Historical Novel Society Conference 2025 (Virtual)

Last weekend, I was able to attend the virtual version of the Historical Novel Society of North America’s conference. The live version was in Las Vegas, but I wasn’t able to travel there, nor did the prospect of Las Vegas in the summer really appeal to me.

This was the third virtual HNS conference I have attended. The first was in 2021 shortly after the pandemic, and the whole conference was virtual. My next HNS conference was in 2023, when the live conference was in San Antonio, but again, I only attended virtually. I also attended an online mini-conference sponsored by HNSNA in 2022, which I think was just one day.

Attending a writing conference virtually isn’t perfect. This time, there were technical difficulties. I couldn’t see all the presenters’ slides. The volume was too low unless I wore headphones that hurt my ears. But it was still a worthwhile experience.

Here were some of the best points I heard during this year’s conference:

Historical fiction puts readers in the shoes of the characters, which non-fiction history generally doesn’t. Historical accounts don’t often tell readers how real characters felt, but biographical fiction can. This is the value of historical fiction.
If you’re writing about a real person, their life will not fit neatly into a story arc. You need to take a slice of their life and have a theme or angle you want to write about. You might need to change the facts to make it work as a novel. (It is fiction, after all.) How much you should change the facts is your decision as a novelist. Your Author’s Note is where you tell readers what you’ve changed.
Subtext is all the things in a book that are underneath the actual text. It is the shadow of what is going on in the story, what you say when you don’t say it. Subtext is important because 93% of human communication is not verbal. But novelists only have words to work with, so we need to convey subtext with words—such as description, metaphors, syntax, and pacing. How you do this is your author’s voice.
Authors write about the American West because the region is a place where people have always dreamed big. Western expansion was spurred by people’s desire to embark on something new. They wanted something big to happen. The West invites you to dream big. It certainly has invited me to dream big as I write about it!
In historical times when women lived under many more societal constraints than they do today, women could find agency by making the best of the world they lived in. They could work the rules of their society to their advantage as best they could. They could exercise autonomy in the areas of life (household, child-rearing) where they were allowed. And some of them could step beyond the women’s world, though there were often consequences to doing so. Women’s agency is something I’ve written about a lot in my books, from traveling the Oregon Trail, to finding a way to make money, to surviving an unfortunate marriage.
Writers can’t control how readers will react to their books. With every book, some will love it, some will hate it, and most will like it. So just write the best book you can. Inuring yourself to criticism gets easier over time, particularly if you know you’ve done your best.
Marketing has no “shoulds” and no guarantees of success. When developing your marketing plan, do what you like best (or hate the least). Work within your constraints (time and money). And be kind to yourself—do not try to do it all. I “should” do more marketing, but even as I write that, I know that my constraints mean that I am better off spending my time writing.
Marketing is likely to go through an existential crisis because of AI, because AI can do a better job at interpreting online algorithms than humans and building marketing campaigns to address the algorithm. The challenge for writers will be to use AI where it can work better or faster than you can, but not to use AI to avoid the creative work that makes you a writer.