Pitch-Fest Rules — Yes, RULES

How did it get to be early March already?! It seems like the pitch workshops went so fast, and it’s almost time to get ready to submit that final pitch! With that in mind, we wanted to give you a quick run-through of all the rules.

• Each pitcher can submit one and only one pitch. Pick your best pitch for a finished manuscript. Our agents are looking for great projects that are ready to go. Don’t make them wait, because that makes them sad.
• Once your pitch is submitted, you cannot change it. So please take the time to make sure it’s exactly how you want it and proof the bleep out of it! We have a very short amount of time in which to assign and post these pitches; we quite simply don’t have the time to hunt down and edit individual pitches.
• Your pitch must fit into one of the genres listed here. It’s your responsibility to figure out where your pitch fits best. We’ve tried to keep the genres fairly general to make sure there’s a place for everyone. So things like romance, mystery, and coming-of-age books could fit into the contemporary category. Epic fantasy, urban fantasy, and fairy tale retellings could fit into the fantasy category. And so on.
• Your pitch must be 200 words or fewer. The pitch only includes the parts of your query that talk about the plot, characters, and themes of your book. It does not include the title, word count of the book, genre, or any biographical information you might include in a query. We will ask for title, word count, and genre separately.
• If you did not participate in the forum workshop, you can still submit to the PitchFest.
• We open for submissions at 6 AM EST on Monday, March 11 and close at 8 PM EST on Wednesday, March 13. We will post a link to the submission form on the WriteOnCon website on Monday morning. You must submit your pitch via this form to be included in the PitchFest. You are not automatically entered if you posted in the forums.
• We have a limited amount of spots in the PitchFest, because our agents can only look at so many pitches before their heads start to spin. If we get more pitches than we have space for, we will randomly select the participants. So please don’t feel like you have to get up in the middle of the night to submit your pitches right when we open. It doesn’t matter when you submit, so long as it’s during the submission period.
• We will post the pitches for you. Your pitch will have an agent and number, which we will send to you. The agents will read and comment on every pitch in their assigned group. Each agent will pick their favorite pitch from their group to win a prize. We will also be telling all the agents about pitches that are scoring really well among our blogger and published author voters, so it is possible to get requests from other agents even if you are not in their group.
• During the PitchFest, we ask that pitchers do NOT post in the forums. The purpose of the workshop is to give you the chance to ask all the questions you can to make that pitch awesome. The purpose of the PitchFest is to give agents, bloggers, and writers the chance to advocate for the pitches they love, so we’re limiting posting privileges to voters only. This does not mean, however, that you can’t blog, tweet, tumblr, FB, or whatever. By all means, spread the word and thank your commenters there!
• When it’s all over, we’ll post the winning pitches on the WriteOnCon website, and of course we’ll contact the winners via email!

Do you have any questions about this process that we haven’t answered yet? Drop a note in the comments section, or email us at writeoncon@gmail.com.

Be Sociable, Share!

•