Back from Left Coast Crime!

The blog was more silent than usual last week; I was finishing up a project and out of town for the Left Coast Crime conference – a fantastic West Coast mystery convention, organized by volunteers, that takes place in a different location every year. This year’s conference, “Honolulu Havoc” — took place at the Hilton Hawaiian Village Resort in Waikiki (O’ahu, Hawaii) Later that morning, I spoke on the Historical Mystery panel with Rebecca Cantrell, Ovidia Yu, Ann Parker, and fantastic moderator Noel Hynd: Later in the weekend, I moderated a panel on Religion in Crime Fiction, attended even more

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Conferences and Copyrights

Most authors attend a writers’ conference at least once (for many, at least once a year) in a writing career. (If you haven’t, I recommend it highly, for many reasons.) Conferences are a gold mine of information, education, and opportunities to make connections and reconnect with friends. And, like every other part of the publishing business, conferences raise some copyright questions for authors. Today, we’re taking a look at a couple of the most common conference copyright questions. 1. Workshop handouts are copyrighted, and belong to the workshop presenter (or handout creator.) This means attendees cannot reproduce, distribute, or share workshop handouts

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Grand Slam! How to Write a Winning Pitch

As promised, today’s post takes a look at how to write an effective pitch for your manuscript. There are many good ways to do this, and many ways to intrigue an editor, agent, or reader, so I do not claim thisway is the only one. It is, however, the one I used–effectively–when pitching my Shinobi mystery series, and the one I teach when working with other writers. Again, to be clear: I do not claim this is the only way to success. It’s simply the one I’m teaching. A winning pitch  – regardless of how it’s written – does one thing:

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