I’ve been working on pitches this week, trying to get a handle on how we’ll be pitching the #PitchWars books we’ve been working on.
Pitches aren’t easy and I tend to make mine WAY too long that they’re basically summaries instead of pitches.
What I’ve boiled it down to is a pitch needs to do the following:
Name the main character
Set the setting
Give the stakes
Give some comps
But then when I started researching pitches, I found that not all successful pitches had all 4 of the above components. Some just listed comps. Some didn’t include the setting. Some didn’t include the stakes. It was all about how it was crafted.
So is there a right way to write a pitch? YES, absolutely. And guess who can tell you about it way better than I can? Traci Chee, author of the incredible book, THE READER which came out last month.
So as I’ve mentioned earlier, I am a #PitchWars mentor this year and boy has it been fun!
All in all, we had 141 submissions and of these we requested 28 fulls. You can find the exact breakdown of genre on Lynnette’s blog post HERE.
I was a little nervous going into this because Lynnette and I have never worked together before and all of a sudden, we needed to go through a ton of submissions and find ones that we could both agree on. How were we going to deal with SUBJECTIVITY??
But we had a great baseline: we knew we wanted something dark and twisty (probably in the Fantasy genre) and we both LOVE books. Those two factors were MORE than enough and we had a blast going through all the submissions. I was even able to tap into my nerd and made a Trello board that had 8 designations for requested materials.
Half of our #PitchWars Trello Board
We were blown away by all the dark and twisty that ended up in our inbox and went through several “THIS IS THE ONE” wait, no, “THIS IS THE ONE” moments.
But then we came across Meghan Jashinsky’s A COURT OF GLITTERING CRIMSON and it was the first one that got an enthusiastic, YES from both of us. But we knew to make it more marketable, we needed to address the magical system which was going to be a big re-write.
We contacted Meghan before the submission period was over to see if she would even be open to making such a big change and she was. THEN came the part where we had to fight off other mentors from offering to mentor hers as well.
Long story short, we were able to snag Meghan’s manuscript and we couldn’t be more happy about it!
But that’s not where the story ends!
Lynnette and I had also loved Tracie Martin‘s THEN BEGGARS WOULDÂ RIDE, a YA literary thriller that has a voice that will keep you up at night. BEGGARSÂ was our #2 pick and we were campaigning hardcore behind the scenes to try to get other mentors to pick it up because it totally deserved some PitchWars love.
Then, the day of the big reveal, I found out I had won a wildcard spot and I could pick one more book to mentor if I so wished (or I could pass it on to another mentor). Due to Lynnette’s active editing business, she knew her schedule would only permit her to mentor one manuscript, but I felt so strongly for BEGGARS that I offered to mentor it myself!
SO there it goes!
I am mentoring both Meghan and Tracie for #PitchWars2016!
These books are high-concept, dark, gory, beautiful, and heartbreaking. You’re going to love them and I can’t wait to see these books shine!
Processing no’s and setbacks are part of a writer’s life.
I don’t know of any writer, no matter how successful, that hasn’t had to process no’s.
I don’t know of any writer, even NYT Bestsellers, who even after achieving success hasn’t had to process no’s.
The life of a creative means a life of accepting subjectivity and not allowing it to pierce your resolve.
I was talking to my husband about this very thing (though not about writing) and was sharing that it’s hard to not let no’s feel like mini-failures. That each time I miss the mark, it feels like I just failed terribly and in conclusion, am a failure.
But he said something tonight that struck a chord. He said, “Then you just fail forward.”
Failing forward… I like that.
Because isn’t that what failures do? They mold us and shape us. We learn from them what not to do and what to do better. Failures thicken our spine and deepen our resolve.
Each failure. Each no. Each closing of the door is an alignment.Â
“Failure is so important. We speak about success all the time but it is the ability to resist failure or use failure that often leads to greater success. I’ve met people who don’t want to try for fear of failing. […] It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously that you might as well not have lived at all – in which case, you fail by default.” – J.K. Rowling
Failure is inevitable, but as you feel yourself falling towards that failure, shift forward.
That way when you hit the ground, you do so in a roll where you can pop back up and continue sprinting toward your goal.
Destiny Cole 