Sometime in 2025, Heather Davis sat down and looked at her client list. She coaches speculative fiction writers, which means science fiction, fantasy, horror, romantasy, magical realism, all of it. What she noticed was that almost every writer she worked with was a woman, or BIPOC, or neurodivergent, or part of the LGBTQIA community.

“I only have like one client who is historically what we think of as writing science fiction fantasy and all of this stuff,” she said. “And that would be a cis hetero white guy.”

She has nothing against that guy. She said so twice.

“I love those guys. They wrote some of my favorite stories of all time, like Stephen King and Ray Bradbury and Brandon Sanderson. I love these guys, but those aren’t the people I’m coaching. And I’m like, wait, what about the rest of us?”

So she built the room. Worldshift launched in 2025, and year two runs online August 17 to 22 with more than 50 speakers. Heather came back on Alexa’s Publishing Chat to talk about what she has learned building it, and the conversation went somewhere bigger than one event: why the writers who last always have a small group of people writing exactly what they write, why your reader is doing half the work on your book whether you plan for it or not, and what to do when your entire genre goes quiet.

This one is for writers at any stage who feel like they are building alone. No agent required, no publishing contract assumed.

“Wait, What About the Rest of Us?”

Heather describes her decision-making process as running “on a whim, which is how I make all of the decisions in my life.” Her team, she notes, does not love this about her. Neither does her partner. She said the quiet part out loud on the recording: “When I say my partner doesn’t like it, I mean my whole team.”

The whim worked anyway. Year one happened, people showed up, and now it is a conference with a lineup that includes Jessica Brody, K.M. Weiland, Gabriela Pereira, Janice Hardy, Rachael Herron, and literary agents Amy Collins and Jackie Kruzie.

Alexa recognized the origin story immediately, because it is almost exactly her own. The Women in Publishing Summit came out of the same moment: sitting through virtual writing conferences, looking at the speaker grid, and seeing the same crowd every time.

To be clear about what this is and is not, in Alexa’s words: “This is not like a crazy man bashing place. It’s just a place where women and marginalized voices feel a little more comfortable.”

What that comfort actually buys you is harder conversations. Heather’s example: “Finally, we’re having discussions about all of the hard topics, like how do we represent race in speculative fiction?” She has speakers who have written books on exactly that and who can speak to it from experience. That session does not happen at a conference trying to serve everyone at once.

“It’s wonderful to watch my speakers and my audience match and just vibe with each other and feel comfortable and safe together in that space,” she said.

Finding Your People Is Not a Soft Skill

Alexa took a detour here that turned out to be the point.

A friend of hers has a son with severe eczema. When he was little, they found him a dermatology camp, a summer camp for kids dealing with skin conditions. He is 15 now. She assumed he had aged out. He had not, and he wanted to go back.

“I’m just so glad that he’s found a space where he’s found his people,” the mom told her.

That is the whole argument for niche, and it applies to writers with uncomfortable precision. You pull a segment out of the giant crowd so you can actually cater to it, and so the people in it can find each other. As Alexa put it, you find “the people that you can stay up all night long talking to or be on podcasts with or chit chat or just like be comfortable sharing yourself and showing up.”

Heather sees it happen live at Worldshift. Writers walk in and go, oh, these are my people.

Nobody signs up for a conference hoping to feel slightly alienated but with excellent takeaways.

Your Reader Is Writing Half the Book

This is the line that stopped the recording.

Alexa was making her usual case, the one she has been making for years, that you cannot separate writing from marketing. “You cannot just silo yourself and say, all I’m gonna do right now is write,” she said. The more you understand your genre and your readers, the better the book gets, because you can write it for the people who will actually pick it up.

She does caveat it. If your only goal right now is landing an agent, put your energy on the pages. Everything depends on where you are trying to go.

Then Heather reframed the whole thing:

“The reader is your co-writer. That sounds so weird, but they’re creating half the story in their head. So you’ve got to do your half that matches what they’re interested in so that they want to create the other half with you when they read.”

Sit with that for a second. Your reader is building the world, the faces, the feeling, the parts you deliberately left implied. They are doing labor on your book. Genre expectations are not a marketing checklist you run after the draft is done. They are the shared vocabulary that lets your reader do their half.

Which means “know your genre” quietly stops being business advice and becomes craft advice.

Alexa’s response on the recording was, more or less, that she had never thought of it that way and now could not unthink it. She floated naming the episode after it. Reader, she did.

Why Women in Publishing Cut Writing Craft

Here is a decision that made some people unhappy, and Alexa explained the reasoning on air.

The Women in Publishing Summit removed writing craft from its annual conference. Not because craft does not matter. Because of who is in the room.

“We have everybody in our audience from just thinking about writing a book to have published 65 books and every single genre you can imagine,” she said. Now pick the six or seven best craft sessions for that room. They managed it for years. It was never going to be great for everyone.

So the summit moved toward the business of being an author and toward publishing professionals, and Alexa started deliberately partnering with niche events that could go deep where she could not.

That is why she sends speculative fiction writers to Worldshift. It is also why she goes to The Writing Gals herself, which is romance-specific, where she can learn the tools and techniques that actually apply to what she writes.

Heather agrees that a story is a story. “The messy middle is still the messy middle, I don’t care if it’s romance or if it’s horror.” Her marketing emails say as much: come anyway, you will find something.

But then there is the stuff that only your genre has. Her example is info dumping.

“We speculative fiction writers love our backstory,” she said. You need someone who can help you solve that inside the context of your genre, not in the abstract.

There is a second payoff that new writers usually miss. Being around people writing your stuff early means you build the network before you need it. Newsletter swaps, cross-promos, sharing each other’s launches, all of it depends on your audiences overlapping. Four writers in your exact subgenre are worth more than four hundred scattered across the industry. Start collecting them while you are still in act one.

