At three years and three manuscripts, I’m beginning to consider myself a veteran query-sender, but it was quite some time before I began to do live pitches. Actually, my descent into live pitching happened totally on a whim — I was at the 2022 Kauai Writer’s Conference and sitting in the back of the room as people were signing up for their Pitchalooza competition, and on a complete impulse I signed up.

Twenty or so of us stood in the front of the room, delivered our best two minute pitch, and then stepped back while the audience voted. To my surprise, I made the semifinals with four other writers. All of them, I thought, sounded a lot better than me.

We gave our pitches again, and then — to my absolute shock– I won.

Literally, I stood there with my mouth open and didn’t know what to do. My poor friend Christina who was in the audience with me was too kind to tell me what a dork I looked like, but I’m sure I did.

From there, I went on to pitch to five agents at a local conference in 2022, then to another two at a conference in September of 2023, and now today at the Seattle Writer’s Workshop virtual conference I’m pitching to four agents.

So that’s — let me count — 11 live pitches under my belt. And as much as they filled me with terror at first, I’ve come to LOVE doing them. I’ve done two-minute, five minute, and ten minute pitches. I love them all.

I’m an introvert. I have social anxiety. And yes, I love live pitching.

Here’s why:

1. For me, working up a great verbal pitch has a much more significant effect on clarifying my story than a written query letter does. I almost always end up taking my finished verbal pitch and rewriting my query with it because I feel like I’ve encapsulated the story so much better out loud.
2. It feels like such a short cut! I have gotten my fair share of requests off the query “slush pile” but there’s just something about getting to chat with an agent in person that *feels* like you have somehow “skipped the line,” so to speak.
3. Agents will give you feedback on your pitch (if time allows), and their follow up questions can be extremely helpful to point out things you need to do in your query and fold into future pitches.
4. Almost inevitably, agents are nice. It really humanizes the process of querying and is such a nice antidote to sending out your many, many written queries, at least half of which go unaswered and end up with the dreaded “closed no reply.” It’s so nice to actually connect with someone and get an invite to submit or not, right then.

A few tips for preparation for verbal pitches:

Aim to be talking for about half of the time allotted to you. If you’re doing a five minute pitch, try to get your pitch to 2:30-3:00. If you’re doing a ten minute, try to talk for 4-5 minutes. (My ten minute pitches come in at 4:30.) This leaves time for questions, back and forth, and anything unexpected that comes up (like trying to get your video turned on and finding the chat box).

Caveat: this is hard to pull off on two-minute pitches. Two minutes is really short. You’re going to need to try to leave a little time for the agent to at least (hopefully) make a request. In that case, shoot for 1-3 sentences in your pitch and leave it at that.

This isn’t a synopsis. Don’t tell them how it ends unless they ask. This should be a blurb – tell them about the characters, the emotional and story stakes, the inciting incident, and give them a sense of the voice.

Brainstorm your pitch outloud. I prepare for pitches almost entirely out loud — in fact, for a recent conference this past September, I worked out the entire pitch on the 45-minute drive to the conference site. (I did write it down when I get there.) Even if you start with writing your pitch down, a big part of your preparation process should be speaking your pitch to see how it feels. Things just sound different when they’re read aloud. You get a better sense of pacing, word choice, awkward phrasing, and tension. The process of reading a pitch aloud is as valuable, I think, as reading your novel aloud, which is always part of my editing and revision process on a book.

Make a cheatsheet. Once I know what I want to do, I make myself a cheatsheet with four sections:

• A few words for each person I’m pitching to about why I wanted to pitch to them.
• The intro to my manuscript – just one sentence, but this helps me not forget the essentials: genre, word count, audience, and title.
• My pitch, written out in 14 point type so I can glance down easily and see it, with lots of unnecessary paragraph breaks and key words I want to make sure I hit highlighted in bold or color.
• My list of comp titles with a brief sentence about why each is relevant.

Practice your setup and lighting. I spend a couple hours before setting up my desk (which involves raising my iPad to the right level so the agent isn’t looking up my nose, hooking up my ring light and testing various colors and levels of lighting, making sure there’s not laundry in the background, seeing if I need to download any tools to make the pitch link work, etc.) I also do a few quick videos of me reading parts of the pitch to see how I look and sound doing it. One thing I realized this time — due to my camera angle, if I lean back in my chair, I look really oddly proportioned. Good to know – I lean forwards on my chair through the whole pitch now and generally manage to look human. Also really hard, getting used to looking at the camera and not at where the person will be on the screen. Practice helps.

Practice a lot. i read the whole pitch, including intro and comps, over and over — sitting at the desk, walking around, etc. until I’m really familiar with it. I make notes and usually end up revising it a little. If there are words I always mess up (“interstellar billiards” is a stumbling block in the current manuscript, and yes, that’s really a thing in my book) I go over them until they come off the tongue easier. My goal is not to memorize the pitch but just to be familiar enough that I know what is coming next, which makes SUCH a difference with the last item, which is…

Try not to read your cheat sheet when you do the actual pitch. After all that practice, I do my best to abandon the cheat sheet (although I definitely keep it in front of me because I have had moments where my brain just empties out and I’ve needed it) and talk more conversationally. I mean, I’m sure every agent I talk to can tell that I’m working from a script, but I try to look into the camera 75% of the time and just talk. I speak slowly and try to pause between sentences. Sometimes I switch words around. But usually, if I’ve done the step above this enough, I can talk through it with only occasionally glances at my cheat sheet.

(Caveat – I always read the comp title bit. It’s complicated.)

So… that’s my best advice, and if you haven’t live pitched before, I suggest you look for an opportunity to try it! It’s a great skill to get comfortable with in your journey towards publication!