Last week was the climax of Pitch Wars 2014, the agent round at Brenda Drake’s blog and alternate showcase hosted by Dee Romito. As one of the mentors, I had a glimpse of what these pitching contests look like behind the scenes. It seemed worth sharing these lessons. 1. Brenda Drake is awesome It’s difficult to […]
Articles on Pitching Contests
Here you'll find articles on pitching contests for aspiring authors, from one-day Twitter pitching events (#SFFpit and #PitMad) to longer-running, Brenda-Drake-style events like Pitch Madness and Pitch Wars.
My WRiTE CLUB Experience
For the past several weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of participating — with complete anonymity — in a unique writing contest. It’s called WRiTE CLUB, and it’s hosted by D.L. Hammons. The concept is simple: entrants were asked to submit a 500-word piece of fiction under a pen name. I’d learned about the contest from my […]
Pitch Wars: One Mentor’s Feedback
I’ve finished responding to all 74 writers who submitted to me during #PitchWars. It took me a long time to write these responses, but I enjoyed it and I felt I owed it to all of them. Even though I could only pick two for #TeamBioMind, all Pitch Wars submitters should be proud of two things. […]
Lessons and Hard Numbers from PitchWars
Earlier this year, I asked Brenda Drake if she was interested in some technical help for her next pitching contest. Specifically, I told her that PitchWars and PitchMadness might go a lot more smoothly if the submissions were done by form rather than by e-mail. Because you can control a form. You can prevent submitters […]
Pitch Wars #AskMentor Highlights
Today the hopeful applicants of #PitchWars had the chance to ask questions of the 70+ mentors for the contest. We had spectacular participation during both 1-hour chat sessions! At one point I realized I’d fallen 20 minutes and 170 tweets behind on the #AskMentor hashtag (which was trending on Twitter). Talk about exciting! Because it […]
