Notes from National: MCRW Members Have a Ball in the Big Easy
Author: Ransom Schwerzler
Original Publication Date in Love Notes: August 2001

One of the most impressive scenes of the RWA® National Conference must be the Readers for Life Literacy Signing. In a grand ballroom you see table after table, row after row, of romance authors with their books. Hundreds of authors, from the writer celebrating her first sale to the real heroines of our genre, the best selling authors, lined up at their tables. They all sit ready to autograph their work. Category novels from sweet to racy are arranged near sweeping historic sagas set in every place and time. The newest blockbusters stack up at the tables near unique small press offerings. 

This is our business. This is our organization. And this is our conference. The gamut of published authors is matched only by the vast spectrum of writers working and hoping for that first sale. RWA’s National Conference is an enormous event designed to serve writers at all points in their careers. 

For writers contemplating the next book, topics range from Voodoo priestesses to FBI agents. Those in the midst of the creative process find workshops examining all facets of the writing craft and the writer’s life. If an author is ready to offer a book for sale, they too have a long list of helpful workshops including RWA’s version of The Weakest Link, in which an editor reads donated query letters aloud and announces. . . “Not going to ask for that!” At first this might seem brutal, but soon you realize that this is exactly what happens hundreds of times a day in offices all over the country. We all need to know this. 

We also need to know about taxes, potential income, press kits, Web sites, how to choose an agent, and how to find time to write in our busy lives. Special retreats are arranged for the published authors and the chapter presidents to meet the needs of those particular groups. The conference truly has a workshop to suit any need. 

As professional writers, we all need to understand the publishing marketplace, and the RWA Conference provides an excellent opportunity to meet the publishing professionals who drive our careers — or those who we would like to have behind the wheel. The editor and agent appointments provide aspiring authors a chance to take a first step into the publishing world, and published writers can use the national conference to schedule valuable face-to-face meetings with the their own editors and agents. 

While meeting those with whom you work can be important to your career, one of the things most often mentioned as a conference highlight is the opportunity to spend time with friends. Conference veterans and long-term RWA volunteers work hard to organize a conference with something for everyone and often find the kinship of other writers is the greatest benefit RWA can give us. 

Looking around the grand ballroom at the luncheons, writers can see glimpses of themselves at other stages of their writing life. Each of the luncheon speakers took us back to her beginnings. Maggie Osborne recalled her struggle to find time to write by telling of her early manuscripts that were written in the bathtub. Patricia Gaffney remembered her first local conference, at which she inscribed “Unpublished Nobody” on the bottom of her name tag. And we could all understand. 

The RWA National Conference brings us together to grow in our craft, learn about our markets, and to understand our business; but most of all our National Conference brings us together to share our journey as writers.

Love Notes, the official monthly newsletter of Music City Romance Writers, is provided to paying members free of charge. If you are an MCRW member and would like to submit an article to Love Notes, visit the main newsletter page for more information. If you would like to reprint one of these articles in your RWA chapter newsletter, please give proper credit to both the author and the original source. For any other uses, please contact the president.