I have a confession. Recently, I have really not been feeling writingtwt pitch events. At first, I didn’t really understand why. I just knew I wasn’t enjoying them as much as I had in the past. So, I took it up with some people who I knew might be able to help put my feelings into words: writers.

Yeah, I’ll stop with the cheesy one-liners eventually. For about 2 years now, I have seen more and more writers voicing their disinterest? frustration? with pitch events. I recently took a poll on my Instagram stories, and the results seem to confirm it.

Here I am never letting the academic in me die as I take a poll.

The majority (55%) felt pitch events “need improvement.”

I also got this extremely informational written response, which really highlights how I feel about pitch vents:

So why do so many people have an issue with pitch events? What’s the deal?

I mean, there are a few things. Part of it might be due to the loss of community on Twitter (which isn’t the fault of any pitch event but more so a disillusioned billionaire whom I won’t bother naming). The other part seems to be something that we *can* fix.

Making the new pitch is due to the loss of purpose (and coordination) behind pitch events.

Some WritingTwt History circa 2021

I first joined writingtwt in 2021, which I sometimes jokingly tweet about as “the golden age of writingtwt.” Mostly because everyone was around then. Agents, editors, and Writers at all different stages of their publishing journey. Back then (Jesus, has it really been four years??) there were an assortment of pitch events. PitDark, PitMad, KissPit, PBPit, and SFFPit are some to name a few. Some were associated with writing mentorship programs (PitMad was tied to PitchWars, for example) while others were genre-specific (KissPit, SFFPit, PitDark, etc). There were also ones meant specifically for marginalized authors to help boost their stories to pub professionals (LatinxPitch, PitchDis, APIPit, etc). That's how pitch events got started. By uplifting marginalized voices who could benefit from having a pitch period built for them. It also made it easier for agents/editors to access and find more of their stories. In short, that was the idea behind pitch events. Give people a chance to stand out from being buried in that oh so infamous slush pile every querying author wants to get out of.

They turned into a lot more than just that. Pitch events were huge for the community. When PitMad would run in August, people would start prepping in June. Agented authors would offer pitch critique giveaways, people built lists of authors who were participating so they could support them later, etc, etc. I hope you get a vibe for the magic that was in the air even if my nostalgia taints it a bit. Some lore: I only got to participate in PitMad once before it was announced it was disbanding! OUCH! But it was seriously the most fun I ever had prepping and participating in a pitch event.

Clearly, I have not gotten over losing WritingTwt (RIP 20110-2022)

When I was new to the community, I connected with many people I am still friends with today through pitch events, as I got to hear about their WIPs and cheer them on! Most of those friends I met in pitch events are agented or on their way to getting published right now! Hell, a lot have books already out and they are under contract for their sophomore and junior novels! I can think of several names off the top of my head who are now New York Times Bestselling authors thanks to Twitter pitch events. So, yeah. Pitch events were huge community and career builders. That hasn’t stopped either. Today’s pitch events are still the reason a lot of people are agented today! I know of so many authors who connected with their agents via a pitch event. Including myself! My agent reached out to me initially through pitch events, and when I participated in the “an agent’s guide to…” trend, where you pitch your book in a series of graphic slides, my agent requested my book, DAGGER OF THE TSAR, through that pitch! The rest is history.

While this is an older pitch of DOTT, look at me and my future agent here :') AWWWWW!!!

But today, most of these don’t run anymore. Which means a lot of the built-in, organized pitch events are gone. The way they were planned, run, and organized went with them.

So, naturally, with the loss of pitch events, there is a hole in the community that a lot of writers miss. I think people on wrintingtwt have tried to solve this by creating *new* pitch events. Which, y'know, is exactly what you need to do to get new pitch events going! I feel like what has been lost in translation are the rules and planning that went into successful, past pitch events. In short, pitch events have really lost their centralization, coordination, and I’ll even say purpose. This definitely isn't an assessment of all pitch events running currently. I really admire QuestPit, for example, because it’s organized nicely, and I’ve seen it reignite some magic to pitch events that the old ones had. There are other great pitch events out there, too. QuestPit certainly isn’t the only one. I just think now it’s starting to get muddled. I see new pitch events popping up almost monthly, sometimes weekly. Some never have their first event, others disband after two or so events. My point is it's getting muddled.

