Bouchercon 2019: Conference Survival Tips

Because Bouchercon was such a weird experience this year, I’ve made the executive decision to not do a review. Instead I’ve bothered all my writer friends for their writing conference survival tips.

Conferences are awesome! You learn stuff! Make friends! But they’re also a lot. Networking! People! Microaggressions!

I’m pretty bad at coming through a conference in a healthy and responsible manner (I at least do the sleep-eat-shower thing), so here are smarter people than me giving you their best conference survival advice.

Scariest thing at the conference: the Book Critic
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Networking, or Bracing For No

I may have mentioned this here before (I complain about it a lot), but the days of writers typing furiously, sending the novel off to their editor, then starting on the next one are long over. Now we have to network and promote and talk to people.

Look, if I wanted to talk to people I wouldn’t have become a writer, okay? That’s, like, the opposite of the point. If I wanted to tell my interesting stories to people directly I would have gone into comedy or something.

But alas, here we are.

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