The biggest news for RWA members this last week is the change of location for the National conference from Nashville to The Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando, Florida, July 28–31.

According to the NY Times, self-publishing numbers are up and they’re gaining in cachet.

Cheap, digital-publishing technology — especially print-on-demand options, which let individual buyers essentially commission copies of books — has been a godsend to writers without agents or footholds at traditional publishing houses. It has also been a quiet godsend to literary history. Books that defy traditional classification now appear in print, and reprints of public-domain titles account for the biggest category of self-published books.

Change isn’t coming, according to the Book Industry Study Group’s Making Information Pay conference, it’s already here.

“St. Martin’s Press v-p and associate publisher Matt Baldacci said the point of no return came to him last year when a bestseller that eventually sold 30,000 copies in hardcover sold 11,000 e-book copies within the first few weeks of release.”

In this Media Bistro interview, agent Meredith Bernstein says “many editors have told me that they are looking for really good women’s fiction.”

“What I am looking for is pretty much always the same thing: A BOOK I CAN’T PUT DOWN. I really don’t care what the subject matter is or the genre or the setting. Just give me a STORY and CHARACTERS that I want to inhale and you’ll have me at “hello”!”

Taylor Martindale joined Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency. One of her interests is women’s fiction.

Donald Maass mentioned RWA-WF member Susan Wiggs in his recent Writer Unboxed post this week, in which he talked about using multiple point of view to give depth to a novel and “to create a true sense of scale.”

Whether you’ve gotten rejections lately or not, this list of 30 famous authors whose works were (repeatedly and rudely) rejected is interesting.

According to Publishers Weekly, St. Paul Library’s Got Friends — including authors and publishers. With author chats, book sales, cocktails and dinners, the library’s fund-raiser had 796 attendees this year. In 2008, they made a profit of $102,000. Other libraries should take note.

Do you think e-books are hot in romance? Publishing Perspectives does. They have numbers and quotes, including information that the over 60 demographic reading e-books is growing.

RWA-WF member Susan Wiggs was mentioned in agent Donald Maass’s recent Writer Unboxed blog about writing “bigger” books. He said:

“Recently I had the privilege of co-teaching workshops with two contemporary novelists whose work embodies bigness: mystery novelist Nancy Pickard and women’s fiction author Susan Wiggs. In interviews and with in-depth analysis of a novel by each (The Virgin of Small Plains by Nancy and Just Breathe by Susan) we were able to discover, at least in part, the methods of bigness.”

Agents are in the news again. Query Tracker reports that Kathleen Ortiz of Lowenstein Assoc. is looking for chick lit and YA. This is so new it’s not on the agency website yet. You could be one of the first to query her.

If you’re querying agents, you’ll want to read Chuck Samuchino’s Guide to Literary Agents editor’s blog on 7 Reasons Agents Stop Reading Your First Chapter.

Here’s an interesting blog on why women read women’s fiction, and why WF has difficulty making it in transmedia.

Not about publishing, but important to all women, the Senate passed a women’s health amendment. According to this New York Times article, “the Senate approved an amendment to its health care legislation that would require insurance companies to offer free mammograms and other preventive services to women.” Bravo to the Senate!