Pitch Wars is a wild, wonderful, rollercoaster of emotions from start to finish. First, the contest is a strong motivator to finish your manuscript in order to enter. If you’re lucky enough to win a spot in the contest, months of revising your manuscript with your mentor(s) await. As the days tick down to the Agent Showcase, you polish your pitch and first few paragraphs to shiny perfection.

Once the Agent Showcase posts, you and your mentors, friends, and family wait breathlessly to see if you get an agent request. You’ll be happy with just one, you tell yourself. And if I don’t get that, well, the experience is what really matters. I’ve made friends in the Pitch Wars community that will last a lifetime. My manuscript is the best it has ever been. I’ve learned so much about writing and publishing in the past few months that . . .

Then your first agent request appears. Or, it doesn’t. Either way, your journey has only just begun. Even though we hear the tales of Pitch Wars mentees receiving multiple agent offers in the first weeks after the showcase, for most of us it takes a little longer – or a lot longer. Sometimes a year or more, and that’s fine. Ultimately, the point of Pitch Wars is to provide you with the tools you need to write your best work. If you keep doing that, eventually, you will be published, Maybe as a splashy debut author with a big five imprint, or with an independent press, or through self-publishing. You will get there. It takes the same amount of courage, skill, and persistence that pushed you to enter Pitch Wars in the first place.

But you’ve got this. You’re a Pitch Warrior. You will prevail.

And I’ll be cheering you every step of the way!

My 2017 Pitch Wars statistics:

# of Agent Showcase requests: 10

# of cold queries sent: 32

# of fulls and partials requested: 22

# of months after the showcase to my first agent offer: 4

# of agents signed with: 1

# of agents lost: 1 (sadly, she left the publishing industry)

# of publication offers post-agent: 4

# of traditionally published novels: 1

My Pitch Wars fantasy THE BRASS QUEEN will be published on January 12th, 2021. Pitch Wars was the catalyst for raising my draft manuscript to a publishable level. Please enter – you never know where your journey might lead!

In case you’re curious, here is my original Agent Showcase entry: https://pitchwars.org/pw-124-adult-speculative-fiction-alternate-history-with-a-steampunk-twist-the-brass-queen/