Though I couldn’t be at SXSWi in person this year, I’ve done my best to do a round-up of all the news and gossip that touches the world of publishing for our beloved SheWriters. More productive than last year’s rather hostile sink-or-swim attitude towards traditional publishers, this year’s panels focused on the opportunities the future has to offer. With titles like "A Brave New Future for Book Publishing," "New Publishing and Web Content," and "iPad: New Opportunities for Content Creators," emphasis was on sharing a meaningful exchange with folks whose careers and/or creativity is heavily invested in an industry that has hardly changed in 500 years.

GalleyCat did an excellent job collecting the best tweets and note-linkage from savvy audience members attending the "A Brave New Future" panel. I definitely got a nice take-away from reading them. You can also read the whole Twitter stream at #futurebook.

Jacket Copy, over at the LA Times, has a great collection of thoughtful articles on the bookish SXSWi panels, and they offer a point of view that seemed to me more empathetic and representative of those in print and traditional publishing. From their piece "When Publishing Meets New Media," "so much pressure is being brought to bear on authors and content providers to sell themselves that they can be made to feel like failures for not employing all the digital marketing tools at their disposal... It was nice, then, to end the day with a panel of publishing experts who were neither reactionaries nor doom-sayers."

HuffPo offers a wealth of reportage of all perspectives. The one I'd like to put forth is "Life Is But a Stream," which speaks to the culture of the convention itself, and how the "interactive" portion came to what was originally a music and film festival. Just as the interactive, techie portion of the gathering was once a "hey, me too!" sort of experience, I hope with all my heart and soul that writers will soon become a natural part of the flora and fauna of SXSWi . As Josh Rose writes so aptly, "They're all developers. All techies. Not just because of the digitization of the music and film industries, but because these are all people who make something from nothing. Inventors. Artists. Creatives. What less people saw coming, I think, was how creative the tech crowd is. How well they fit in and belong with the musicians and movie-makers."

One day, they’ll be saying that about writers and the publishers there, too. I know it.

It's already happening. I found some great blog posts by writers in the audience, discovered via my techie/designer friends' SXSWi tweets. Kelly Hitchcock wrote some posts that I highly recommend, beginning with Learning a shit-ton at SXSW. Incidentally, she also wrote one about her experience as a new author on Goodreads that I think would be helpful for SheWriters to read.

Another useful perspective came from Yen Cheong's blog, who works in the publicity department of a major publishing house here in New York City. "The truth is that most publishing houses do indeed recognize the need to change and adapt. The crucial question, though, that has yet to be answered, is that in this changing marketplace, how exactly is the role of a publishing house changing and how can that role(s) best be executed? For the answer to that, you’ll have to, um, check back next year."

But for now, I'm really interested in hearing from anyone who attended SXSWi, or anyone who wants to share what they think, particularly from their niche of writing and publishing experience. Were any SheWriters in attendance? Share with us! Tell us what you think!

(Image: a SXSW 2010 Attendee updates her WordPress blog during the keynote speech. Courtesy Jeffrey Zeldman.)