Top 5 Results from Doing a Pitch Event

So the summer of 2018 has barely begun and I have already been in two pitch events online. One was PitMad on Twitter, and the other was the, 2018 Hot Summer’s Pitchfest on savvyauthor.com. For those of you that don’t know what a pitch event is. It’s where authors get together and pitch their books to agents. In the two events I stated, the author must write a very short pitch. For PitMad it’s no longer than a tweet and for Savvyauthor’s it is to be no longer than 3 sentences. In fact Savvyauthor wanted your pitch to be one sentence. This can be really challenging but I really enjoyed taking part in the event. But I discovered that there are only a few outcomes from doing them.

5. Getting an agent to make contact with you. This is of course the most favorable outcome and the one out come you are most likely not to get. The reason for this is because of the huge volume of author’s that are pitching, not the quality of your pitch or book. 

4. You spend hours going over every single pitch and learning from other author’s pitches. This is also very unlikely.

3. You look at pitches that are getting attention from agents and try to figure out how to do what they are doing.

2. You sit around waiting and hoping for an agent to like your pitch, going over your pitch in your mind, wondering if you could have done it better.

          1. Worrying that no one even saw your pitch.

Obviously numbers 1- 4 can be combined in different ways and if you got 5 then the others really don’t matter. Numbers 2, 3, and 4 are about growing, learning, and if you are serious about writing you will be doing those. I have not met a person yet that did a pitch event, that didn’t do a little of 2 – 4. But the one you have to avoid is number 1. The reason for this is because number 1 probably did happen. There is a really big chance that no agents saw your pitch but that is not your fault. When doing a pitch event you really are like a single person in a full stadium of thousands of other authors, yelling and screaming, “Look at my book!” Especially PitMad on Twitter. Of course any of you that did these two events already know that, Hot Summer’s Pitchfest was a little more narrowed in. Where the authors got to pick the agents they pitched to. This makes your voice more like 1 in a few hundred but the problem is the same, you might not have been seen. What I have noticed is that authors come down really hard on themselves when they realize this and they shouldn’t. Getting an agent’s attention has so many variables. So remember, if you weren’t contacted by an agent during events like this, it could be something as simple as the agent that would have loved your book was sick that day, and decided not to attend. Or maybe agents weren’t looking for your genre this time around. My point is, don’t give up. Just like in fishing, if your line isn’t in the water, you have no chance of catching a fish. If you stop pitching, you will have a zero chance of getting an agent.

So my advice to authors that do these events is to find something else to do during them. Set up your pitches, get them out there and then go out. Schedule the time that you will check up on your pitches or study other author’s pitches, and then leave all your electronics at home and don’t go back to them. Until it’s the schedule times you already set up. This year I decided to go out and enjoy nature and do a little fishing. Just like the two events, I didn’t get any bites, but by doing this I cleared my head, and was able to follow up with the events with an open, positive mind.

I hope this post has helped or inspired some authors out there, and As Always,

Happy Reading and Writing Everyone.

G. D. Talbot