I’m so grateful for the Pitch Wars community and my mentorship with them in 2019!
For those unfamiliar, Pitch Wars was a mentoring program where published/agented authors, editors, or industry interns chose one writer each, read their entire manuscript, and offered suggestions on how to make the manuscript shine for an agent showcase. The mentor also helped edit their mentee’s pitch for the contest and their query letter for submitting to agents. It ran from 2012 to 2022.
I started drafting my book, The Algorithm Will See You Now, in late 2016. Although I’d been writing and publishing personal essays, I had never written a book before, and, looking back, I can see I had no idea what I was doing at the beginning. In 2018, I started sending out queries. Like many new writers, I made the mistake of querying way too early when the book was far from ready. (Also, those early queries were terrible! Lol).
Then, through the online writing community, I learned about Pitch Wars. In the fall of 2019, I applied on a whim, never dreaming my book would have a chance. But to my happy surprise, it was selected for the Pitch Wars class of 2019. (The working title of my manuscript then was “The Frailty of Matter,” a line from the Oath and Prayer of Maimonides).
After selection, mentees worked with their mentors over three months to revise their manuscripts and prepare them for the online “showcase.” If a literary agent expressed interest, we could send our submission materials (or a full manuscript if they requested). We were also free to then query other agents. Our class’s showcase was in February 2020. Here’s an interview with me and my pitch wars mentor just before the showcase.
But long story short, I didn’t end up being a “Pitch Wars success story.” I received a few full requests and also queried widely, but ultimately, I didn’t land literary agent representation. Over the next few months of 2020, we were, of course, in the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I realized that agents and publishers had little interest in medical thrillers. (And who could blame them? We were all living in a real-life one).
So as painful as it was on a personal level, I shelved the book for a few years.
But I had gained something far more valuable from Pitch Wars—a cadre of writing friends who have become ongoing beta readers and critique partners to this day.
With the help of my new writing support group, I ultimately went back and did another major revision of the book. When another journey into the query trenches ended again in countless rejections, I was demoralized but not ready to give up. I still believed my book had something important to say to the world, even if I hadn’t been successful in convincing literary agents. Whenever I doubted that, I would remind myself that my Pitch Wars mentor had also seen something worthwhile in it.
So I decided to explore a different avenue—publishing with a small press. I researched on Publisher’s Marketplace and sent out a small batch of submissions.
In May 2022, when Musk put in his bid for Twitter, I realized it provided a way to help publishers understand how my story about algorithms in healthcare was relevant and timely. I pitched it with something along these lines: “Billionaires and their biased algorithms taking over social media are only the start. Just wait until they get ahold of your healthcare.”
That garnered immediate requests to read the manuscript and, ultimately, an offer of publication. (I wrote a little more about that in another blog post).
There was a time, right before Pitch Wars 2019, when I almost gave up on the book—and writing fiction in general. Now, I have one novel published, and the second slated for publication later this year. The support and guidance of the Pitch Wars community were invaluable in helping me get here, even if it ended up being on a nontraditional path.
One of the best parts of having been a part of Pitch Wars is now seeing the books of other members of Pitch Wars ’19 out in the world. I’ll show my husband their book cover and say, I know them! They were Pitch Wars!
originally published 5/4 23 on Writer Advice