Over the weekend I attended Northwest Bookfest, a writers & readers conference held at Northwest University.
This was my first time attending the event, which was housed in the Health & Science center within the university's campus.
The directions provided on the website helped me navigate, as I drove hell for leather the posted speed limit up to and through Kirkland.
As I zoomed past cruised up to the main gate, I spotted these helpful signs...
This year's theme was "Navigating the Digital Age." Wifi was provided, of course I forgot to bring my laptop--on both days.
Despite the digital theme, there were plenty of hard copy books available for purchase...
Vendors and exhibitors lined the halls...
...of both floors:
During the course of the two-day event, I managed to meet some of the local writers I know, like:
Deborah Schneider (who I think organized the festival)
Terry Persun and his daughter Nicole.
I also managed to make some new acquaintances with:
Abigail Carter (I even bought her book for my mom)
and
There were ten workshops writers could attend, five each day and a few of them were free to the public. The ones I attended will be blogfodder for upcoming posts. The main thrust of the most of the seminars dealt with building and maintaining an on-line presence so readers can:
a. find you--and--b. buy your books.
However, the writing community seemed to be divided into two tribes.
The first tribe advocated getting on every social media platform in cyberspace: Facebook, Pintrest, Google+ and even YouTube. Funny though, MySpace was never mentioned.
The second tribe wasn't against all on-line activity, only against anything that made you feel uncomfortable, or siphoned off your most valuable commodity--time. Time you need to write your books.
What both tribe did agree on is that writers need to have a user-friendly website.
Upcoming posts under the NW Bookfest label will be about specific workshops and what I learned (and what I've done/still doing wrong).
So stay tuned!
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