A Belated Guide to AWP

Things I learned from AWP, & things I wouldn't do again

Last week, I attended the AWP Conference in Baltimore, along with several hotels’ worth of other writers, editors, readers, and publishing people.

This was my first time attending AWP. I went mostly because Baltimore is convenient to NYC and this seemed like an easy way to judge for myself whether I’ll ever want to go again.

Before the trip, I read several guides to AWP, including Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s and Jane Friedman’s, which offer some good practical advice. (Don’t prioritize the panels. Don’t eat at the conference center.) But I want to write my own guide, for the following reasons:

1. There are some things I wish I’d known that no one told me.

2. I will definitely forget those things before the next AWP rolls around.

3. I have strong opinions based on my one (1) experience of AWP, and I haven’t seen them voiced elsewhere.

I’m going to start with the big, overarching, widely applicable takeaways I got from AWP, and then work my way through to more specific advice.

Conferences are not directly useful, but they can be indirectly useful.

The planned events, the panels, the agent pitching sessions, the presentations, whatever the conference is promising—they all sound useful. But, broadly speaking, they are not. The useful things happen in between all the programmed events, when an offhand remark to someone you barely know leads to an introduction to someone who ends up publishing your next book.

Conferences can’t engineer these serendipitous moments—the best they can do is bring a lot of readers and writers and publishers together and encourage them to interact as much as possible.

So if you are attending a conference like AWP in hopes that it will give you some specific, useful thing—information, book sales, subscribers, high-profile connections, etc.—you will probably be disappointed.

If, on the other hand, you go with the flexible agenda of hanging around and talking to people, good things might happen to you. (You will then go home and tell your friends about the good thing that happened to you at AWP, and then they will go to AWP seeking that good thing and be disappointed, and the whole cycle will start again.)

So if you’re deciding whether or not to go to Chicago next year (#AWP2027), keep in mind what you’re likely to get out of the conference:

• The chance to catch up with people you know and like

• Run-ins with people you forgot about but who might actually be useful to you

• Discounted books and magazines

• A sense of the landscape of literary magazines and small publishers

• Reminders to submit to journals you hadn’t otherwise considered

• A couple more instagram followers

• A free tote bag

And what you’re unlikely to get:

• Practical advice on how to get published

• A submission shortcut that bypasses the slush pile

• Meaningful face time with important writers

• Bosom friendship with editors at important magazines

• The secret

Publishing your work with a journal creates a relationship.

Whenever I’ve published work with a literary journal, it’s felt pretty one-and-done. I get the happy email that they’re accepting my story; I work through a few copyedits several weeks or months later; and usually I get one last email on the day the piece comes out, to the tune of, “Congratulations—the story is out!” I add the journal to my bio, and then I keep submitting far and wide, and nothing has changed except that my bio is a little longer.

But at AWP, I understood for the first time that journals experience this process differently. When I walked up to the booth of a journal that had published my work two years ago, the editor sitting there said: “Devon Halliday??” He remembered me, remembered my story, had proofread and carefully typeset it in the magazine, had used it to train a class of interns… The editor had a months-long relationship with the story, and therefore with me. When another writer walked up to the booth, the editor introduced me: “This is Devon Halliday—one of our authors.”

I simply had not realized that there was a human element behind these short story acceptances. Frankly, though this now seems naive, I had always felt that if a journal accepted my story, there was little point submitting to them any longer—I already had them in my bio, after all.

But after my experience meeting the editors in question, I want to focus more consciously on building relationships with the journals that publish me. That might mean submitting to those journals more often, or just keeping in touch. (“Congratulations on your novel!” the editor said. “Let us know when it comes out, we’ll help spread the word.”)

You have a relationship with the editors you’ve worked with in the past, even if you’ve never met them in person. Keep submitting your work to them, keep them in the loop, and show up for them on social media or at in-person events. They are rooting for you, whether or not you’re aware of it!

Lit mags and small presses are run by enthusiasts.

If you walk around the AWP book fair for three minutes, you will pass the booth of a literary magazine you’ve never heard of, displaying ten beautifully printed back issues with cover art and glossy pages and long lists of contributors. It is staggering how much work goes into these magazines, and the work is mostly thankless.

I was humbled and a little moved by how fiercely enthusiastic all these editors were. I consider myself a lover of fiction, and yet I spend a lot of time grumbling about the state of publishing and not reading much of anything. These editors, meanwhile, had sorted through mountains of submissions, selected their favorites, carefully arranged them, proofread them, typeset them, and printed them, all so that these stories could be available to the reading public, a reading public that is small and ambivalent about short stories and loath to pay for subscriptions to literary magazines.

