Every September, I sit down with a spreadsheet of the upcoming year’s literary conferences, book fairs, and industry events, and I try to figure out which ones are worth attending. It is one of the more agonizing annual exercises at ScrollWorks, because the universe of possible events is large, our budget is small, and the return on investment for any given conference ranges from “transformative” to “complete waste of three days and two thousand dollars.”

Over the years, I have developed a framework for making these decisions that I think might be useful to other small publishers facing the same dilemma. It is not a formula. There is no formula for something this context-dependent. But there are questions I ask and criteria I weight that have helped me make better choices about where to spend our limited conference budget.

The Three Reasons to Attend a Conference

I think there are exactly three legitimate business reasons for a small publisher to attend a conference. Everything else is either a vacation disguised as a business trip or an obligation that you should question.

The first reason is acquisition. You go to the conference to find books to publish. This means meeting agents, meeting authors, and hearing about manuscripts that are available or forthcoming. For this purpose, the relevant conferences are the big trade events: BookExpo (when it existed), the Frankfurt Book Fair, the London Book Fair. These are the places where rights are traded, where agents have meetings stacked back-to-back, and where the deals that shape the next season’s lists are made.

The second reason is marketing. You go to the conference to sell or promote books you have already published. This means meeting booksellers, meeting reviewers, meeting librarians, and connecting with readers who might be interested in your titles. For this purpose, regional book festivals and reader-facing events are more useful than trade fairs. An author appearance at a well-attended literary festival can sell more copies than a month of online advertising.

The third reason is learning. You go to the conference to acquire knowledge or skills that will make you better at your job. This means attending panels, workshops, and presentations on topics relevant to your publishing program. For this purpose, specialized industry conferences, such as those organized by IBPA (the Independent Book Publishers Association) or PubWest, tend to be more valuable than large general events where the programming is spread thin across too many topics.

Before committing to any conference, I ask: which of these three purposes will this event primarily serve? If the answer is unclear, or if the event serves all three purposes equally and therefore none of them well, that is a warning sign.

The Cost Calculation Nobody Does

Most publishers, when evaluating conference attendance, think about the registration fee and maybe the travel costs. But the real cost of attending a conference is much higher than that, and I think failing to account for the full cost leads to bad decisions.

Here is how I calculate the true cost of a conference. Start with the obvious expenses: registration fee, airfare or mileage, hotel for however many nights, meals, ground transportation, and any booth or table fees if you are exhibiting. For a typical three-day industry conference in another city, these direct costs add up to $1,500-3,000 for a single attendee.

Now add the opportunity cost. Every day I spend at a conference is a day I am not spending on editing, acquisitions, marketing, or administration. For a small publisher where every team member wears multiple hats, this is significant. I estimate the opportunity cost of my time at a conference at roughly $300-500 per day, based on the revenue-generating work I am not doing. For a three-day conference, that is another $900-1,500.

Now add the preparation time. Before a conference, I typically spend one to two full days preparing: researching attendees I want to meet, scheduling meetings, preparing marketing materials, briefing our authors who will be attending, and organizing our booth or table display if we are exhibiting. That is another $300-1,000 in opportunity cost.

And finally, add the recovery time. After a conference, I typically need a day to process notes, follow up on contacts, and get back up to speed on the work that accumulated while I was away. Another $300-500.

When I add all of this up, the true cost of attending a typical three-day conference is somewhere between $3,000 and $6,000. For a small publisher with an annual revenue in the low six figures, that is a meaningful investment. It is the equivalent of a modest book advance, or half the cost of a print run, or the entire marketing budget for a title. Framing the decision in those terms makes it easier to be disciplined about which conferences are actually worth it.

What I Have Learned Works

Based on several years of trial and error, here are the types of events that have consistently delivered value for us, and the types that have not.

Regional literary festivals where our authors are speaking are almost always worth attending. The combination of a captive audience, a bookselling opportunity, and the chance to meet other publishers and booksellers in a relaxed setting produces consistent returns. Our best conference experiences have been at mid-size regional festivals where we had an author on a panel and a table in the exhibitor area. These events typically cost less than major trade fairs, the audiences are engaged and enthusiastic, and the networking is more personal because the event is small enough that you can actually talk to people.

The major international book fairs, Frankfurt and London, are worth attending once every two or three years if you are actively buying or selling translation rights. They are not worth attending annually unless rights trading is a major part of your business. The fairs are expensive, exhausting, and overwhelming, and the signal-to-noise ratio is low. I found that we got more out of Frankfurt when we attended every other year and prepared intensively for each visit than when we attended annually and treated it as routine.

