The Media Drop

Tonight I was invited by Debra Galant to attend a gathering of local writers and editors (spouses and bloggers were also apparently allowed past the bouncers!) in the Montclair, New Jersey area at a place called Diva Lounge. The group hosting the event is called MEWS (Montclair Editors and Writers), and its creator is Pamela Satran, who wrote some baby-name books you’ve probably heard of, among other things. The group has a newsletter that keeps everyone apprised of what’s going on in the area, including book signings, job postings, etc. - so it sounded like a great chance to mingle with the locals, if you will.

Two major things came out of this event for me. 1> The area I live in has a fantastic concentration of “media” folks, and 2> there is so much content and information out there I could only hope to scratch the surface of it all. And talk about variety… I was able to chat with people who ranged from authors to individuals from the New York Times to someone at DC Comics to one person from Institutional Investor. Topics ranged from how people planned on marketing their next book to people asking me all about blogging and how they could get into it.

One of the coolest things (though somewhat of a bummer) was that I didn’t even get to talk to 1/10th of the people in the room. There was only so much time to get around and speak to people, but what was great was that everyone had some starting point in common - they were into writing/editing and had some proximity in where they lived. So no need for icebreakers. Being able to have access to people such as these is a great opportunity, and is one of the reasons I’ve been promoting stuff like LinkedIn so much offline and on. Orkut is fun and all, but that’s not what it’s for.

So we’ll see what kind of results are garnered from tonight’s event. All I know is I’m leaning towards going to the BloggerCon event next month…