A great day at Swanwick!

The WM team's visit to Swanwick Writers' Summer School gave us a real taste of the famous Swanwick magic

From the moment we set foot in the Hayes Conference Centre, we were enveloped in a warm, enthusiastic atmosphere of creative endeavour, fun and friendship. 

A highlight of our visit was Troubador's excellent interactive course on cover design and marketing, which combined creativity with commercial sense to give self-publishing authors a real idea of how to make their book jacket attract attention and help create a brand for its writer. The session included some useful exercises, including the near-impossible task of writing a book blurb in ten minutes. Our Creative Writing Courses co-ordinator Sally managed it though (with a little bit of help from the editor!)

The greatest pleasure of a visit to Swanwick is the people, though. We talked to writer friends who are well known to us, including our regular contributors Alison Chisholm and Tarja Moles, and were really pleased to put faces to familiar names that we see in the magazine and on our social media channels and chat to on the phone and by email. We made some lovely new friends too, and and were particularly delighted to meet up with many of our subscribers and hear about their writing plans and projects – and find out how Swanwick was helping them to develop as writers.

Thank you all for a lovely day – we'll definitely be back next year! And in the meantime, we are sure everyone we met will be keeping the Swanwick spirit alive, both in taking their own writing further forward, and in helping and encouraging other writers to learn and grow!

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