It’s been so nice to be able to travel again to in person events! In 2022, the KWL team attended eight events in person and twenty online. Our last event of 2022 was 20BooksTo50K in Las Vegas.
20BooksTo50K (20Books) was created by bestselling indie author and LMBPN publisher Michael Anderle and author Craig Martelle. This year saw the first time 20Books was held on both sides of the Atlantic, with an event earlier in the year in Holland and the flagship event held annually in Las Vegas.
Now in its 7th year, 20Books is truly one of the largest indie conferences out there with 2,000 authors attending in person and an additional 750 tuning in online. Nearly all the talks were simultaneously streamed online and the speakers and moderators did a great job at including questions from the online viewers. If you’re not familiar with 20Books, check out their Facebook group that now has over 66,000 members. It’s a very active author community with lots of advice for indies in all stages of their careers.
The 20Books conference was 5 jam-packed days that began with an industry day on Monday. This allowed authors to connect with people from the indie author industry, Kobo Writing Life included! Rachel and I had a table full of KWL swag and we talked to authors all day long. It was so lovely to meet so many authors in one day!
The following 3 days were full of the presentations and meet ups. There was focus on writing craft in all genres, marketing advice and success stories from 7 figure authors. On Thursday morning, I got up bright and early to present about Kobo Writing Life, focusing on Kobo Plus. And if that wasn’t busy enough, we also announced the launch of Kobo Plus audiobooks in Canada while we were there! (You can read more about that here.) 20Books ended with a massive Author Day on Friday where readers could come and meet the authors in attendance.
In-person events like 20Books are such great networking opportunities! I loved catching up with authors I hadn’t seen personally in a few years and also meeting authors for the first time, all within the chaos that is Las Vegas. It was fun to wander through Paris and Venice, all while remaining inside a casino. And while Rachel and I are maybe not the best gamblers out there, we both left with winnings!
If you’d like to learn more about 20Books, or are interested in attending in 2023, you can buy tickets here.
What events did you go to this year? What were your takeaways? Let us know in the comments and stay tuned to more dispatches from the KWL team in 2023.
