A New Year For SINC

[Sisters In Crime]

Happy New Year to all of our friends – whether you are readers, librarians, writers, agents, booksellers, editors…or a combination of any of those. We welcome you to the SinC blog, and to SinC. If you are not a member of Sisters in Crime but would like to be, please visit us at sistersincrime.org. We’d love to have you join us.
This year we are trying some exciting new things for our members, with the goal of expanding our members’ knowledge of writing, the mystery business (and sometimes it truly is a mystery!), and the web of support we – and others in the community – can offer.

One of these ways, which was discussed last week, is the new Mentor Mondays program on the listserv, which brings experts of our business to the forum for questions. Margaret Maron, multiple award-winning SinC author, started us off last week with a wonderful day, in which she shared about her process, the business, and writing in general. On January 14 our visitor is Paige Wheeler, a literary agent from Folio Literary Management. If you’d like to join the listserv to participate in the active discussions there, the information is on the homepage of our web site. We’d love to have you!

Another program that began last year and will continue in 2008 is the Publishers Summit. Several members of the board visited with publishers and agents in the fall to talk with them about the writing business and find out how we can best help our members break in, promote themselves, and, yes, even make some money. The information they received is helping to expand the information section of the web site, and will be coming out in the newsletter and other forums. We plan to hold another summit this year, and gather more information for our members.

At Malice Domestic, in April, we are expanding our annual chapter presidents’ meeting to include anyone from SinC chapters who would like to attend. We will be inviting members of various chapters to share a way in which they have excelled at helping their regional members or the larger organization. These ways might include newsletters, workshops, conferences, or other creative areas. If your chapter does something you would like to share, please contact our administrative office at [e-mail] and let us know what special things you do!

We will continue to fill InSinC, our newsletter, with informative (and entertaining!) articles, monitor publications for reviews of books by women, and gather information for a Book Club Database. We strive to help our members in whatever way we can, and look forward to a very exciting 2008!

Happy Reading and Writing!

Judy Clemens

Vice President, SinC