An Invitation to Writers

Welcome to Novel Pitch! If you’ve made it to this page you have either come through a direct invitation or by the link on the home page. Novel pitch is a site where writers are helping other writers by sharing their experiences with pitching their work. Hopefully you have recently pitched your work at a writer’s conference like Writer’s Digest, Thrillerfest, RWA or one of countless others. Maybe you are preparing to pitch for the first time. Then this is a great opportunity for you!

First off CONGRATULATIONS! Pitching a novel is an important step in your writing career. Hopefully it went well and you had a great experience.

Even if it didn’t go as well as you hoped, I am sure you learned something both about your writing and about the process.  Here is an opportunity to leverage that experience, grow your audience and share your story. I set this site up for writers to help writers. In my (limited) experience the best help comes when we share our stories of success and failure, learning what works and what to avoid.

I started posting individual pitch experiences in August of 2015. I have been posting 2-3 testimonials a week from writers covering a wide range of genres, experience levels and pitch situations.  I am looking for diverse stories where writers can share the specifics of their pitch experience and highlight the things that did or didn’t work. I am also looking to share information about the best pitch conferences or other non-traditional pitching situations (like twitter pitching and the classic elevator pitch – yes that actually happens sometimes). Currently I am rolling out 1-2 stories a week along with other supplemental blog posts. Each testimonial will have a two page spread. The first page is a short narrative from the author answering the following questions:

• Where did you pitch?
• What genre / age group did you pitch?
• How did you prepare?
• What was the experience of pitching like?
• How did the pitches go? (no specifics about individual agents or editors please)
• What did you learn from the process?

Overall, the narrative should be between 500-1200 words. It can be treated as a straight interview Q & A or as narrative in your own voice. Feel free to get creative, but please be sure to hit the points above.

Along with the narrative I will include a 50-100 word bio of the author and a link to their website or other relevant pages. If the book you pitched is published I will also link and promote the book.

On the second page, we want to include your actual pitch, the way you wrote it. Again on the second page we will also include the same author bio as on the first page and a link to your website. If you have a video from a pitch rehearsal, or an earlier draft that you would also like to share those are both welcome.

Once your story is posted I will send out a blast to our mailing list as well as a series of tweets to followers. We hope you will do the same. The first wave of testimonials will be promoted again 3-6 months later as the site continues to grow. I am hoping to get to 100 testimonials in the next 6 months. It would be great to include yours!

This is a special opportunity to leverage your pitch to continue to build your audience and to share your experiences.

If you would like to participate, please email Ralph Walker at RWalker12813@gmail.com and include the words Novel Pitch in the subject line.

Thanks! I am looking forward to hearing about your pitches!