A Look Back at the NINC 2023 Conference
At the TradeWinds Island Grand Beach Resort in St. Pete Beach, Florida, September 20–24, 2023, the professional novelists organization dubbed Novelists Inc. (NINC) put on their annual conference laden with conversations about the modern publishing landscape. NINC is a professional writer’s networking organization designed to help manage an author’s career—an industry familiar with rapid-onset change. At conferences like NINC, upcoming shifts in technology, tactics, and strategies often come up. NINC 2023 was no different; in fact, it seemed to embrace these shifts in the industry, not just in individual sessions but also in the conference’s overall theme.
Tawdra Kandle, who is the assistant conference director and programming chair for the annual conference, shared her thoughts on the event from both a programming perspective and as someone who sat in on a few of the sessions. “The theme of NINC 2023 was Elevate!,” Kandle says. “The main focus under that heading was discovering the paths forward for taking our publishing careers to the next level.” Naturally, this included discussions on some of the more buzzworthy topics in the industry today, including artificial intelligence (AI) and the direct sales model.
Kandle says sessions at NINC events are geared toward qualifying authors as much as established authors and are not discriminatory as to the avenue an author chooses to publish. Although the organization works hard to present content that’s applicable to everyone, she notes that at least three-quarters or more of the workshops would appeal directly to independently published authors. Alongside more timely discussions about AI and direct sales models that took place this year, Kandle says less technical topics such as author burnout and exhaustion were also explored. Authors can sometimes tend to overlook such topics; having intentional sessions to call out these issues increases the likelihood that someone might identify these struggles within themselves.
When asked about specific sessions Kandle attended, she identified a few sessions that were standouts for her.
“As a member of the conference team, I’m often not able to attend all of the sessions I’d like, but I was very impressed by Sarra Cannon’s presentation on the path back to joy, Erica Ridley’s masterclass on newsletters, and Melanie Harlow’s workshop on staying in your lane without getting stuck in a rut,” she says. “Overall, I feel the conference offered valuable content to help authors grow in a well-rounded, positive manner—not just sales or marketing, not just producing books rapidly, but how to maintain our vibrant careers for the long term.”
The NINC conference had a clear intention to include both craft sessions and business sessions for authors and publishers in attendance, and Kandle says that was by design. The necessity to produce well-written books never goes away, she says, going so far as to call producing subpar books “a disservice not only to our reading audience but also to our author community.” It all seemed to match well with the conference’s overall theme—Elevate!—the idea being to lift authors up and discover paths forward for taking publishing careers to the next level.
Much like other popular author conferences, NINC attempts to create a blueprint by which all authors can mold their business model. This strategy revolves around good books, good business, and good intent to lift your author colleagues. There is something to be said for consistency of messaging, and NINC as an organization seems to have just that.
The NINC 2023 conference topics certainly reflected it, according to Kandle, and if past years are to be a guide, authors can expect more of the same in the 2024 rendition of the event. Next year’s conference takes place September 18–22, also in St. Pete Beach; watch the organization’s website, https://ninc.com, for updates and more information on how to register.
David Viergutz
