The Pennsylvania Writers Conference will be held August 5-6. See http://www.wilkes.edu/pwc for details. This is cheap at $100/person (includes dinner) and includes an opportunity to present five pages of your work in progress. Apparently some agents and editors will be in attendance. I will be going and I think everyone from neophyte to those ready to hit the marketing trail might find something worthwhile there.
How often does this happen? Annually? Biannual lyrics? I'm only asking because I am very much interested, but I will be on vacation with my family this particular weekend. I'm hoping to make plans another time.
This was a very worthwhile event for both Karen and myself. Karen, doing young adult fantasy, learned a lot of terminology that may cause her to reshape her WIP slightly. I was primarily interested in queries and pitches, and got quite a bit of help in that area. And we had an interesting presentation by an extreme planner (I consider myself a pantser, though I am learner that I too have planner-like flaws), include detailed character sketches, flow charts and outlines. Over all this was a very worthwhile event at a bargain price of $100, dinner included, and I would recommend this to anyone next year.