My First Writers Workshop – The 2025 Colorado Writers Workshop
A few weeks ago, I attended my first writers’ workshop—The 2025 Colorado Writers Workshop hosted by Writing Day Workshops. Since starting my current manuscript, I had deliberately avoided looking ahead to the publishing process, telling myself to focus on finishing the book first. Now that I’ve completed the first draft and begun revisions, I decided it was time to explore what comes next. This workshop felt like the perfect place to start, just one day, and reasonably priced.
The Writing Day Workshop is a full-day event focused on “How to Get Published,” covering topics like writing query letters, pitching to agents, marketing yourself and your books, and navigating the traditional and self-publishing landscapes. It’s also a pitch event, giving attendees the rare opportunity to connect directly with agents and editors. The panel discussions were fascinating, and having the chance to ask questions and hear insights from industry professionals was an incredible experience. I walked away with a wealth of knowledge about pitching, building an author platform, and enhancing my writing craft, making the event well worth the investment. In fact, I took over twelve pages of notes! Originally, I planned to compile everything into one massive blog post, but I’ve since decided to break it down into a series of smaller, more focused posts.
For this post, I’m starting with the first session I attended: Traditional vs. Self-Publishing. I’ve included some of the key takeaways from that session below. While I don’t necessarily agree with every point that was made (after all, this was a pitching event geared toward agents and editors), it did give me a lot to think about. The overarching message was clear: why not explore the traditional publishing route first? You can always choose to self-publish later if that path makes more sense. This perspective definitely challenged some of my initial assumptions going into the event.
Here are some of the key points from this session:
Self-Publishing
- Two types of people who Self-Publishing
- Type A – Wants to get the book out and sell a few copies to mostly friends and family
- Type B – They have a plan, and set goals, want to publish this number of books by X date, make X amount of money, have a platform, and an advertising budget
- Need to have a way to do self-promotion to be successful in Self-Publishing
- Need to know your audience – A book for everyone is a book for no one
- Where are your readers and how do you reach them? Do you know this?
- An agent won’t usually work with someone who has self-published.
- Self-publishing is a cost-effective way to start; Amazon is $0 to start
- You have complete creative control over your book(s)
- You get up to 50% to 60% Royalties
- Quality can be inferior with self-publishing
- ⅓ good, ⅓ just ok, ⅓ terrible
- You can’t sell your film rights
- Facebook and Instagram ads are a good way to promote your book
- Need a good cover
- Need to research other self-publishers in your genre
- Finding the right price point can be difficult
Traditional Publishing
- You get an upfront fee, which usually depends on the publisher, anywhere from a few hundred to thousands of dollars, depending on the book and the deal
- Your Agent gets 15% of this fee
- Traditional publishing can help sell movie rights, audio rights, and foreign rights, making you more money in the long run.
- Usually, you’re assigned a Publicist (not always, depending on the size of the Publisher) to help promote the book
- The publisher sets the price point
- The publisher determines the cover art, but a good Agent can negotiate that you get a vote in the final choice
- After your upfront payout, you get 10% of book sales, and your agent’s fee comes out of your 10%
- So if your book is selling for $17.99, Hardback, you’re making $1.79 before your agent fee
- Traditional publishing moves very slowly, expect your book to take up to two years to come out after it has been sold to a Publisher
- Editors and Agents don’t want a book that needs a lot of work, so all of the talk about that is what an editor will do; nope, your book needs to be as close to ready as it can be.
- Your editor is there to make small improvements, not large changes. Have your book ready
- You need a platform, Newsletters, Social Media, website, Podcasts, whatever, it is highly encouraged to have some of these things in place for Fiction, and essential for Non-Fiction
- Agents will always try to sell to Large and Medium publishers, so they can make the most money; smaller and independent publishing houses aren’t worth their time.
- There are some exceptions to this, of course
- There isn’t enough shelf space to sell fiction books
- Recommended to start with Traditional publishing because you can always self-publish if things don’t turn out the way you hoped
As you can see, there was a lot of information packed into a one-hour session. A couple of the person takeaways for me were that if you self-publish, most Traditional publishers don’t want to work with you. This was a common theme in the agent section, but there are always exceptions. The common thinking among the agents was that if you have poor book sales, that is a negative to an Agent and a publisher. But as always, there are exceptions. Andy Weir self-published The Martian as a web series before it became a book and then a huge box office hit. Hugh Howey self-published Wool, the first book in the Silo series before it became a book and went on to Apple TV.
Hybrid publishing also came up, but it was mostly not a viable option, a lot of so called Hybrid publishers are out there and offer packages for you to pay into but they do little work that you couldn’t do on your own, and so very few of them can get your physical book on shelves. It was highly encouraged if you’re going to go this route to do your research and be careful of what you are getting into; you could spend thousands of dollars and have very little to show for it.
I think the other key takeaway was cost, in self-publishing, if you want to be successful, you’re going to have to market yourself, and there will be upfront costs for that. Set a budget for what you can and can’t afford. There are still free ways to promote your book, but if you expect to put it up on Amazon and it to start selling just because you think it’s great, you’re going to be disappointed. You’re going to have to invest some money in ads and promotion. Whereas if you do get a book deal, the publishing house does most of this for you, yes, you will still have to do some self-promotion, but they do have the reach to get your book in front of people.
For me, this was a great event, I learned what I wanted to about the publishing industry and what my next steps with my book. I will be pitching it when I am ready. I will send query letters out and try and find an agent, and if none of that gets me to where I want to go, I will self-publish my book.
So I highly recommend anyone who is thinking of attending a writing workshop, especially one of the ones put on by Writing Day workshops, do it, it’s well worth the investment.