But first, a bit about our contest series. Every week we are going to have a contest on our Facebook Page. The contests will change from week to week, but the winners will always be published in the magazine. The contest winner and the runner up are chosen by a voting system, and then the editors of Authors Publish will select several additional entries from the rest to be the Editor’s Choice winners.

Below are all the winners of this week’s contest. This week the challenge was to write down what you were most thankful for, using 50 words or less.

The next contest starts at 9 am PST on Saturday.

Winner:

Runner Up:

Editor’s Choice:

Writing conferences are one of the few places where you have an opportunity to pitch directly to literary agents. Many conferences have agents you can sign up to consult with for free. Others have less formal events where you can mingle with agents. Now, not all writers conferences offer this option, so you should do your research first. But most conferences will have at least one or two agents in attendance, so even if you don’t have the opportunity to make a formal pitch you can make an informal one, and you can get to know the agents better. Even if an agent is not interested in your work, they might know another agent that is, or they might give you good advice on how to make your work appeal more to agents.

Also, most writing conferences have a book fair, a place where large, local, and independent publishers sell their books. Many of the smaller publishers and even some of the larger publishers have booths manned by the editors themselves. This means that you can talk to potential publishers directly. You can also get a much better idea about what kind of books they are interested in publishing, just from looking at the material on the table. Usually, literary journals have tables at these events as well.

The panels and lectures at most conferences itself are educational and cover a variety of topics. Some are lead by established writers, others by publishers, editors, and professors. You can learn a lot from these lectures about writing and the publishing world. A lot of the information you learn here is much more up to date than print publications and even internet articles.

You have a lot of opportunities to meet other writers at conferences. Some focus on meeting famous writers and collecting autographs at sessions such as these. I am much more interested at meeting other writers at my level. I really love the opportunity to have so many literary conversations. If it is a local conference, then it is a great opportunity to meet other writers who might want to start a writing group with you.

Speaking of local conferences, when you are first starting out, it can be best to attend a writing conference in your area. You can save a lot of money by doing so and you are more likely to connect with fellow writers in your area, as well as local art organizations, regional publishers and local agents. Some of these conferences will be very small, but sometimes the smallest conferences still offer a lot of opportunities.

The biggest writers conference is the AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference. They rotate their location every year. This year it will be held in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Thousands of writers attend every year.

I encourage you to look for writing conferences in your area and then if you find the experience educational, consider attending a larger conference such as AWP.

Hot Key Books is an imprint of Bonnier Publishing which is part of the much larger international Bonnier a large media group.

Hot Key Books is based in the UK. They publish books for kids and teens between the ages of 8-18. The cover art for these books is exceptional. They also have a great, easy to use website. They even have a map to encourage people to visit them if they are in the UK. I think that their catalog is the best part, and very unique. I encourage you to check it out, in part because it will give you a better idea of what they are looking for.

Their staff list is very impressive, most of the people working their have a great deal of experience. The managing editor previously worked for a number of big name publishers including Penguin and Bloomsbury.

Hot Key Books has some established and respected authors on their list already, including Garth Nix. Hot Key Books has already published a lot of books in a wide variety of genres.

They are open to unsolicited submissions. Submitting is very easy to do. Just email them a synopsis and the full edited manuscript of your book (as an attachment). They do not respond to every submission, only the ones they are interested in perusing. So if you have not heard back from them after six months or so, it is safe to assume they are not interested in your novel.

To learn more visit their website here.

We are so used to interacting with the world from our own bodies, from our own height and shape. Many of us take this for granted. However, by altering such a fundamental thing, we are able to write about new and unusual things.

You can focus in the prompt on how the world looks now and how you feel in it. Or instead you can focus on interacting with this world. Just take 15 minutes or so to imagine this and write the details down. You should end up with some very interesting results.

They are a great publication in part because they are not just focused on literature. They are open to all the arts. A wide variety of artists contribute to the magazine. This also means that their readership is more varied.

They have a low acceptance rate. It takes them about a year to get back to most submitters. They use Submittable to manage all their submissions.

It is easy to get a feel for the work that they publish as they post the weekly Word Choice column online. The poetry they publish leans a little towards fragmentation. The fiction they publish tends to be rather straightforward, with a tinge of mystery.

BOMB Magazine accepts submissions of unsolicited poetry and prose for their literary supplement First Proof and their weekly online Word Choice column. Any submissions to BOMB will be considered for both. If your work is accepted they will tell you where it will appear. They do not consider unsolicited submissions for any other category.

To learn more visit their website here: http://bombmagazine.org/ To submit, visit their submission manager here: https://bombmagazine.submittable.com/submit/22385