Guild Members as Instructors
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$50.00 will be donated to the Guild for any one registering from the Guild or this website before October 4th.

The eighth annual La Jolla Writers Conference will take place from November 7 – 9 at Paradise Point Resort & Spa.

Nationally recognized, and called by Writer’s Digest Magazine “one of the 84 conferences in the country worth your money,” (there are more than 1600 every year), the La Jolla Writers Conference has thus far drawn from 23 states and 4 countries. We have also been featured in the Wall Street Journal, mentioned in Westways magazine, …

All of our faculty and organizers donate their time – including us. We do this to make the conference affordable to aspiring authors. Our first keynote, back in 2001, was the Catherine Ryan Hyde. We took the title of her most famous book, Pay It Forward, as our theme, and each year a group of us who are successful in various aspects of the publishing industry come together to pay it forward to aspiring authors. Check out www.lajollawritersconference.com.

What makes us so unique is the quality of our faculty; the 1:4 faculty/attendee ratio; the accessibility of our faculty; the fact that we cover the art, craft, and business of writing; and the extremely ambient location. Unlike other conferences, there is no additional fee for the keynote meals. Included in the conference fee are a keynote with appetizers on Friday evening, a lunch keynote on Saturday, and a dinner keynote on Saturday.

As always, this year we have several NY Times bestselling authors on faculty, including James Rollins, Christopher Reich, Margaret Weis, and Robyn Carr. We have agents from five different agencies covering everything from all areas of non-fiction to fantasy, women’s fiction, suspense/thriller/mystery, and more in the fiction genres.

The faculty of the LJWC are chosen by me for their knowledge, their ability to effectively share that knowledge, and their generosity in doing so. Our faculty often takes a personal interest in attendees. One of our attendees, a police officer from Las Vegas, found a champion among our faculty. That faculty member, a former editor at St. Martins, insisted that a former colleague look at his first book. A faculty member from the Andrea Brown Agency, took him on as a client. The first book sold to St. Martin’s, he now has three books out, and he has been blurbed by Tess Gerritsen, Joe Wambaugh, Phil Margolin, John Lescroart, and Jeff Parker – all of whom he met at the LJWC. This is not unusual.

By the way, we do not have agent panels at our conference. Rather, our agents and editors actually teach classes and conduct workshops so that attendee work gets up close and personal in front of them!

We have had attendees from 23 states and 4 countries, but I sometimes think we are the best kept secret in San Diego! We take no more than 200 attendees, so there is a real sense of community. About 50 percent of our attendees come back again and again over the years.