Serious about improving your craft? SCBWI's regional events provide opportunities for professional growth and help you connect with a supportive, creative community.
WRITING IRRESISTIBLE QUERY LETTERS ⭐ The query letter is crucial to your submission journey, but they give writers an endless headache. How to boil down all of your hard, creative work into 250 to 450 words? Let a former literary agent guide you through what an irresistible cover letter is—and isn’t—and how to pull yours off with style and flair. This workshop involves a presentation covering query basics and best practices, including submission strategies. ⚡ Mary offers an opportunity for you to submit your query letter to be edited live during the workshop. Please use the dropbox link (found in the email you use for SCBWI) to send your query, including your name, email, genre and/or target audience in a Word document. Be aware that only a few of the queries selected for the workshop will be edited. Deadline May 12th.⭐ Former literary agent Mary Kole founded Mary Kole Editorial in 2013 and provides consulting and developmental editing services to writers of all categories and genres. She founded Good Story Company in 2019 with the aim of creating valuable content—like the Good Story Podcast, YouTube channel, and Good Story Learning classes and resources—for writers of all categories and ability levels. She also develops unique and commercial intellectual property for middle grade, young adult, and adult readers with Upswell Media and Bittersweet Books (website forthcoming). Mary has appeared at regional, national, and international SCBWI conferences, as well as dozens of independent conferences. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and has worked at Chronicle Books, the Andrea Brown Literary Agency, and Movable Type Management. She is the author of WRITING IRRESISTIBLE KIDLIT, SUCCESSFUL QUERY LETTERS, WRITING IRRESISTIBLE PICTURE BOOKS, and HOW TO WRITE A BOOK NOW. ⭐ Registration closes May 11th. (This webinar will be recorded and available to view for one month for registered attendees.)
SCBWI Oregon’s Great Critique is an event that happens twice a year. Each session is an awesome opportunity for writers and illustrators to be critiqued by a professional and their peers. 📝 Never been in a critique group? Wish you could be critiqued by someone who is ahead of you in the publishing game? Want to strengthen your work? Need a fresh set of eyes and ears on that oft-revised piece? This is your chance. A published author or illustrator will lead each small group and critique your manuscript or art. You’ll also hear/see others’ work and get feedback from those writers and illustrators too. Plus, you’ll learn from the comments by the critique leader about the work of others. ⭐So join us for a morning of perfecting your craft. And, who knows, you might make a few new like-minded friends to start a new critique group, too.⭐ Registration opens Saturday, May 11th and closes Saturday, June 15th.