Our Schedule
Welcome to the official schedule for Ireland’s Publishing Show2026 - your go-to page for all session times, speaker details, and workshop booking info.
Over two jam-packed days, you’ll hear from speakers across two rooms, covering everything from writing craft to marketing, AI, and career strategy.
Main Room Sessions
These sessions are open to all attendees and do not require booking. Panels, keynotes, and presentations run throughout the day — simply take a seat and enjoy!
Second Room Sessions (Free Pre-Booking Recommended - link in email)
Our second room hosts smaller, hands-on sessions, capped at 40 people per session to allow for deeper interaction and Q&A.
Booking for second-room sessions is recommended — spaces are limited and must be reserved in advance.
If a second-room session doesn’t suit your interests, you’re always welcome to attend the main room session running at the same time.
Note: While all sessions will be recorded, smaller workshops may be harder to follow on video after the event due to their interactive nature | If there is space on the day for a workshop, you'll be able to attend even if not booked.
As always, our inbox is open irelandspublishingshow@gmail.com
Suzy K Quinn
How to Write Bestselling Characters
Suzy K Quinn shares character secrets and tips for bestselling books. How do you create characters that readers love, write rave reviews about and want to read again and again? It's not just luck or talent - there are formulas!
Suzy has sold over 1 million fiction books worldwide, been a bestseller in the UK, US and Germany and had published and self-published books optioned for film.
All levels, from beginners to advanced, will enjoy this talk. This is primarily fiction focused, but non-fiction / narrative non-fiction authors will also learn something useful.
Steven Aitchison
The 7 Video Ads That Generated £703,000 in Royalties: A Blueprint for Authors
Discover the video marketing strategy that drove £703,000 in book royalties. Steven Aitchison breaks down 7 specific ad formats—ranging from the storytelling "Hook-Story-Close" to the atmospheric "Silent Scribe." This is a practical, no-fluff session designed to give authors a ready-to-use blueprint for creating video content that captures attention and converts viewers into readers, regardless of your budget or technical skill.
Diana Xarissa
Increasing Productivity and Getting Unstuck - Tips, Hints, and Ideas from a full-time Indie Author.
Let’s talk about setting goals, using different tools to increase productivity, and some different ways you can get stuck and how to work through them. Diana shares what she’s learned from her own experience and from talking to other authors over her fourteen years as an indie author.
Thomas Dean Donnelly
How To Win The Lottery: Tips and Tricks for Selling to Hollywood
Hollywood. Movie stars. The big screen. TV. The red carpet. Many’s a writer that has been entranced by the lure of Hollywood and the film and television business worldwide. For indie authors, is this a walled garden that we will never be invited to? Or are there ways to at least have a chance of having our work noticed by this most gatekept of creative industries? Join T.D. Donnelly as he imparts to you the wisdom he’s learned over thirty years as a professional Hollywood screenwriter, adapting the works of Ray Bradbury, Clive Cussler, Stan Lee, Robert Kirkman, and more. Learn what Hollywood is looking for from us, and once we have that project that fits the bill, how to strategize an approach. There are no guarantees in Hollywood, but the rewards are at least equal to the challenge!
Kevin McLaughlin
The Zero to Sixty Author
In this session you’ll learn everything you need to build a full-time writing career in a year. It’s a lot of work and not for the faint of heart - but armed with the knowledge from this class, you’ll have a clear, repeatable path to get it done and achieve your dream.
Matthias Kadott
The Invisible Bestseller: How to sell books without showing your face
In an era of personality-driven social media, is it possible to build a publishing empire while remaining completely anonymous?
Matthias shows that it is. In this session, he reveals the strategy behind writing successful Romance novels as a male author using a secret identity.
From paid advertising, creating "faceless" content for TikTok and Instagram to rapidly testing new genres with minimal risk, Matthias will share his blueprint for success. Expect real data on four different pen names, insights into overcoming the "ego trap" of anonymity, and practical tips on how to sell books based on story power alone—no selfies required.
Tammi Labreqcue
Set It and Forget It - Automate Your Author Newsletter So You Can Get Back to Writing
Your newsletter shouldn’t steal time from your writing — it should quietly work in the background for you. In this session, Tammi Labrecque (Newsletter Ninja) breaks down which parts of an author newsletter are ideal for automation.
We’ll cover essentials like welcome sequences, reader magnets, list hygiene, and simple backlist promotion, along with optional semi-automations for launches and seasonal content. You’ll leave with a clearer sense of what to automate, why it matters for sustainability, and how to build systems that support your writing life instead of complicating it.
Tony Lee
Working backwards to move on - and how not to shoot yourself in with Chekhov's gun
Following his keynote speech at last year’s conference, New York Times #1 bestselling author Tony Lee returns with a candid, example-led masterclass on story. Drawing on decades of professional writing, Tony explores how working backwards from a fixed endpoint strengthens character, avoids broken promises to the reader, and makes Chekhov’s Gun work for you rather than against you.
