RWA is expensive, but seemingly with for good reason...
Just faxed off my registration for RWA, and since ya' know I didn't spend enough money at Wiscon, I registered for World Fantasy as well.

RWA is quite pricey, but looking at the actual conference, I understand why. Unlike SF cons where you go to panels to hear famous / infamous /semi-famous people talk about issues, the bulk of RWA's conference consists of workshops. Now, most of these are workshops geared to the romance genre of course, but there's quite a bit of good intro to publishing advice that would have been invaluable to me a few years ago. It's like the romance equivalent of Clarion West lectures, only shorter. What's nice is that not all of them are geared to the beginner and some are tightly focused on character, plot, suspense, etc. I'm thinking about going to a research presentation by someone from the Dept of Homeland Security, but I'm thinking it's possible that I could also get very very annoyed by this panel. We'll see.

There's a whole list of the workshops here, and in fact, you can even download some of the handouts for some of the workshops here.  Some of the handouts are just sketches of what they're going to be talking about, while others are actually pretty good notes. (I wish I had come across "Bootcamp for Writers" a few years ago!)