Getting ready for NYWC

We’re only a couple weeks away from the first National Youth Workers Convention, that means I need to get ready for three weeks of travel. Typically when I’m there, I’m meeting with authors and prospective authors. We’ll talk about where projects are at and what they’re thinking about in the future (and just get caught up on life). If you’ve got an idea, the best thing to do is email it to me jay at ysopenbook.com (we don’t really use paper proposals any more). Please, don’t show up your proposal in hand, I’d rather hear your idea and hear your passion for it at that point than lug around a ton of proposals (not to mention getting all that paper back home!).

If you’re thinking about writing a proposal you can check out our guidelines here. As you think about your idea…please keep in mind what we publish. We’re probably not going to publish a children’s book on the 7 days of creation. Or your favorite youth group recipes. Yeah, I’m not joking about getting those…very strange.

The big thing to keep in mind is what would you really find helpful. Bounce the idea off a few other local youth workers and see what they think (don’t worry, the vast majority of people aren’t going to steal your idea…if you do have worries about that, then you’ll need to create a whole proposal and then do a “poor man’s” copyright. If you want to be official and go through the process of obtaining a full blown copyright, you can check out the steps here.

Keep in mind, some ideas make great articles (or blog posts), when you have to come up with 35,000 words to complete a book, well, let’s say that hitting word count every five minutes isn’t a fun thing!