The session also looks at different ways writers approach the page, from meticulous plotters to instinctive pantsers, and how skills learned in one medium can unlock success in another. Tony discusses how his background in comics shaped his novels despite wildly different writing routines, and why studying long-form storytelling under real-world constraints such as WWE wrestling, where storylines must constantly adapt to sudden change, offers valuable lessons in flexibility, payoff, and narrative control.
There may also be a 20-sided die involved. He won't tell us why.
Lorna Sixsmith
Getting Press Coverage for your Books
Being featured in newspapers or interviewed on radio or television is a huge stepping stone to getting your books into bookshops, gaining recognition as an author and increasing sales. This workshop will show you how to contact journalists, write a successful press release and prepare for interviews.
James Blatch
AI translations: The 5-Pass Method
A Complete Framework for Translating Your Books Using AI, Without Losing Your Voice.
Too many authors are publishing a first pass of their novel from an AI translator and crossing their fingers. But there’s a problem and native readers can spot it. The prose feels... translated. Sentence structures mirror English too closely. Idioms land with a thud. Dialogue sounds like no one who actually speaks the language. And here’s the key issue: the author's voice, the thing that made readers fall in love with the book in the first place, has been stripped away and replaced with something flat and mechanical. In this session, you'll learn the systematic process that produces translations native readers actually enjoy, ones that preserve your voice, your pacing, and everything that made your book worth translating.
Stuart Grant
The Invisible Author
Do you feel like your books are the best-kept secret on the internet? Here's the truth: readers can't buy what they can't find. Join Stuart Grant, a renowned GEO expert specializing in author discoverability and author websites, for a fast-paced, fun, and mind-blowing session that will change how you show up online. Stu will cut through the jargon and focus on what actually works: **SEO to get found on Google, and **GEO to get recommended by AI. You'll learn how to structure your content so it gets noticed and walk away with an action plan you can implement right away. This isn't theory—it's a practical roadmap for getting found, getting fans, and building the audience your books deserve.
Robin Bennett - Freebairn
The $1.2 Trillion Market Most Authors Ignore: How to Sell Your Books in the Gifting Economy
The gifting market is enormous, predictable, and wildly under-exploited by authors. This session shows how fiction and non-fiction authors can make their books gift-worthy, emotionally compelling, and more profitable by understanding how gift-buyers think, buy, and repeat. Practical, proven, and immediately actionable.
TJ Green
Beyond the Book: How to Build Worlds Readers Never Want to Leave
This interactive session is for authors with published work who want to think beyond individual books and build lasting reader loyalty.
We’ll explore how branding applies to authors and series across all genres, how consistent tone, themes, and visual identity create recognisable “worlds,” and why distinctive author identity matters more than ever in a rapidly changing publishing landscape.
Part talk and part workshop, this session will include practical exercises to help attendees clarify their author identity, strengthen series cohesion, and apply their branding across newsletters, subscriptions, and other reader-facing extensions beyond the book.
Chelle Honiker
AI-Powered Social Media Automation: Build Your Content System in 60 Minutes
Stop drowning in social media content creation. In this hands-on workshop, you'll build the foundation of an AI automation system that generates 30 social media content ideas tailored to your books and brand - all triggered by a single email. You'll create your brand guide, set up your book information in Airtable, and build your first Make.com scenario that actually works. Walk away with a functioning system you can expand on your own and the knowledge to take it further.
LJ Dix
Developing a Writing Career: It's Never Too Early or Too Late
Featuring Kevin McLaughlin
There Are Many Paths Up The Mountain. Writing books is one of those odd careers that people come to from many different directions and arrive at during wildly different times of their lives. Join a mother and son pair of writers and learn the different ways they came to this career, develop confidence that it is never too late or too early to write, and be published. Advice for unpublished or early career writers
Steve Higgs
The Synthetic Audience and how it will end all your advertising woes
AI is about to make your ad campaigns ten times more accurate and far simpler. With a synthetic audience you can have captions, copy, headlines, and confidence in minutes. It will even write the prompts you need to create the images in Midjourney. Come with me as I walk you through how to do it all from start to finish.
Jonathan Brazee
Co-Writing Pros, Cons, and Methods
You’re at a barcon with your new best writing buddy, and after a few beers, that joking “We should write a . . .” actually starts sounding like a good idea.
But is it?
This presentation will cover the types of co-writing, pros, cons, pitfalls, and how to make it work.
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Ben Richardson
Why Most AI Video Fails — and How You Can Improve It Today
Sometimes AI video works—and sometimes it doesn’t. Sometimes the limitation is the technology itself, and sometimes the issue is how the tools are being used. In this session, Emmy Award–winning filmmaker and President of the 11:11 Media Creator Academy, Ben Richardson, breaks down which AI models are best suited for different creative workflows, where creators unintentionally undermine their own results, and why authors in particular have a unique advantage when working with AI image and video. Blending practical discussion of software and prompting with cinematic principles of story, visual intent, and shot thinking, attendees will leave with a clear framework they can apply immediately to improve their AI video outcomes—without relying on hype or one-size-fits-all tricks.