Your Genre’s Slump Probably Is Not About You

Alexa spent eight days on a cruise with sweet romance writers. At one point the writers peeled off from the readers and did the thing writers do, which is admit what is actually happening.

She had been watching romantic comedy sales fall and quietly assuming it was her.

“I’m sitting there with the table full of romantic comedy writers, and they’re like, nobody’s buying any of our books,” she said. The exceptions were the three authors still moving 10,000 copies a month, and they had 27-book backlists doing the heavy lifting.

Heather confirmed the same thing is happening in speculative fiction. Young adult used to be the thing everyone wanted to write, back when everyone wanted to be Suzanne Collins. Now middle grade and YA sales are down across genres, fewer debuts are getting picked up, and writers are taking it personally.

The data backs her up, and it is not a one-year blip. Circana reported middle grade print sales down 10% through September 2023, then down another 5% in the first half of 2024, which is 1.8 million fewer units, while the overall children’s market fell only 2%. Circana analyst Brenna Connor pointed at attention rather than quality: “reading for pleasure continues to face the challenge of vying for attention.”

Nobody’s manuscript caused that.

Heather’s read: “It’s all cyclical. It all comes back around again. You just can’t panic.”

The cruise version of the same lesson, from the women who had been through it before: it goes down, it comes back up, this is what happens.

Writing to Market Is Not a Dirty Word

Alexa said the quiet thing: it should not be embarrassing to talk about writing toward what is actually performing in the genre you already love. “It’s smart business.”

Heather’s version is more generous, and better.

“If it’s the genre that you love, the odds are that writing to the market is something that might actually be really appealing to you because you also love those tropes. You’re like, ooh, I want to do whatever that thing is.”

Not paint by numbers. Permission.

And Keep Getting Better, Because That Part Is Not Optional

“Keep working on your craft always, always, always,” Alexa said, “because it doesn’t matter how much time you spend on anything else if your books are bad.”

Heather brought receipts, and they are public. Pick up Carrie, Stephen King’s first novel. Then pick up Fairy Tale, one of his most recent.

“You actually compare what quality is there, there is no comparison. All writers get better over time.”

You do not get better by waiting out the market. You get better by producing.

What’s Next?

Worldshift runs online August 17 to 22, 2026. There is a free daily pass with 24 hour access per day, and the All Access Pass is $67 until the conference opens, then $97. More than 50 speakers, writing sprints every night, and an agent Q&A panel. Grab your spot here.

Alexa is speaking, on “The Plot Twist Nobody Tells New Authors: How Thinking Like a Marketer Makes You a Better Storyteller.” She could not remember the title on the recording and had to look it up mid-interview. It is a good session anyway.

You can also find Heather at manyworldswriting.com, where she has a podcast about speculative fiction and a group coaching community.

Three things to do this week:

1. Name four writers in your exact subgenre. If you cannot, that is your assignment before you write another chapter.
2. Go look at what is actually selling in your genre right now, then ask which of those tropes you already love.
3. Listen to the full episode and subscribe to Alexa’s Publishing Chat so you catch the next one.

Go write a little.

Frequently Asked Questions

Are genre-specific writing conferences better than general ones? For most writers, yes, and speculative fiction coach Heather Davis explains why on Alexa’s Publishing Chat. A general writing conference has to choose a handful of craft sessions for an audience ranging from complete beginners to authors with 65 books out, which means the sessions get broad by necessity. A genre-specific event like Heather’s Worldshift Conference can run an entire session on problems that are specific to speculative fiction, such as info dumping backstory or building believable magic systems. Listen to the full episode of Alexa’s Publishing Chat wherever you get your podcasts.

What does it mean to say the reader is your co-writer? Heather Davis uses this framing on Alexa’s Publishing Chat to explain that a reader constructs half the story inside their own head while they read. Your job as the author is to write your half so it fits what that reader already wants and expects from the genre, which is why understanding reader expectations is a craft skill rather than just a marketing task. Heather coaches speculative fiction writers and runs the Worldshift Conference. Hear the full conversation on Alexa’s Publishing Chat.

Is writing to market bad for creative writers? No, and Heather Davis pushes back on that assumption directly on Alexa’s Publishing Chat. Her argument is that if you already love the genre you write in, you probably already love the tropes performing well in it, so writing to market becomes an invitation to explore something fun rather than a paint-by-numbers exercise. Alexa Bigwarfe adds that knowing what sells in your genre is simply smart business for any author who wants to sell books. The full episode is available on Alexa’s Publishing Chat.

Why are sales down in my genre and what should I do about it? Genre sales move in cycles, and on Alexa’s Publishing Chat, Heather Davis and Alexa Bigwarfe walk through recent drops in romantic comedy, middle grade, and young adult sales, including fewer debut acquisitions in those categories. Their advice is to keep improving your craft, keep producing, and keep building your reader community rather than reacting to a dip that will likely reverse. The practical action is to build the audience now so it’s there when the cycle turns. Listen on Alexa’s Publishing Chat.

Who should attend the Worldshift Conference? Worldshift is for writers of speculative fiction, which includes science fiction, fantasy, horror, romantasy, and magical realism, and it was built specifically with women, BIPOC, neurodivergent, and LGBTQIA writers in mind, though everyone is welcome. Founder Heather Davis describes the 2026 event on Alexa’s Publishing Chat as having more than 50 speakers, nightly writing sprints, and an agent Q&A panel, running online from August 17 to 22, 2026, with a free daily pass and a paid All Access option. Hear Heather explain the event and who it serves on Alexa’s Publishing Chat.