To pitch or not to pitch

When is the best time to pitch your work to a publisher? How many rewrites, how long should you keep going before you bite the bullet and get your work out there?

Allen and Unwin makes the pitching process easy by offering Friday Pitch, and they have uncovered some great new talent. On their web site they give some examples of new books that came to them this way.

“Jacqueline Hammar’s fascinating autobiography, Daughter of the Territory, about living in some of the remotest reaches of the Northern Territory; Anh Do’s phenomenal bestselling memoir, The Happiest Refugee, about his family’s escape to Australia from war-torn Vietnam, the poverty they endured, and his inspirational rise to the top of Australian comedy; Rebecca Starford’s Bad Behaviour, a gripping account of the bullying she both witnessed and endured at an elite country boarding school; Paul Carter’s hilarious bestseller Don’t Tell Mum I Work on the Rigs, She Thinks I’m a Piano Player in a Whorehouse; Larissa Dubecki’s Prick With a Fork, a highly revealing account of the hijinks Larissa saw during her ten years as a waitress; Peter Moore’s My Droving Days about the experiences he had and the larger-than-life characters he met as a long-distance drover; Munjed Al Muderis’s Walking Free about escaping a death sentence in Iraq, surviving the Australian refugee system and becoming a leading orphopaedic surgeon; plus many many more Australian stories by people from all walks of life.”

So what is involved? Pretty much all you have to do is:

• In your email subject line, indicate the genre of your piece (i.e. fiction, non-fiction or illustrated), and a couple of words about the subject area.
• Copy and paste the relevant Title Information Sheet (see here) for your genre into the email body, and fill in the requested information.
• Attach a double-spaced FIRST CHAPTER and a 300 word SYNOPSIS as a word document (or PDF if illustrated).

Find out more on their web site here.

My word of caution is make sure you have completed and polished your draft as best you can (with input of writer friends or an editor) before pitching. If the publisher likes your work they will ask to see the whole manuscript. And make sure your synopsis impossible to put down!

Need some help to do that? Bring your draft along March 20 to Draft Swap. (Petersham Sydney)

or come along to our monthly Draft Busters Workshops from April 17.

Need help to write a synopsis? My WOW Workbook has some great techniques and the brilliant Jane Friedman has an excellent how-to-write-a-novel-synopsis article here.

To hear from an author who was picked up by A&U’s Friday Pitch in 2007, read an interview on the QWC website with Deborah Kalin, author of the two book fantasy series called The Binding.

If you think you would like to pitch on a Monday (Pan Macmillan) or in the first week of the month (Penguin’s Monthly Catch) find out more from Virginia Lloyd ( agent, editor, copywriter) on the pitfalls of submitting unsolicited manuscripts. She echoes my point on the importance of having a polished MS before you go seeking publishers or an agent.

If that all sounds too hard, run away to write with us in 2016-17.We can chew the fat on this topic and more while getting some good writing under our belts!

Creative in Bhutan Aug 18-30.

Haiku Walking in Japan Nov 1-11

Moroccan Caravan, Feb 20 – Mar 5, 2017

Happy Writing!