Myrtle Beach Workshop

I'm back from the intensive writer's workshop I attended in Myrtle Beach. This is one Carolina city I'm not at all fond of, and with good reason. The abundance of hotels, condos, restaurants, activities, and shore line results in a glut of tourists and traffic. And there's a reason they call this place The Redneck Riviera. Along with pot-bellied tourists dressed in the minimum amount of fabric required by law, some opted to dry their beach towels the good old fashion way, despite the Landmark Resort's request to do otherwise:


You gotta love air-dried laundry.
Back to the workshop. I took notes, but out of respect to our instructor, Maggie Come Lately and My Beautiful Disaster author, Michelle Buckman, I won't plaster those on my blog. I will say that her sessions on marketing hammered home what I've recently learned and have discussed--YOU NEED TO KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE AND THE PUBLISHER YOU'RE TARGETING BEFORE YOU WRITE A NOVEL. Seriously. It's a must. Besides the fact you must follow their guidelines, including word count, you need to know if the target publisher represents novels similar to the one you wrote.
I cannot stress this enough.