Bar Camps tend to attract presenters with something to sell, though if they’re wise, they’ll focus on presenting useful information and not selling. The visiting experts at the Bryan, TX Writers BarCamp did just that, giving solid advice based on years of experience. Several speakers were professional writers servants; that is, they serve writers, as editors or marketers.
I don’t like to think of my writing as a product to sell. I’d rather express what’s in my heart and let it find its own audience. However, as several session leaders reminded us, successful publishers don’t have quite that same attitude. Before they will print your book, they would like to know that you have thought about who might buy it. (Unless you’re paying them to print it, in which case you still ought to think about who might buy it. Because that’s not their job.)
I knew that publishers have fewer editing and marketing resources than most beginning authors would imagine. Writers BarCamp stressed the necessity of finding other resources to help you sell your writing, whether to an agent or to a publisher or to book buyers. I asked one session leader, a bespectacled PhD who writes hard-boiled detective fiction set in Hawaii, if he was surprised at how much work his publisher had him do after his novel was published. He responded that they had a lot of work for him to do before that.
