Writing Practice Prescription

Please mark your calendars and plan to attend the Saturday, January 10, 2009, NSA/NC Chapter Meeting at the Sheraton Gateway hotel near the San Francisco airport. The program will start at 9:00 a.m. and end at 3:00 p.m. This informative day will help you move beyond a speaking platform to products and publications that reach many.

Lunch is included in your low registration fee of $45.00 for chapter members or $65.00 for nonmembers and guests.

Grow your idea into products and a National Day

Jeff Rubin

The day will begin with speaker Jeff Rubin, founder of National Punctuation Day®. His presentation, “How I turned a national holiday into a branded, moneymaking enterprise” describes how he turned a publicity stunt into a brand, and then developed a speaking program for children and an instructional DVD for teachers. These products have now become major business enterprises. You will learn how to take an idea that might come to you in the middle of the night, develop it, and market it, and become known as THE expert in that discipline and make money from it.

Grow your speech into a published book

Michael Larsen

Have you often wished for a published book to support your speaking work and mission? Perhaps you have heard the advice that “If you have a speech, you have a book.” Speakers who have attempted to turn a speech into a book, however, realize that this task can be an enormous challenge because they:

• Have little or no time to write
• Love to speak but dread penning words to a page
• Lack an agent

The good news is that speakers can be authors without also being “writers.” Michael Larsen and his selected panel members will show attendees how to:

• Understand the publication process
• Find and work with an agent
• Promote and market their published work
• Work with a collaborator of ghost writer to produce their book’s content

Networking lunch

Your low registration fee includes lunch. An experienced speaker will sit at each table to facilitate a fun networking experience. Be sure to bring your business cards!

Proposal writing afternoon workshop

Elizabeth Pomada                               Michael Larsen

San Francisco agents Michael Larsen and Elizabeth Pomada will wrap up the day with a proposal-writing workshop. Between the two of them, Mike and Elizabeth have written or coauthored fourteen books, including Mike’s popular, must-have book, How to Write a Book Proposal.

An appealing and tight proposal will help you find an agent and, in turn, will help your agent sell your book. Even if you don’t choose to seek an established publisher, a proposal will help you to test market the potential of your book idea. The other major benefit a proposal provides is that the tough work of outlining your ideas and organizing them comes near the first of the process. Once the outline is firmed up, the writing and research can flow in an orderly fashion.

If you have a proposal already written, bring it with you and either Michael or Elizabeth will look at it and give you feedback if time permits.

To read more about this upcoming meeting visit the NSA Northern CA website by clicking here.