Riding the Market: Strategic Positioning to SELL into a Slippery Marketplace
Friday 5:00 Room 1
Presenter: Pam Sheppard
SESSION DETAILS:
You’ve focused on producing an excellent book – how do you position it to SELL?
Amazon algorithms reinvent themselves regularly. The marketplace flips from one trend to the next newest shiny trend. You already have more than an ideal reader and targeted COMPS. Your book will have assets that connect with market trends and opportunities you may have overlooked.
We will uncover the ways to identify your project’s valuable Marketing Assets that can ride the changes playing in the market and amplify your potential for customer conversion to BUY.
Katharine Sands

A literary agent with the Sarah Jane Freymann Literary Agency, Katharine Sands has worked with a varied list of authors who publish a diverse array of books. Highlights include Spiritual Pregnancy: Nine Months that Change Your Life Before You Give Birth by Dr. Shawn Tassone and Dr. Kathryn Landherr; Loglines by Lane Shefter Bishop; Talk to Strangers: How Everyday Random Encounters Can Expand Your Business, Career, Income and Life by David Topus; The New Rules of Attraction: How to Get Him, Keep Him and Make Him Beg for More by Arden Leigh; Stand Up for Yourself: Resolve Workplace Crises Before You Quit, Get Axed or Sue the Bastards by Donna Ballman; Health and Beauty Bullet Points with Dr. Oz guest, Dr. Pina Loguidice; Dating the Devil (producer: Vast Entertainment) by Lia Romeo; XTC: SongStories; Chasing Zebras: THE Unofficial Guide to House, MD by Barbara Barnett of
Let’s Talk TV; CityTripping: a Guide for Foodies, Fashionistas and the Generally Style-Obsessed; Writers on Directors; Ford model Helen Lee’s The Tao of Beauty; Elvis and You: Your Guide to the Pleasures of Being an Elvis Fan; New York: Songs of the City; Taxpertise: Dirty Little Secrets the IRS Doesn’t Want You to Know; The SAT Word Slam, Divorce After 50; Trust Your Gut; Make Up, Don’t Break Up with Oprah guest Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil to name a few.
She is the agent provocateur of Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye, a collection of pitching wisdom from leading literary agents. Actively building her client list, she likes books that have a clear benefit for readers’ lives in categories of food, travel, lifestyle, home arts, beauty, wisdom, relationships, parenting, and fresh looks which might be at issues, life challenges or popular culture. For compelling reads in faction, memoir and femoir, she likes to be transported to a world rarely or newly observed; for fiction, she wants to be compelled and propelled.
Pam Sheppard

Pam Sheppard is a veteran of over three decades of selling books into all channels of the marketplace for Big 5 and a range of medium and small publishers. Overlapping her job as a publishers’ rep, Pam has worked for 20 years as a developmental editor and consultant. She has adapted to the changes in publishing without losing her literary eye and very practical instincts to employ for projects of all genres. She is a market smart editor and a metadata specialist, providing robust information tailored to the needs of both writers and independent publishers.