From Thursday to Sunday, I attended the annual conference and bookfair for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs in Denver, CO. While there, I attended panel discussions about the craft and business of writing, and I enjoyed readings given by well-known authors (Etgar Keret, George Saunders, Tony Hoagland, and Robert Hass).
When I attended last year’s conference, I was interested in how many people supported print and still believe in it as a medium. This year, I wanted to pay more attention to the ways that publishers, writers, and literary magazines/journals are using technology and social media to expand and promote their brands.
Here are 10 ways that technology enhanced my experienced of the conference and made me more excited about the future of publishing and writing:
1. Online lit mags/journals used laptops to showcase their work: Some of the first people I met at the conference were the founders and editors of Knee-Jerk, an online-only literary magazine that publishes fiction, creative nonfiction, essays, interviews, and reviews. When I asked the guys if I could see samples of their work, they pointed to a laptop on their table. The browser was already open to various pages from their website, and I was able to peruse the Knee-Jerk the way I might do from the comfort of my own home.
2. Graywolf Press Twitter account: On Friday, I attended a reading with authors from Graywolf Press, a publishing house that publishes authors like Charles Baxter, Sven Birkerts, Jane Kenyon, and William Stafford. I loved the reading (especially Catie Rosemurgy and Tony Hoagland), and I live-tweeted my opinions of it. I had not been following Graywolf Press on Twitter, but the compaby’s marketing manager found my tweets and retweeted some of my insights.
GraywolfPress: RT @ryssiebee: Misheard book titles: I thought “How to Escape from a Leper Colony” was “How to Escape from a Leprechaun.” Woops. #awp10
GraywolfPress: RT @ryssiebee: Poet Catie Rosemurgy is reading from “The Stranger Manual.” Crazy good, highly recommended. #awp10
3. Finding friends via the #awp10 hashtag: On Friday, I took a few minutes to browse tweets tagged with the #awp10 hashtag. I was surprised by how few people were tweeting with this hashtag, but I started following some of the more interesting tweeters. Within an hour or two, some of these people started to follow me back, and I exchanged insights and recommendations with them. Two new friends I made via the #awp10 hashtag were Chris Hollister and Jenn Crowell. Chris recommended I try coffee at Tattered Cover Bookstore after he saw my tweet about browsing books there.
4. Emma Straub: On Thursday, I bought “Fly-Over State” by Emma Straub (published by Flatmancrooked) after speaking to one of the editors at the Flatmancrooked table. He totally sold me on the book and the company’s mission, and I’m a huge fan now. I tweeted about buying Emma’s book, and she found me on Twitter. She encouraged me to come back to the table to meet her and to pick up a “love letter“, a personalized note that she wrote for each person who bought her book. Through Twitter, I was able to ask Emma where and when I could find her. She even recognized me when I came up to her at the table!
5. Fiction for people who like blogging: Anyone who says people no longer read because the Internet has shortened attention spans needs to check out flash fiction, or extremely short stories, most no longer than a page. At AWP, a few flash fiction journals and publishers were exhibiting their works. NANO Fiction is one example.
6. An anecdote about cheese spreaders: I was chatting with a representative from Eleven Eleven, a biannual journal of literature and art published by the graduate writing program at the California College of the Arts. She handed me a postcard about their journal and explained the artwork to me: “Cheese Spreaders” by Judith Selby Lang and Richard Lang. I was so intrigued by the story she told me about the plastic cheese spreaders (cheese and cracker packages, anyone?) that I made a point to visit the journal’s website the next time I got to my computer. You can roll over each cheese spreader to view works published in the journal.
7. NewPages.com: NewPages.com is probably the most “meta” thing I saw because it represented all the literary magazines that were representing themselves at the conference. NewPages.com is an online directory of literary magazines, information about writing contests, information about submission deadlines, and helpful hints for writers.
8. Fiction Writers Review: Fiction Writers Review is an online literary journal by and for emerging fiction writers. The website includes book reviews, essays, interviews with writers, and a blog! This online magazine organized a panel about the Evolution of New Media (I was not able to attend), and you can watch a video preview of the panel here.
9. Using Twitter as a notebook: Instead of carrying a notebook with me (I did carry a notebook, but I didn’t really use it), I took notes via Twitter and tagged them all with the #awp10 hashtag. I hope I didn’t annoy any of my followers with my manic style of conference tweeting! I tweeted both to entertain my followers (and my myself) and to keep a log of my observations. I tweeted various insights and photos I took at the bookfair. My tweets are definitely helping me now that I’m putting together this list and reflecting on my experiences.
10. SubmishMash: SubmishMash is a free (for all publishers of art and literature) online submission management tool for literary journals and magazines that take electronic submissions. With this tool, editors can run contests and accept submission fees. SubmishMash can be customized to conform to the literary magazine’s needs.
Using Twitter while at AWP 2010 and talking to various editors and writers about their experiences with social media definitely enhanced my overall conference experience. Even now, I am connecting via social networks with all the contacts I made at the conference. I hope that these connections will be mutually beneficial and fulfilling in the future!
Note about the photo: I found this written in the inside cover of a chapbook I saw at the bookfair, and I decided to take a picture of it. However, I do not remember the title of the book.
Interesting. But I hope to hear more from you some day, (perhaps in a post), about how you feel social media will or will not ultimately help the writing industry itself. (Most specifically, those that are trying to break into same.)
I enjoyed your review of the events of AWP and believe you are absolutely right in how the DIgital Age has made such an impact on every facet on everything in our lives. I implore you to check out the movie Epic 2015, it is on YouTube and is a great account of how the journalism industry is and will be affected by the Internet.
You should have checked out Evolution of the New Media, that was truly a great panel and portrayed just how involved digital mediums are in journalism and literature now. But, I want to reiterate that this is a fantastic article and I am going to show it to my staff during our next meeting if you do not mind.
Oh, and I should point out that I am Chris Hollister from Twitter lol, That name is derived from my professional wrestling character but my real name is Ben
Ben LeDoux
http://the-technicolor.blogspot.com
Thanks for the shout-out!
It was great to “meet” you both on Twitter (thanks for the Tattered Cover coffee rec, Chris/Ben!).
I was just commenting to my husband yesterday that tweeting at AWP really showed the positive potential of what can happen on Twitter. I had a blast following everyone’s tweets, getting great recommendations, and (most importantly) feeling connected at an event that was far more massive than I expected. (And it certainly helped to know that I wasn’t the only one huddled in my hotel room reading literary journals while the masses went bar-hopping …)
Jenn
Thanks for the nod to NewPages. AWP is our favorite event of the year, and we definitely look forward to meeting so many people F2F that we otherwise only know online. One adjustment to our ‘meta’ status is that we were actually not representing all the mags already there – as much as we do try! Many were there, but we were also ’showing our covers’ for some mags who could not attend AWP. We set up a couple browsing racks of lit mags for readers who might not otherwise have the opportunity to puruse some of those titles. Maybe more ‘meta’ is that we were there representing our online presence – so perhaps we were being meta beings – ? Nonetheless – hope to see/meet you in DC 2011 where we’ll be meta-ing again.