This workshop goes over everything you need to know to pitch your book articulately, enticingly, and successfully to editors and agents. Covers logline, genre, hook, questions to ask in a pitch, and what questions to prepare to answer. Includes multiple worksheets plus a customizable in-pitch guide.

A two-hour version of this workshop includes a pitch "demo", individual hands-on exercises like logline writing, and group brainstorming of “key words” to use in a pitch.

(2-Hour Workshop) If your settings aren’t doing double duty (or even triple duty), they’re not working hard enough. Explore how your settings can go beyond location and time to reveal your character's personality, enhance or instigate conflict, and establish tone, mood, and atmosphere—all without slowing down your story. Discussion, examples, and hands-on writing exercises will help you make settings an important tool in your “show, don't tell” toolbox.

Fiction that doesn't make us feel something is fiction we fail to remember. This workshop will focus on techniques to help writers show not tell and get in touch with their emotions.

Ready to reach more readers and boost your book sales? Join USA Today Bestselling author, Jennie Marts, as she covers the basics of creating Amazon ads that help your book stand out. You’ll learn how to create ads and leave equipped with actionable tips and insights to make your ads work for you. Whether you’re new to Amazon ads or just want some easy-to-follow tips, this session will give you the tools to start using Amazon ads to get your book in front of more readers!

The MCU may be the first thing that pops to mind when you think of a shared world IP, but it’s a fast-growing trend in publishing communities. We’ll talk about shared universes in speculative fiction: what they are, how they work, IP considerations, and how to write in another author’s sandbox. From there, we’ll explore co-writing, including the best ways to outline and prepare for writing with a co-author, various techniques to splitting the workload, and the “yes, and” mindset that helps make these stories shine their brightest.

If you’ve ever written a book but didn’t have the expertise to flesh it out the way you wanted, want to write in another author’s IP, or just want to write a novel with your best buddy, we’ve got you covered.

We review the concepts of allegory, archetypes, tropes and other story templates and how they can be used to shortcut what we are trying to deliver in our writing and create depth and subtext to our themes and characters. In the last hour we brainstorm characters using archetypes then allow writing time in the class to show off our new skills.

Often neglected the most important part of the process is prewriting. Spurned by a powerful but short-sighted urge to “get started" one rushes headlong and unprepared into the deep unforgiving waters of muddled middles, flat characters, incomplete ideas, and weak plots only to founder and wreck on the infamous writer’s block.

What you need is a pre-writing checklist to verify you’re ready, that your is hold full, your ship intact, your destination sure. Laden with sharpened harpoons for the literary leviathans that await.

This class presents a concrete check list of items and angles every author should consider before starting out of any work of fiction.