Making the Most of the Backspace Conference

This conference is tremendously helpful in 4 major ways:

1) You get direct feedback from agents about your work.  In most cases you will receive constructive criticism, and sometimes they will make suggestions about your plot or characters that they believe will make the book much more appealing.  The most frustrating aspect of this is that you will often receive conflicting advice from different agents, and it is up to you to discern which suggestions are right for you.  If you are very lucky, one of the agents critiquing your work will ask you to send them something after the conference.

2) Speaking with agents so that you can query them after the conference.  This one is really important!  After the panel sessions, the agents on the panel (sitting behind a long table on the dais) will usually stick around for 15 minutes.  Be quick.  Get up there and approach any agents on the panel who might be a good fit for your type of book.

What I do is politely say that I am wondering if it would be appropriate for me to query them on my project, and then I briefly give them a pitch as to what my book is all about.  I did this with 12 agents, and only one said that he did not feel that he would be the right person to represent my book.  For the others, I asked what, precisely, I should send.  The typical answer was to send the query plus 50 pages or 3 chapters.  One agent wanted me to send the query plus one special scene from the book - I liked that.

The key here is that after I spend time improving my query letter and my manuscript based on suggestions I received from the agents, I will be able to email these agents directly with a subject header that says something like "Follow-up from Backspace Conference."  I know that these emails will be read and treated more carefully than simply one of hundreds of other emails received each week.

3) Learning more about the industry.  During the panel discussions, the agents talk about their business and how they work with authors and editors.

4) Meeting other authors.  This is a good opportunity to find others like yourself and with whom you can perhaps form writers groups.  We all need to receive feedback from non-friends and non-family members!