Team: Author, Agent, and Editor. Since we don’t have an agent, and I do my own editing (not just for our books, but for others), it was interesting. The takeaway for me was getting an agent mostly depends on luck and timing. In the age of self-publishing, it is no longer necessary to have an agent unless you are aiming for a New York publisher, and those are fewer and fewer all the time.

The keynote speaker at lunch was Catroina McPherson. She spoke about writing with passion. I totally agree with her. Authors should never write anything unless they are emotionally committed. She is a witty and totally enjoyable speaker.

After lunch, we attended a panel on Marketing Without a Budget. This one was especially interesting since we are both cheap. We have done many of the things suggested. (A few actually sounded pretty expensive.)

The last panel of the day was How to Build a Long Career. My takeaway was: keep writing. I’ll never begin to catch up with A.J. Lewellyn with over 300 titles! But we now have twenty published between us. Neither of us writes quickly. We do research. And we both “craft” our writing, analyzing each word choice and sentence. This takes time, and it’s time we are willing to spend to produce books we can be proud of.

Tess Gerritsen gave the final presentation: How to Find Your What If. She talked about where she gets her ideas. Some come from current events. She keeps newspaper clippings she finds interesting. Later on, something else may happen, and she realizes the two things can be woven into a cohesive story. She has also written books based on her dreams. She is a terrific speaker as well as a wonderful author.

The last event was interviews of Tess and Catroina by the organizers of the conference. It was nice to learn a bit more about them and their backgrounds.

We thoroughly enjoyed the weekend and plan to attend the next one in two years. This is one we highly recommend for mystery writers.

California Crime Writers Conference

We spent the past two days at the California Crime Writers Conference.

This one is held every two years, and we always enjoy it. We have attended several in the past. Why do we attend? Because we always learn something, and we get to see old friends we don’t see anywhere else.

For each Panel/Workshop session, several options are offered. It’s a regular smorgasbord of choices.

Since we write historical fiction, we chose “Bringing the Past to Life” for the first one. All of the panelists write in different eras, so the discussion was most interesting. Someone suggested looking for old maps as a resource. We’d never really thought about it, although we saw some doing the research for The Memory Keeper, and the book itself contains one. 

We already knew a couple of the panelists, but we met Rosemary Lord. She writes about the history of Hollywood, and did some voice-overs for one of my favorite movies, The Holiday. We’re now Facebook friends.

The next panel I attended was called “Killer Dialogue.” Anne Cleeland moderated a great group of authors. I so enjoyed some of their suggestions of how to make dialogue authentic and interesting, including using humor.

At lunch, Tess Gerritsen delivered the keynote speech on writing with emotion. We had heard her in 2005 at the Maui Writers Conference and enjoyed her both then and now. She talked about finding the thing you felt compelled to write about, but making sure you included the character(s) emotions. Since I have a short attention span, I keep finding different things I want to write, and some of the others move to the back burner. I know I do my best writing when I am fully engaged in the subject. And when Larry and I write together, I'm the one who writes most of the emotional scenes.

The panel on “Hallmark Mysteries” was fascinating. They had a producer, writer, and show runner for the channel. No surprises here. Their stories are formulaic (a single woman amateur sleuth—played by an actress too old for the part). How do you get your story made into a Hallmark movie? It’s really all a matter of luck and who you know. Sorry about that. However, they also pointed out that with so many places now producing content (Hulu, Amazon, Lifetime, Netflix, etc) the chances of your book or series being selected are much better than they were in the past.

On Saturday afternoon, they lined up quite a few “experts.” We then played a form of “speed dating.” The attendees sat at tables, and the “experts” moved from table to table. We each got to hear three different people, and their assignments were random. The first at our table was Scott Williams, the executive producer for writing on NCIS. He shared some terrific stories.

Next, we got to chat with Valerie Woods, who is a writer on the Queen Sugar series. She was fascinating. She is clearly someone who loves writing.

Last, was Cindi Parent CFO of Tule Publishing, a relative newcomer to the world of publishing.

The last event of the day was another keynote from Catroina McPherson. She was a delight. Born in Scotland, she has a terrific sense of humor. She titled her talk “Deep in a Bowl of Porridge.” She spoke about clues and how and when to insert them.

And this was only on Saturday!

My next blog will be on Sunday of the conference.