Preliminary Schedule

At this year’s festival, we’re offering something different. One intensive day where you can work with two of the biggest names in publishing: Jane Friedman and Tiffany Yates Martin. At the start of of the day, you’ll be assigned to a group with one of them. Jane Friedman will lead an intensive workshop about the business of writing. Tiffany will guide you in a hand-on experience revising your manuscript. Groups will be small with no more than 35 writers to allow for intensive guidance on two of the most critical aspects of publishing. These lessons apply to all genres and publishing paths: self-publishing, indie, or traditional. In the afternoon, you will switch instructors.

Saturday, June 13

8:30 a.m. Registration Gather and divide into one of two groups

9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. Head into an intensive about either business or editing

12:00 p.m. to 1:00 p.m. Lunch and mingle at the beautiful Historiska Museum

1:00 p.m. to 4:00 p.m. Switch groups! Business heads to Revision and vice versa

4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. Meet our experts together in a special wrap up where you get the chance to ask questions and mingle with all your workshop mates.

6:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. Jane Friedman: “The Truth About AI and the Future of Writing” (Jane’s keynote is part of your ticket. We will also offer this to the public as an add-on ticket)

7:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Mingle with your expanded Scribe Tribe

Business

Getting Known Before and After the Book Deal: If you’re the kind of writer who likes to ask, “What’s the single most important platform-building activity I should focus on?” (because you don’t have time to do it or don't want to do it), this workshop is for you. But it's also for writers eager to platform build because you'll learn foundational principles that will guide you over your entire career.

What do I mean by that? Good marketing doesn't start with a book deal or launch date. It starts once you're a writer who wants to be known in the world as a writer. No matter how you plan to publish, or what you publish, you'll need to give some thought to how you'll make yourself and your work visible to readers. But given how fast tools and techniques change—and how hard it is to attract attention—how can you figure out what’s worthwhile to focus on?

This workshop focuses on key principles that underlie to career-long book marketing, plus the bare minimum required for an online presence. You'll learn how to approach platform building and book marketing work when many of the traditional methods of publicity don’t work so well, given dwindling media coverage and review opportunities. The end goal: feel confident you have a sustainable framework that suits your strengths and can be adjusted as needed given your available time and goals.

Here's what we'll cover.

• Get your author brand in order. Brand for writers is really nothing more than expectation: what readers expect from your based on countless signals. Since readers inevitably form expectations, it is better for the author to shape them deliberately rather than let the brand develop by accident.

• Know your comps and develop relationships. Agents and publishers often want to know your comparable titles or authors when you pitch, as they can be critical in understanding a work's position in the market. But you should be just as interested in knowing your comps as agents, as they're a critical component of both one-time and ongoing marketing and promotion.

• Establish your online presence: Most writers have some kind of online presence, including a website and email newsletter or Facebook page, but they don’t have a clue what it means to develop a cohesive content strategy, how much attention they should pay to new tools, or if they're even encouraging the right outcomes.

• Understand how book launch plans come together. When it comes to book marketing, the biggest mistake that authors make, by far, is focusing on tactics rather than first setting a strategy. Tactics look like: posting on social media, writing guest posts, or planning a podcast tour. Strategy looks like: reaching as many readers of a comp author as possible or becoming a recognizable name in the horror writing community. Each of these strategies could have endless tactics associated with it. A good book launch starts with a strategy then prioritizes tactics to execute on that strategy. What makes for a good strategy? Whatever makes you happy—really!

Platform building is not a one-time event, nor can it be delegated to a third party. To be successful only requires one thing: you. It also helps to set an intention for your efforts, which many writers forget to do. This workshop will help you sort through various strategies, tools, and opportunities available and what might work for your career. By the end, you should feel less anxiety and more centered—and less likely to worry about what industry changes are around the corner.

Craft

Scaling Revision Mountain: Regardless of genre, the challenges of editing our own work are legion: Authors must first overcome their inherent objectivity blinders—where it feels nearly impossible to assess your own work clearly because you’re “filling in the blanks” between the vision in your head and what’s actually on the page. There’s also the cat-juggling overwhelm of trying to grok and grapple with 80,000 words or more of story. Pull one thread and ten others might unravel, and trying to weave them all together cohesively feels like untangling the world’s largest ball of yarn.

And then there’s the fact that the editing process itself can feel opaque, frustrating, and discouraging. Writing craft is often taught as if drafting a story is the main process of creating it, when that’s just the first base camp up Everest. Most of the work of creating a cohesive, effective, polished story happens in the editing process—but if you don’t know how to go about it or give up in overload, your manuscript may never reach readers or pack the punch it could.

But editing your own writing doesn’t have to feel like a painful slog up Revision Mountain. Approached in the right way, it can be a creative, organic, satisfying process for finding the soul of your story and bringing it fully to life. It’s where the real magic happens and you bring the vision of your story you imagined fully onto the page.

Based on decades as an editor working closely with authors and publishers, Tiffany Yates Martin will teach practical techniques for helping writers learn to assess their story’s strengths and weaknesses with an objective editorial eye and pinpoint areas that may need development, clarification, or tightening.

That’s step one: how to find what’s working well in your story, and what may not be. Then you’ll learn how to address problems that may need attention and devise a concrete, actionable game plan for implementing revisions—even huge ones—in a manageable way.  That’s step two: how to fix it.

This workshop offers even the least analytical writer practical, actionable tools to tackle the toughest of edits and hone manuscripts into tight, polished shape. You’ll learn:

• The difference between editing and revising—and how both are indispensable to developing a story

• Why most authors approach revisions in a counterproductive way

• How to gain objectivity—the first step to assessing your own work

• Figuring out what’s wrong—and how to fix it, with exercises like defining your story question, creating an X-ray, making every scene essential, the but/therefore test, and the Tarzan method of story propulsion and character arc

• How to create a game plan: Practical steps for approaching revisions, or, “the triage approach”

• How to get the most out of feedback and critique from others

• Whether and when to hire an editor and what type of edit you may want/need

The workshop will get you started with tips, techniques, and tools, along with practical, hands-on exercises, to help you identify possible areas of weakness in your story and create a clear blueprint for revisions.

Is SWF26 for you? See if you answer “yes” below…