Non-Fiction Conference 2011 [Amsterdam!]

As mentioned in the previous post, I’m going to be gone basically all next week to participate in this year’s Non-Fiction Conference, which is taking place in Amsterdam and is put together by the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

This is a pretty amazing opportunity—not just to see Amsterdam, but because this event is pretty hardcore. There are only ten speakers, each of whom is allowed to talk for 10 minutes maximum (even you, Richard Nash!), with the rest of each session dedicated to discussion. Presentations are supposed to be thoughtful, challenging, smart, provocative, etc. I’m still finishing up my speech (trying to do something a little bit different than usual and have been testing out various ideas on a bunch of people with varying degrees of success . . . little does my “Intro to Publishing” class know, but they’re going to be subjected to a lot of this today), but after the conference is over, I’ll post it here and write up the event as a whole. We are being videotaped, so you should be able to watch all the presentations on the website as well.

Anyway, you can see the whole line-up here, but it’s basically broken into three sections: What’s Now?, What’s Next?, and Digitally Crossing Borders.

Should be really interesting, and since Ed Nawotka will be there, I’m sure there will be some great coverage on Publishing Perspectives.

In addition to announcing the BTBA fiction longlist next Thursday, I’ll try and post a few additional blogs. Mostly about our summer catalog, but some other stuff as well . . .