I’ve always been a bit of a snob about lit mags, submitting only to the ones I’ve heard of, the ones that get prominence in other writers’ bios. But walking around AWP reminded me that any lit mag, as long as it’s well run and reputable, is a champion of your work. And it never hurts to have more champions out there.

It’s easier to meet people if you know people.

I found AWP to be a great venue for catching up with friends, and a poor venue for making new friends.

Likewise, I found it very useful to introduce myself at the booths of journals that had published my work, and utterly ineffective to introduce myself to editors who had never heard of me. (“Nice to meet you, Devon. You should submit your fiction to us sometime!” “Thanks, yeah, I do submit my fiction to you… you’ve actually sent me a few kind rejections… which I appreciated… anyways…”)

Maybe this is more a reflection of my own social skills than of any enduring truth about AWP, but I still think AWP is better suited to people who already have a few contacts in the writing world. If you go in with no contacts, you’ll need to be much bolder and more charismatic than writers usually are.

Don’t go to the panels.

At least, don’t go to the panels if you want to learn things.

There are people out there who enjoy the panels, finding them inspiring, motivating, comforting, thought-provoking, etc. I’m sure there were some good ones tucked here and there in the schedule at AWP 2026.

But all the panels I witnessed seemed pretty worthless.

The panels are worthless because they are not actually designed for you, the writer/attendee—they are designed for the people on the panels, who use them as an occasion to promote their books and bolster their academic careers. The amount of practical advice on offer is negligible, and you have to sit through an hour-and-a-half panel to get one or two vague insights.

(Again, yes, there are surely exceptions. I was not able to attend every panel to verify this impression. But I did regret every panel I attended.)

If you do insist on attending panels at AWP, choose them on the strength of the panelists, not on the strength of the description. A panel with great speakers on an irrelevant subject will far outperform a panel on an ostensibly useful subject with mediocre speakers.

Next time I go to AWP, I will skip the panels entirely, and trust that if any of them are in fact useful, I’ll hear the important takeaways through the grapevine.

Pitch and participate in panels.

On the other hand, being a panelist or a moderator is worth your while for one main reason: it advertises your presence at the conference ahead of the conference. People scrolling the list of panels will notice your name, deduce that you’ll be attending the conference, and suddenly think: “We should ask Devon to read at our offsite event!” “We should have Devon do a book signing at our table!”

Most of AWP is about reminding people that you exist, and having your name on a panel is a great way to do that before the conference even starts.

There are other circumstantial reasons to do a panel—maybe your university will only pay to send you to AWP if you’re on a panel, or maybe having this panel on your CV will boost your credentials for a job application. Maybe you really care about the topic and you want to help other writers. That would certainly be an unusual reason to organize a panel, but I would love it if more panelists took this approach.

(In fact, if I do go to AWP again, I’ll probably pitch a panel myself, and then I will have to scrub out this part of the article and insist that panels are super informative and valuable.)

Don’t pay to pitch agents.

This is one of the great axioms of life, and probably deserves its own post, but I’ll say it briefly here: paying to pitch an agent is never worth the money.

When I was an agent, I felt sorry for the writers who paid to meet with me at conferences, because the absolute most I could offer them was: “You should send me your novel, I’d love to read it!” Yes, I read their novels, and sure, maybe I got to them faintly sooner than if they’d come through the slush pile, but in the end, I still made a decision about their submission the way I made decisions about all submissions: by reading the sample pages.

A great pitch at a conference cannot overcome bad sample pages. Nothing can overcome bad sample pages! The novel’s got to be good! Writers who paid to speak with me were getting a shortcut straight to the starting line: sending over their sample pages. It’s like paying extra to start at “Go!” in Monopoly.

The only reason to pay for one of these pitch sessions is to use it as an opportunity to get honest feedback on your story’s concept. Concept, not pitch. Usually, the problem with a writer’s pitch is not the format of the pitch itself but the story concept, and agents will notice this underlying problem immediately, but they won’t communicate it to the writer, because they’re trying to be nice.

If you sit down with an agent at one of these paid pitch sessions, start by saying: “If it’s all right with you, I’d love to use this as a chance to get feedback on my story idea. I’ll give you the pitch, and then maybe we could talk about any red flags or questions that the pitch raises?”

Only say this if you are truly prepared to listen and take in harsh feedback. If you’re not, then don’t pay to pitch agents in the first place.

You don’t need business cards.

I brought business cards, because I secretly love business cards, but no one else was using them and I felt like a tool when I whipped one out. They impose a formality on an interaction, and most of my interactions at AWP were not formal. (“Hey good to see you! Yeah we’ll catch up later! Oh by the way here’s my card.”) Also it’s a bit painful to hand someone a business card at one of the book fair booths and watch them place it in a special spot on their table, clearly the spot for Things That Will Later Be Thrown Out.

