Daily talks are given by authors and agents.
The first two could not have been more different.
Monday last week kicked off with an author who is a 'Jill-of-all-trades'. She's had a crack at writing on a spread of topics, not just fiction. She's also a dab hand at small business, something she attributes to her need for variety.
The next day we had a former star feature writer for one of London's dailies. She found herself drawn to being an author after getting tired of the tread-mill of deadlines that is journalism. She did an MBA and then launched into a career in the niche now known as Young Adult Fiction - which by all accounts and sales figures, is booming.
She wrote her first novel and has stuck to the same genre with the next 5 - they're quite successful.
I asked her a couple of days later if she thought she could have written the novels without doing the MBA. "Thats a very interesting question" she said. She probably could have, but the MBA gave her the confidence to do the novels. Which I found interesting given the confidence you would need in writing feature articles in a major UK newspaper for a living.
Confidence and how you discover it has been a topic in many discussions - both by the speakers and among the group.
A lot of discussion in her Q & A at the end touched on the incredible need in the market for more of the same ie 'the next big thing' so long as it's Harry Potter or vampire-related.
Another guy spoke about how he created his own genre. He re-imagined a 30's paper-back detective noir in a small sleepy Welsh village. He's written 4 or 5 of them - they've been successful.
So by now a pattern seems to be emerging.
For fiction novelists, the key to success is to write for yourself. You can never please everyone.
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