Things to Learn About the Book Business at the Wordstock Book Festival

I love book festivals.

We exhibit at some of the biggest and best in the country including the Tucson Festival of Books, The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, and the Miami Book Fair International. Nancy and I are looking forward to Wordstock in Portland, Oregon next weekend.

If you love books, you can’t beat the conversations at a book festival. Each time we go we meet some wonderful people, talk about interesting and exciting books, explore the craft of writing, and learn more about what is happening in the business of books. You can get a great education at a book festival just by walking around, talking to people, visiting fellow exhibitors, and dropping in on some of the speaker sessions. We come home enriched by the experience.

Each time I go to a festival I set a goal. This my goal time is to learn more about tools that will help self-publishing authors in their roles as entrepreneurs. I will be at the festival as an exhibitor, so most of my time will be spent in our Stories To Tell booth talking with people about how we can help them turn their manuscript into a well edited, well designed, professional looking book. I have chosen to sneak out for three sessions:

• Kickstarter: An Author’s Guide to Crowdfunding Success

• Publicity and Publishing Secrets No Author Can Afford to Live Without

• Writers and Social Media: Developing a Distinctive, Memorable and Effective Voice

I also plan to stop by the booths of Jan Bear’s Market Your Book, Inkwater Press, and Bianco Publishing, all of which offer marketing and publicity services for self-published authors.

If you are going to Wordstock, what sessions are you looking forward to most? (Click here to see the festival schedule.) If you can’t attend, check out the schedule and leave a question you would have asked had you been there. I will see if I can get it answered.

I’ll post after the festival on what I learn.