Pitch Fest: Insight into publishing beyond the query

What I Learned | Professional Practices

Terry Brennan

The San Francisco Writers Conference, which I attended last February, was a pitch fest. The conference invited agents and editors from a variety of small presses to receive pitches from attendees. One ten-minute pitch was included in the conference cost, and additional pitches were $50 each. Most attendees purchased several.

Sending query letters to agents and editors is a silent task. I’ve never received anything but a form response, so I can’t tell if my query letter is bad, if my book is bad, if I just sent it to the wrong person, or if I don’t know something important about the publishing industry. I feel like a puppy that’s being punished but I have no idea why. Without feedback, writers have no ability to improve their querying.

Pitch Fest: Live Pitches

Live pitches—even as short as ten minutes—solved that problem, because the agents were forced to explain themselves. It’s feedback writers need.

Because the conference was a pitch fest, attendees practiced pitches with each other. There’s nothing like a look of confusion or boredom to show that something’s wrong with a pitch, or occasionally, the look of concentration when a pitch is hitting.

Pitch Fest: Agent Feedback

The rest of the conference continued the theme of pitching. In one illuminating session, four agents read a query letter and raised their hands when they would have stopped reading the pitch. Few agents got all the way to the end of the letter. Sometimes the pitch intrigued them, and they went to the attached sample; more frequently, it was because the pitch wasn’t clear enough or the story idea was old. Agents had different reactions to pitches, but they were in agreement most of the time. So there really is a method behind the madness.

In another good session, twenty agents answered audience questions from the stage. My takeaway was that the agents love stories and want to hear new and interesting ones. They actually read query letters. One agent said that 90% of their authors come through queries; another noted that Colson Whitehead was discovered through a blind query.

I left with a better sense of the people in the publishing industry, something far beyond knowledge of the submission process. Querying is where agents and editors quickly size up a project and determine if it could be profitable and if it’s for them.

My scorecard was mixed. I pitched a novel to one agent who asked me to send him sample pages. when I did, he rejected them, but I think I understood why. I pitched a nonfiction book, and both an agent and an editor said that it was unpublishable. At least I had answers, not resounding silence.

The next San Francisco Writers Conference is February 6 to 9, 2025. 

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TERRY BRENNAN writes novels and nonfiction at the intersection of sex, religion, and psychology. An active OCWW member and volunteer, he is currently seeking representation.