Top 5 Pick-Up Lines at the Media Conference

In my experience, media and publishing conferences are attended by an interesting mix of sales-types, writers, and geeks. Especially where writers or bloggers congregate, you can expect a lot of women. Such good odds for the men in attendance, so why are their openers still so awful?

• What’s your handle so I can tweet you?
• I’d love to expose you to my audience.
• Meet me in my room. We can update our status.
• I can get you on the front page of Digg.
• Not everything in publishing has been downsized! [insert wink]

When will they learn? It’s all about good white shirts, intelligent jokes and this:

• You are NOT in your forties!

This one works. Anywhere. Always. Every time. But if it doesn’t, try something dirty–like a martini.

Image Credit: Peter Gorges, Flickr

Subjectivity in Publishing

This is for anyone who writes, or anyone who wants to write. The rest of you should go back to your previously scheduled programming.

Few of us struggle with words strictly for ourselves. We may not aspire to the New York Times Bestseller list, or even to make money from our writing, but most of us want other people to read the words we have wrenched from our very souls. (Too much?)

Anyway, this is about subjectivity. You hear it all the time – that publishing is an extremely subjective business. There is usually one person at a time who decides if your work moves on to the next set of eyes, the next step in the publishing process. And this process can involve many such judgments along the way.

To give you an example, I entered a story in a contest at this year’s Oklahoma Writer’s Federation Conference. It’s probably my favorite short story that I have written. Short, simple, sad, and centered on a young girl’s abortion. I entered it last year in the same contest and it received a score of 99/100. Great score, right? And the comments – raving. However, since there were so many entries to the short story category, my 99 didn’t merit 1st through 3rd place, or any of the eight honorable mentions. On the bright side, because it didn’t place in the contest I was allowed to submit it again this year. So I did. And it scored…. ready?

68/100

The comments, as you can imagine, were not complimentary.

Maybe it was my subject matter and the fact that I live in Bibleland, USA, or maybe it was the writing. Either way: publishing is subjective. Never doubt it.

99 or 68 – it’s still my favorite.