Our Saturday Huddles are relaxed, informal and confidential. They're open, without further cost, to all Full Members of Litopia.

Sometimes a Huddle will have a set theme, announced in advance. At other times it’s open house: bring your work-in-progress... your cover letters... your synopses... your first pages… or simply your questions, concerns or worries.

After many months of successful Huddling, it seems to me that our Huddles are extremely good at doing these things:

• Keeping you in the loop, both professionally and socially. I like being able to talk freely and openly about the publishing business (our cast-iron rule of confidentiality creates a safe environment for this and more). Huddlers are extremely diverse people, both geographically and in every other possible way. Yet we’re united in our concern and support for each other, and that’s more than special.

• Putting our high-octane hive mind to work on your writing tasks and challenges. Such as improving a title. Or slicking-up a synopsis. Or crafting a covering letter. We’ve done all of these and more.

• Bringing clarity to issues that writers invariably find baffling or impenetrable. Such as Amazon Reviews, Amazon Author Central or simply understanding what a blurb must do in this day and age to be effective. We’ve tackled all of these, and much more, because they’re issues of concern to today’s writer. These are topics that other (often highly-priced) seminars, workshops and courses barely begin to address.

I think it’s fair to say that, with nearly a year’s worth of hindsight, there are one or two things that are best not addressed by Huddles. Looking at longer chunks of text – anything more than about 1000 words – is best done in Litopia’s Workshops, not in the Huddle. And it’s hard for a Huddle to give meaningful and practical feedback on text that is out of context e.g. taken from midway through your manuscript. Huddles typically last two to three hours, and can’t address tasks that might take longer than that (for which, head for the Workshops!).

Litopia’s weekly Huddle is one of the highlights of my week. It’s such a pleasure to work and have fun with (what’s the difference?) so many talented people. If you haven’t yet joined us – now's your chance!