Author Nation: The Conference Writers Cannot Miss

About this video

Dale Roberts presents Author Nation, in its second year, as a conference built around practice rather than theory: learn something in a session, immediately consider how to use it, talk openly about what worked and failed, and leave with actions to take right away instead of just notes. To test whether that idea showed up at the event, he stops authors in the hallways for two-minute lightning rounds. Interviewees include Alexa Bigwarf, publishing as Lexi Haddock in romantic comedy for 12 years; Adam, writing as AP Bezwick, who had just finished his 18th book after a first book in 2019; Kimberly Garcia, who writes homeschool curriculum, adult coloring books, children’s books and a dystopian young-adult trilogy; Melissa Storm, with over a hundred books; Jeremy Fabiano, writing cozy fantasy and lit RPG since 2018; Jessica Dean Norris, with three young-adult epic fantasy books in about four years; and Katie, writing as CJR Eisley and CL West for about five years. Recurring answers include that marketing takes more work than writing, audiences take time to grow, and several authors reject ‘stay in your lane’ as bad advice. Roberts closes by promoting the Author Nation Afterparty digital replay at daleinks.com/authornation replay, described as lifetime access to more than 90 sessions on book marketing, audience building and the future of publishing plus live virtual Q&As, and tickets for AuthorNation 2026 at daleinks.com/authornation, with Andy Weir, author of The Martian, as keynote speaker. He also mentions his recent interview with founder Joe Solari about recent changes to Amazon’s algorithms.

Key takeaways

• Author Nation’s stated theme is practice over theory: apply ideas during the event, share real methods and failures, and leave with immediate actions rather than passive notes.
• Multiple interviewed authors said marketing and publishing take more work and time than writing itself, and that growing an audience takes longer than they expected before publishing.
• Tools named by individual authors in the lightning rounds included KDP (Alexa Bigwarf/Lexi Haddock), Vellum (Adam/AP Bezwick), Facebook ads (Melissa Storm), Google Docs (Jeremy Fabiano), Notion (Jessica Dean Norris) and Story Origin (Katie).
• Repeated practical advice included having professionally edited books with great covers, saying yes to more opportunities, and the line quoted by Katie: you can edit terrible writing but you cannot edit a blank page.
• The Afterparty digital replay is promoted as lifetime access to more than 90 sessions on book marketing, audience building and the future of publishing, and AuthorNation 2026 is promoted with Andy Weir as keynote speaker.

Episode details: published December 8, 2025 · 20:25 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dale L. Roberts’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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