Past pitch events (like the ones I’ve mentioned above) had clear, strict rules that helped keep authors and publishing professionals alike in the know. The ones that most of them shared were

You can only pitch completed manuscripts

Events ran biannually (give or take)

Nowadays, I rarely see a pitch event that follows these cardinal rules. And it’s turned into a problem.

The Current State of Affairs

Let’s dig into No. 1 because I really do think it's one of the major kryptonites to pitch events today.

I don’t mean to be dramatic, but back in 2021 writingtwt if you pitched an incomplete manuscript, you would get verbally stoned to death. No, seriously. I remember when someone openly admitted to it, and the TL was full of “this is not okay” rambles for at least a few days. It WAS that serious if you broke that ru;e. Back then, I didn’t understand why. But girrlllll, now I do.

For starters, it gets extremely overwhelming. Not just for writers, but for publishing professionals participating. When a lot of people are pitching manuscripts that may not be close to querying or that they haven’t started writing, it takes up space on the timeline for pitches by authors who have finished writing their books. For those authors who can send the requested query/full on the same day the agent likes the pitch. The increase in unfinished manuscript pitches led to a decrease in visibility for manuscripts that were query-ready.

Last year, a few pitch events ran into this problem. What I heard along the pipeline was that it was confusing and frustrating for writers and agents. Writers weren’t sure how to interact with pitches (do you boost the pitches? does this event allow you to like the pitch, or was that the other one?) Then, agents who liked pitches didn’t see the requested work in their inbox as quickly as normal. Maybe they will see it two years later or 8 months later. Maybe they never see it.

As industry professionals, we need to remember that most of our work is contractual. Meaning, most of us don’t get paid hourly to do the work we do in this industry. That goes for agent,s too. Their time is valuable, just like ours is. It takes time for an agent to read through pitches and requests from the pitching writer. In the past, agents knew that the manuscripts they chose to “like” were 1) completed and 2) query-ready. Meaning all the pitches they were taking time to look through were all something they could potentially offer on as soon as they read the full. Which, for some agents, meant maybe the pitch they just requested would be their newest client in a week or a month or more or less.

Now, that's not the case. There’s no guarantee they’ll ever see the requested manuscript in their inbox, or if they do, there’s no guarantee *when* they’ll see it. I get why many of them have decided not to be as actively involved, given that. The time they spend interacting with pitches may be a waste at the end of the day.

I say “waste” with the approach that publishing is a business. Not in a way to be mean or to say our pitches aren’t worth someone's time. Agents are paid on a contract basis. Which means, the more book deals they sign for clients, the more money they see coming in. Imagine you are an agent. If you’re query inbox is full with 2,000 queries (which at this point isn't even an overestimate for most agents), would you choose to spend two hours scrolling through pitches on Twitter that you may not see the query for for another six months at best, or would you spend it going through your slush?

If I were an agent, I’d spend it going through my slush. My slush pile has manuscripts that are ready to be queried, that are completed, and could be potential clients (and thus potential paychecks). Unfinished manuscripts that are being pitched in pitch events that allow them aren’t any of these things yet. And I’m not trying to be callous with this oversimplification. I just know many agents don’t agent as their full-time job. Just like many of us writers have day jobs to pay the bills. Lots of us are trying to be successful enough where we can do our passion full-time, but many of us aren’t there yet (me included!). Which means you do have to be creative and smart with your time. And nowadays, it may not be smart to interact with pitch events if you’re trying to make the most of your hours (and your pay).

As a writer who can’t afford to author full-time currently, I’ve started thinking about my time in the same way. I’m working on books that are for traditional publishing right now because that is the best use of my time to hopefully one day get paid for my work. I spend less time working on other things (like other wips or creative ideas like that podcast I keep teasing). I do this because I want to spend my time working on things that can (eventually) lead to pay. So, I don’t blame others in the industry for moving the same way. Publishing is a business, and we all deserve to get paid for our hard hours.

