Pitching

No, not throwing a ball. A pitch in the publishing world means delivering a pithy witty one-minute spiel on your book to the agent or publisher of your dreams, in person, without stuttering or referring to notes. It has to capture the essence of the story, the main character, the setting, without being boring or including way too much detail.

A snap, right? Not! The fabulous and award-winning Avery Aames, who writes the cozy Cheese Shop Mysteries (and who has just had her series extended), produced a video on how to pitch and how not to pitch. It entertains as it educates. Thanks, Avery.

Why am I concerned with pitching? It so happens that this weekend is the New England Crime Bake. More than a half-dozen agents and several publishers will be in attendance. One might encounter them in the hall, at lunch, in the proverbial elevator. Plus there is a pitch session, where each attendee who signed up (including yours truly) gets five whole minutes with an agent. Gulp.


I have drafted a pitch for my second Speaking of Mystery series book, Bluffing is Murder. I'm not happy with it, despite getting some excellent feedback from the Guppies AgentQuest group. I have 62 hours left to revise the heck out of it. Gulp.

When Lauren Rousseau finds one of the secretive Trustees of the Bluffs murdered on the coastal Holt estate north of Boston, police at first suspect her of the murder because she had been seen arguing with the victim earlier in the day. After Lauren goes on a date with her flirtatious karate instructor, she digs up not only local clams but also the truth about the actual killer. A Linguistics professor, Lauren’s abilities to analyze text on a social-networking site lead her to the murderer. She solves the Holt killing and uses her Quaker contacts to unveil the mystery of her own father's death by the same killer nineteen years earlier.

Whaddya think?

Moving Beyond Rejection

Great news from a couple of fellow writers who have recently landed agents. In particular from Pat Brown, who just posted this on an online group we are both members of:

"So, after sending out 281 queries, getting 185 rejections, sending 17 partials or fulls, leaving 79 who never responded, I have signed with The Literary Group International."

Now that's perserverance! She's a faithful contributor to the group, a fellow member of Sisters in Crime, and a valuable supporter of the rest of who are looking for agents. Plus she writes about Los Angeles, my home town. (This is Pat's picture of the LAPD.)

I'm starting to do avoidance behavior on my Writing Fridays. I'm working on new short stories, and feeling lured back to Book Two (which is about one-fifth written) instead of doing what I need to do first: target agents, find the ones who already represent the kind of writing I do, look up their exact query requirements for what they want to see -- one page, a synopsis, the first chapter, the first five pages, whatever -- and then send the query packet to five or ten agents per week.

After that, sure, I can get back to the fun stuff: writing new material. That certainly isn't fun all the time. It's a lot more fun than the looking-for-an-agent part, though. But part of the draw of of creative writing is wanting to get it out into the reading public's hands. That's called publication. If it also involves a little income and a little fame, well, all good!