Industry-specific workshops and seminars, particularly those offered by IBPA and similar organizations, have been consistently valuable for learning. A two-day workshop on digital marketing or distribution strategy often delivers more actionable knowledge than a week at a general conference. These events are also cheaper and less time-consuming, which makes the cost-benefit calculation more favorable.

General literary conferences where we are not exhibiting or presenting have almost never been worth the investment. Attending as a passive audience member at a conference like AWP (the Association of Writers and Writing Programs) is an interesting experience, but it does not generate enough business value to justify the cost. The event is too large, the programming is too diffuse, and the networking is too random. Unless I am speaking on a panel or hosting a reading, I skip AWP.

The Meetings Matter More Than the Program

The single most important thing I have learned about conferences is that the official program is usually less valuable than the meetings you schedule around it.

A panel discussion on “The Future of Independent Publishing” might be intellectually stimulating, but a thirty-minute coffee meeting with a bookseller who specializes in your category is worth more in practical terms. The panel gives you ideas. The meeting gives you a relationship. And in publishing, relationships are the primary currency.

Before every conference I attend, I make a list of the five to eight people I most want to meet. These might be agents who represent the kind of authors I am looking for, booksellers who stock titles similar to ours, reviewers who cover our genre, or other publishers with whom I want to explore partnerships. I email each of these people in advance and ask for a brief meeting during the conference. Most people say yes. The hit rate on these pre-scheduled meetings is much higher than the hit rate on random networking at conference receptions.

I also leave unscheduled time in my conference itinerary for serendipitous encounters. Some of my most valuable conference connections have been with people I met by chance in a coffee line or at a shared dinner table. If your schedule is packed back-to-back with panels and meetings, you have no time for these accidents, and you miss the unplanned conversations that are often the most generative.

My ideal conference schedule allocates about one-third of my time to pre-scheduled meetings, one-third to selected panels and presentations, and one-third to unstructured networking and exploration. This ratio has consistently produced the best results for me.

The Follow-Up Is Everything

Here is a confession: for the first two years of running ScrollWorks, I attended conferences, made contacts, collected business cards, and then did almost nothing with them afterward. I would return to the office, get overwhelmed by the backlog of work that had accumulated, and the business cards would go into a drawer. Six months later, I would find them and realize I had wasted most of the networking value of the conference.

Now I have a rigid follow-up protocol. Within 48 hours of returning from a conference, I send a personalized email to every person I had a meaningful conversation with. Not a generic “nice to meet you” email. A specific email that references something we discussed and proposes a concrete next step: “I will send you a copy of our latest title,” or “I would love to schedule a call to discuss the translation project you mentioned,” or “Here is the article I recommended during our conversation.”

This follow-up habit has transformed the value I get from conferences. Probably 70% of the actual business outcomes I can trace to conference attendance came from the follow-up, not from the conference itself. The conference is the introduction. The follow-up is where the work gets done.

I also maintain a simple database of conference contacts with notes on what we discussed, when we last communicated, and what the potential value of the relationship is. This sounds bureaucratic, and it is. But it means that when I am preparing for next year’s conference, I can look up everyone I met last year and assess which relationships have developed and which need attention. It turns the random social graph of conference networking into a managed set of professional relationships.

Our Current Approach

Given everything I have described, here is how ScrollWorks currently allocates its conference budget.

We attend two to three regional literary festivals per year where our authors are speaking. We prioritize festivals in markets where we want to build our bookseller relationships and reader base. We always exhibit at these events, even if the table fee feels expensive, because having a physical presence with books on display generates more sales and conversations than attending without one.

We attend one major industry event per year, rotating between Frankfurt, London, and a domestic trade event. At these events, our focus is on rights and acquisitions rather than marketing.

We send one team member to one or two professional development workshops per year, chosen based on whatever skill gap we most need to address. Last year it was digital marketing. This year it will probably be audio production.

That adds up to five or six events per year, at a total cost of roughly $15,000-20,000 including all the hidden costs I described above. It is a significant line item for a publisher our size, and I scrutinize it carefully every year. But the relationships, knowledge, and sales generated by these events have consistently justified the investment. The key is being selective, being prepared, and following up. Without all three, conference attendance is just expensive tourism with a literary theme.

When our authors are promoting titles like Echoes of Iron or Still Waters at these events, the immediate sales are gratifying. But the lasting value is in the connections we build with booksellers, reviewers, and readers who will remember us the next time we publish something. That accumulated goodwill is the real return on our conference investment, and it is one that compounds year after year.