5 Authors Dish on Publishing Experiences
Friday, June 26, 9-11:30 AM, Pacific Ballroom
Facilitated by Yvette Keller
What’s it like to work with a hybrid publisher? What are the steps?
How is it to work with a small traditional publisher?
How do you reissue a book that has already been published?
Promo? Cover design? Photos? Page Layout? Who does what?
Writing a new book while also marketing a published one?
How did you do everything, everywhere, all at once?
Our roundtable of authors will share their experiences and answer questions from the audience. Every publishing story is different. There will be ample time to not only hear the individual stories, but also for Q&A and discussion. Attendees might want to share their publishing stories as well as time allows.
Facilitator, Yvette Keller, has used her degrees in literature and psychology from UC Santa Cruz to educate and coach Silicon Valley technical professionals. She returned home to Santa Barbara to focus on telling her own stories and supporting her fellow writers. Yvette's short fiction leans toward SF/Fantasy at an extravagantly relaxed angle. Douglas Adams' London is available from Herb Lester and Associates. Audiobooks narrated by Yvette can be found at Audible.com.
Jann Winford is the author of the delightfully humorous novel, Dating Under the Influence of Estrogen. She is a humorist, educator, and speaker specializing in modern dating experiences. A lifelong storyteller, she learned early that well-told tale could entertain, persuade, and transform even the trickiest situations. Today, she blends humor, lived experience, and insight to help audiences navigate dating with clarity, confidence, and laughter.
Max Talley's third short story collection, Destroy Me Gently, Please, was published by Serving House Books, his hippie crime novel, Peace, Love, & Haight, launched last fall, and his hardboiled thriller, Santa Fe Psychosis, was expanded and republished this spring by Lazarus Media. He has had seventy stories or essays published since 2015. His writing has appeared in Vol.1 Brooklyn, Atticus Review, About Place, Iron Horse Literary Review, and The Saturday Evening Post.
Nicholas Deitch’s debut novel Death and Life in the City of Dreams is deeply influenced by his experiences in nonprofit leadership and the design of inclusive communities and urban places. He is a writer, architect, and advocate for social justice. His fiction explores the intersection of cities, history, and human resilience. He has honed his craft, publishing short stories in Litro Magazine, Club Plum, and Santa Barbara Literary Journal. His short story “Grace Eternal” won Best Fiction at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference (2019). Originally from Los Angeles, Nick now lives in Ventura, California, with his wife and creative partner, Diana.
Kathy Crighton first attended SBWC in 1995. In 2019 she was on the First Book Panel for her novel The New Normal, set in her hometown of New Orleans in the time immediately after Hurricane Katrina. It received honorable mention in the 2019 Writers’ Digest Self-Published Book Awards. In 2025, for the twentieth anniversary of Katrina, she re-issued the novel as How Lonely Sits the City. The title is a quote from the opening line of the Biblical book of Lamentations: “How lonely sits the city that once was full of people.”
Frances Pettey Davis’ debut novel Red Summer is set in the summer of 1954, where the small California town of Bear River simmers with Cold War paranoia. She’s an author, journalist, essayist, fiction writer, and poet, born and raised in California's Central Valley. decades as a newspaper columnist, feature writer, and editor. She’s a winner of the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction and a Pushcart Prize nominee. She lives in Goleta, California and has served as a manuscript consultant at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference.