What I recommend instead—or anyway what I’m going to try next time—is post-its. If someone really needs my contact info, I’ll scribble it on a post-it and stick it to whatever book they’re carrying. Yes, that takes longer than handing over a business card, but at least it doesn’t have that unsettling premeditated vibe. (“Ah yes, I suspected you would want my email address, phone number, instagram handle, and website… Well, here they are…”)

Wander the book fair alone (at least once).

On the first day of AWP, I decided to do a full pass of the book fair, stopping at every table where I had some preexisting connection. My first few stops were awkward and halting, but gradually I got better at introducing myself, making book fair–appropriate small talk, and getting something useful out of each conversation. By the end of my solo round of the book fair, I was feeling confident and well acquainted with the way the book fair operates.

This turned out to be the right approach. Wandering the book fair with friends the next day was fun, but much less useful. First there’s the matter of wrangling everyone to get to the table you’re trying to get to, on the way to which you’ll have to stop at six or seven booths that hold no interest for you. Then, once you get to the table, your friends are either standing right next to you as you introduce yourself, or standing back waiting for you to wrap up. The conversation often becomes a group conversation, and those quickly dissipate into generalities: “So what do you guys publish?” says your friend, just as you’d prepared to deliver a heartfelt compliment on the journal’s memorable 2022 issue. You’ll either be more or less charismatic than your friends, which means either you’ll lean on them as a conversational crutch or they’ll lean on you. However it goes down, you will leave feeling that you weren’t quite in control of the impression you made.

You don’t have to shun your friends, but I recommend doing one pass alone, and doing it early. Then, when you do wander the book fair with friends, random people will wave at you (“Oh hey, it’s Devon! I talked to you yesterday!”) and your friends will be awed and impressed.

Take notes after every aisle.

The thing I did not get right in my first pass around the book fair was my reliance on memory. I stumbled out of the book fair, dazed but pleased, thinking: “That was so useful! Those editors at that journal really seemed interested in my work! Their names were Kate and… or maybe Kate was at the other journal… was there a Kate? Actually, what journal was it? I think it had Review in the title…”

Next time, I’ll pause at the end of every aisle and take some rapid notes on every conversation I had. You may have a stronger memory than me, but I still think this is a good approach, and it will make your follow-ups after the conference much easier.

Stay in a hotel, not an Airbnb.

I stayed in an Airbnb about a thirty-minute walk from the convention center. This was the right call for me, because I booked late and it was the cheapest option, but it also meant that once I went home for the night, I was home. I wasn’t going to venture out again for some intriguing afterparty or offsite reading. Similarly, I was very unlikely to make it to any 9am panels. (Not that the panels matter, but still, rolling up to AWP at 10:30am every day, I felt like I’d missed a few things.)

Next time, I’ll try to book a hotel room early, before the rates go up. Staying in a hotel near the convention center also increases the odds that you’ll wander past interesting people in the lobby—more chances to have a good conversation and, crucially, to remind people that you exist.

Good food is antisocial.

I was determined to eat good food in Baltimore, and this led me far away from the convention center at mealtimes. Unfortunately, it was hard to persuade people to go on a 45-minute trek just to grab lunch, so I missed out on a lot of mediocre meals with great people. Next time, I think I’ll just give up on eating well for those three days and follow the herd.

If you find a good restaurant, go back to it.

I was in Baltimore for four days, and there are three restaurants that I went back to twice. (The Helmand really came through for me.)

I personally hate scrolling through restaurant reviews on Google Maps, so when a friend asked where we should eat, I always recommended places I’d already tried and liked. In an unfamiliar city, it’s nice to have a guarantee that the food will be good.

Your coat is your outfit.

I don’t know what I thought was going to happen to my coat and scarf when I entered the book fair. A coat check, maybe? I think there actually is a coat check, but you do so much wandering in and out of the convention center that it would take forever to deposit and retrieve your coat every time. Instead, you end up either 1) wearing your coat or 2) carrying your coat, perhaps by 2a) stuffing your coat in a tote bag.

I went with 2a, and was envious of all the savvy people who wore cool leather jackets around the book fair. Next time, I will consider my coat as an essential part of my outfit, and I will not choose a puffy coat. (Very warm, but made for an overstuffed tote bag.)

Bring your own tote bag.

Yes, you’ll get a free AWP tote bag, but it will look like everyone else’s. Bring an unusual tote bag as a statement piece! (I got a few compliments on my Swannanoa Review tote bag, emblazoned with the slogan: “Not My Poem, Not My Problem.”)

Bring conditioner.

My hair is still recovering from that Airbnb shampoo.

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Well, it’ll be an entire year before this post is useful to anyone, but I hope it at least somewhat tracks with the experience of anyone who went to AWP. If not, let’s productively disagree!

I have some exciting practical stuff cooking for next week. Thanks for sticking around!