Maria Savva's Blog - Posts Tagged "robert-mccrum"

I have just come back from a two-day conference at the Free Word Centre.

The conference was organised by The Literary Consultancy, in partnership with The Times Literary Supplement.

I am very grateful to my fellow indie author, Laxmi Hariharan, for telling me about the conference and arranging a press pass for me so that I could attend the event.

I enjoyed the conference and learned a few things that I am sure will help in my ongoing publishing adventure. Highlights for me were:

1. The keynote speech by Audrey Niffenegger (author of The Time Traveler's Wife). I picked up a signed copy of her novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, which I am very much looking forward to reading.

2. Steve Bohme's statistics about book sales (Bowker Market Research).

3. The speech by Robert McCrum, an associate editor of The Observer, about his perspective on the change in the contemporary book world.

4. Audience Storytime, where we heard from some independently published authors about their experiences with self-publishing.

5. Canon Tales: Stories Behind the Book, where we heard from various industry professionals about their love of literature and their hopes for the future of literature.

I'm going to be reporting back on what I learned at the conference in a short series on my blog in the coming weeks. There was a lot of information about how the book world has changed with the digital revolution. There were discussions about self-publishing, editing, what works best for marketing both traditionally published and self-published books.

It was well worth attending the conference. I met a few fellow writers who I will be keeping in touch with too. All in all, it was an enjoyable experience, and an informative and entertaining couple of days.

I have taken some comprehensive notes of all the speeches and discussions and will be writing about those soon.