Oversaturation of the Timeline

There’s also the issue of the timing of pitch events. In the past, most pitch events ran maybe twice a year. Sometimes they ran 3. Other than that, they didn’t run every few months, and once they announced their dates, the other pitch events respected it.

Everyone knew PitMad was one time in August and another around May, so even before PitMad officially announced their event days so other pitch events knew not to try to run in August or May. They chose other months (like October and March). Now, pitch events are running closer together. Last year, there were two events that ran within a week of each other. It was honestly exhausting to keep up with, and it made me burn out quickly. A sentiment echoed amongst other writers I spoke to about it. I rarely participate in pitch events now. Before I was agented, I usually sent one pitch in as a “at least I got SOMETHING out there to catch eyes” pat on the back, but other than that, I spent zero time prepping or really participating in pitch events. I was just too overwhelmed by my overflowing feed and by how many pitch events were happening back to back. Now that I’m agented, I haven’t really felt a draw to come back to most pitch events because of this (but of course it isn’t the sole factor but alas).

There’s also the matter of a lack of preparation that leads to this oversaturation of events. Past, successful pitch events announced their dates at least a month or two ahead of time. Others announced their yearly schedule right at the start of the year. There used to be people who would compile a list at the start of January so you could see the annual pitch event schedule. Now, something like that would be hard to maintain accuracy. I feel like there has been an increase in events that pop up, announce their event is within the next 1-5 days, then disappear again. I don’t like this strategy as a pitching author myself. I like to build support lists and be given more than a few days’ notice to write new pitches, and I think if you want more industry professionals to participate, you probably need to give them more than a few days or a week to learn about the event, too! But alas, I do not run a pitch event. I can only comment with my observations about what works vs. what doesn’t work.

For now, all I can say is the current setup is not working. Which sometimes makes my eye twitch because we know what a working formula is, we just aren’t using it anymore.

Is There a Solulu or Am I Delulu?

So what's the solution? How do you go back to when pitch events were not only useful, but built community?

I’m going to be honest, it requires an overhaul. I wrote a thread about this once, and I think my stance hasn’t changed much. If you want engagement from industry professionals, you need it to be structured to fit their needs. Although I’m open to other ideas, this probably means requiring query-ready manuscripts to be pitched and being very clear about that. I’d also add that giving people more notice about events can’t do any harm. Waking up to find out about a pitch event happening the day of is never ideal for max success for writers and agents/editors alike.

A larger part of this is to recentralize pitch events and keep the ones that are crucial. Mainly, the pitch events that are genre, age group, and marginalized writer specific. How would you cut events? Well, to be honest, that’s out of my (and your) wheelhouse. It’s not like we can vote to remove a pitch event. Writingtwt is very much not a democracy lol. I’ve also been told that reaping all the pitch events to fight in an arena is also a no-go. So that’s where pitch event organizers step in.

There are some pitch events I see now that work better as writing trends, not official pitch events trying to be effective to garner industry engagement and boost writers. Not everything has to be a pitch event. Want to start a trend where we share our books in the form of a movie poster? Do it! A song lyric? Yay, even better. But it doesn’t *need* to be a pitch event. Utilize writingtwt trends or community events (think Pitlight, which is run by Amanda Woody and is meant for manuscripts at ANY stage of the game, so you can meet and connect with other authors, and is also NOT for industry engagement). We used to have a few writers on writingtwt who every week would post a trend for all of us to participate in. These were great and awesome, and were fun. But they weren’t made into pitch events.

My ramblings will probably amount to nothing *shrug*. It’s not really fair to ask one pitch event to step down while another goes on. My plea is basically this: for event organizers to communicate with each other about event dates and to review current pitch rules.

But who knows? Maybe pitch events will find a new, better way to coexist with each other. Maybe not. Maybe Twitter will die off by then. I’m already spending more time on Threads anyhow. Either way, I have a lot of love for the community and the things people created to uplift other writers, and I want to see it working again.

Until then, I tip my hat.

Sincerely,

emma (wrote what?!)

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