Pitch to Publicity 2016

I got a little side-tracked by Pitch to Publication 2016, #p2p16. I recognized three of the editors with a couple more being kind of familiar maybe. I found out about it the day before the deadline but didn't have time to put something together. Due to lack of submissions, they extended the deadline by a day. Even with that, I was still rushed and didn't have a proper pitch letter. Remember the YA book I mention sometimes but haven't done the final edit on? It's in good enough shape that I sent the first 5 pages to see what would happen. Since the book wasn't quite done, I thought maybe I should work on enough of it to cover a larger sample in case an editor asked for one.

I added the editors I submitted the sample to on Twitter. They each said something like "all the submissions are great". All of them? Alarm bells. Then I started seeing things like "great pitch, great pages, too much work" and "great pitch, great pages, too much work for a month". Alarm bells. The Archive, Blog Posts and Success Stories pages on the site are all blank, and this is not a new event. Evidently, no one who has done this has gotten a book deal. Alarm bells.

Finally one of the editors tweeted to the effect that the manuscripts need to be grammatically and stylistically perfect. My comma usage is never grammatically perfect. That's what editors are for. :) There was no explanation of exactly how the whole process is supposed to work. Specifically, there's no FAQ. For example, they asked for 5 pages but have no margin or word count specification. Alarm bells. Etc.

After absorbing this for a few days and reading tweets, which you can check out for yourself by following their Twitter links on the Editor page, I realized something. They're not looking for the best books. They're looking for books that need the least amount of work. Basically, they want books that are already agent ready or need an absolutely minimum amount of editing.

It's pitched as a helping hand, but the writers who need this the most are automatically disqualified by the 4-week editing time frame. The people who benefit from it are the ones who don't need this kind of help. They're already agent ready whether they realize it or not. As I write this, I'm still waiting to hear from two editors that haven't said they're done going through submissions to see if they want a larger sample. This late in the week, I don't really expect to hear anything.

So, if this doesn't benefit writers, who does it benefit? Follow the money. It's a publicity gimmick to drum up business for the editors, especially during a slow time of the year like the holidays, when writers are spending money on everything but editing services. It's essentially free advertising. However. It's not a pure scam. It may not even be a deliberate scam. It may just be poorly designed. One month is too short a time frame. To get the best books instead of the easiest books, it needs two or three.

At least one editor said she was going to send feedback to the authors. Submissions are limited to 100 per editor. Only two editors were listed on the site as having that many, although one mentioned receiving over 90. I don't know how many the one doing feedback had, but sending feedback is an incredible amount of work. I don't think a scammer would work that hard. Even if the whole thing is just a publicity stunt, some of the editors are putting real work into it.

Anyway. I know I should be more cynical about "free" opportunities and not be so disappointed, but I found this whole process to be extremely discouraging. Messengers isn't widely commercial, but the YA book is. I was hoping that somebody would see something of value in my work, even if it was a little rough, and be willing to take a harder look. To find out that I'm automatically eliminated and never had a chance to begin with really sucks. If I'd found out even a week earlier, I could have polished my terrible pitch letter and thought through some of the risky things in the first 5 pages such as the real jargon I used. Authentic and immersive world building to be sure but very, very risky for such a conservative industry. To an editor who hasn't seen my other books, it was probably an alarm bell.

The point is I got a little done on Book 2 but not what I should have. I tried to get the break I needed, and it didn't work.

Have a great weekend.