As a present for my birthday earlier this month, my wife signed me up for four pitch sessions at the Virtual ThrillerFest XVI Conference in late June. I get ten minutes to pitch Chasing Money to four different literary agents for $50 each.  To be honest, I wasn’t totally thrilled with her present. I know I need to get an agent in order to get my book published the way I want – in hardback, in bookstores, from a big name publishing house. But I’m not sure I’m ready for this.

The conference is usually in New York City, and it’s attended by publishers and agents and wanna-be writers. The writers who pay up for the Pitchfest get a chance to pitch their book, in person, to some of the agents who are there. It sounds like an assembly line process for selling your book. Agents are talking to one writer after another, looking to find a winner. I’m not sure how you do that with a five-minute pitch and five minutes for questions. But, apparently this is common. In fact I’ve found many articles written about how to write the perfect five-minute book pitch and how to deliver it. 

This year, due to Covid, the conference is being held virtually with 10-minute zoom conferences. I won’t have to travel, which is great, because it will cost me a lot less. I spent some time with my wife, going through the list of agents who were going to be there, and picking out the ones we thought would be most receptive to my book. Then, this morning, I got the email for scheduling. But I didn’t check my email fast enough and all the agents I had wanted to pitch to were booked up. That’s really frustrating. 

I thought there was something wrong with their computers, and I wrote to the organizers to complain. Every single agent that I tried was booked.  But they wrote me back, and said that there were some agents that I hadn’t tried that still had availability, and so I signed up for those. I was left with some choices that may not be a good fit, and I’m not as excited about this opportunity as I was.  It will still give me practice at pitching my book, but I’m not expecting great things from it. 

Michael