How We Choose Speakers (and Other Programming) for Future of Publishing Mastermind and Writer MBA Conference
A behind-the-scenes peek at our process.
We often get requests for our speaking application, so I thought I’d share a peek behind the scenes about how we go about selecting speakers for our conferences.
Who Do We Serve?
Of course, all of our speakers need to be in service to our audience, so let’s start with who are audience really is!
Our conferences are about the future of publishing and our primary goal is to platform useful tools, software, and services that help writers and other creatives make more money.
Because of the content of our events, we primarily serve established writing professionals. These professionals are career-oriented and work either part-time or full-time as writers. They are usually building their own online brand and may have a suite of products or services to offer their readers, including books, publications, courses, paid subscriptions, and more.
Our attendees are also doing cool things at the edges of publishing. Russell said it best: “If you are tired of talking to writers about all the cool things you can do and getting nothing but blank stares back, then this is the conference for you.”
So about six months out from our events:
We look at what is trending in publishing that we personally care about. Our taste is usually spot on for our audience—they are interested in the same things we are.
We look at edge and fringe areas of publishing where we are uniquely qualified to bring offerings. These are most likely to be around direct sales, alternative revenue streams, fringe platforms, fringe formats, and algorithms, automation, and AI.
We look at publishing spaces where the future seems uncertain. Uncertainty usually means opportunity to us. We know how to translate uncertainty into opportunity, especially when everyone else is stuck in fear and scarcity around change.
Everyone in our audience is interested in the above as well and likes to keep abreast of our musings on these topics. Our work is not for people who are following the usual independent author path.
Of this audience:
Group #1 - A small group of people in our audience are pushing the envelope hard in one or more of these areas. They are people who are going deep into experimentation and building communities, companies, tools, or services to solve the problems they find. This group is often the group of people we tap for speaking.
Group #2 - A larger group of people in our audience—the vast majority—are simply interested in what the first group is doing. They are also usually interested in our analysis of it as well. A lot of people in this group want us to take a ton of data about what’s happening and turn it into digestible analysis so that they can make better business decisions for themselves. This group is not usually implementing yet. They may be dabbling. They may just be watching and thinking and waiting for the right timing for them to move. They may be learning and considering.
With all that said, we look for speakers from Group #1 who can inform and provide solutions to Group #2.
How Do We Select Speakers?
We have further criteria for greenlighting a speaker.
We mostly work from the pool of people already committed to the conference. Many of our speakers this year are people who attended our mastermind last year.
We work with a lot of sponsors (companies and industry people who want significant exposure at our conference) and industry guests (industry people who want a vendor table and to attend our conference). The attendees we bring in are interested less in information and more in having their problems solved. We prefer all of our speakers to have a strong call to action that is substantially supported. To us, this means they have built solutions to people’s problems and systems to continue working with someone after the event.
When we have additional slots or gaps to fill, we look at our mastermind attendees, who are usually 6-7 figure authors or subject matter experts in a specific area that is a helpful skill for the future of publishing.
Every person on the stage is someone we have personally vetted, which to us means using their company's product, hearing them speak (often multiple times), and/or having them on one of our podcasts or on our membership calls. Nobody really gets on stage without our wholehearted trust that they have a real solution to a real problem that our writers have, and that they are able to deliver that solution both on stage and after the event is over.
We care a ton about diversity and equitable opportunity and do everything we can to bring in a diverse group of speakers. Three out of four of us on the planning team are female and I am Pacific Islander—so speaker diversity is a big topic of conversation in our meetings. Our priority is to find speakers with the highest level of expertise we can find, and we also attempt to bring in a cross-section of writer disciplines going beyond independent publishing.
If you’re interested in speaking or being a part of the programming at Writer MBA, you can reach out to our sponsorships coordinator, Tawdra Kandle, at tawdra@authorrx.com, or you can reach out to Russell and Monica at support@writermba.com.