The Pitch Madness submission window will be open for 24 hours on March 10!
Pitch Madness is a contest to win a request from one or more of the participating agents. I will have an agent introduction post up soon.
The submission window will be open from 12:01 AM EST on March 10 until 11:59PM EST. You should have plenty of time to get your submissions in. There is no limit of how many entries will be accepted. Please note: All entries sent before or after the allotted times will be deleted.
There will be 60 finalists moving onto the agent round. Pitch Madness will accept Middle Grade, Young Adult, New Adult, and Adult completed fiction, novel length (no novellas) completed and polished manuscripts only. This time around we will not accept non-fiction. Only one entry per writer this round.
What do you need to enter? A 35-word (max) pitch and the first 250 words of your finished manuscript. If the 250th word falls in the middle of a sentence, go to the end of the sentence. I will post formatting instructions before the submission window opens, along with the email address to send your entries to.
Pitch Madness will be on four blogs and each blog host will have a co-host helping them choose their top 15 entries. I will have a post up soon to introduce the hosts, co-hosts, and slush readers.
We’ll have a small team of first readers checking for formatting and putting their top picks through to the hosts. This time around, the hosts and co-hosts of each blog will choose their team of slush readers for the second round. Some blog teams may opt out of having slush readers. So I won’t be choosing all the slush readers this go around.
All the twitter fun will be happening on the hashtag #PitchMadness!
Here are the links to the blogs joining me for the contest:
Summer Heacock’s blog (aka @Fizzygrrl)
Sharon Johnston’s blog (aka @S_M_Johnston)
Rebecca Weston’s blog (aka @callmebecks)
Here’s the schedule …
- Hosts and their teams Introduction on March 3
- Agent Introduction on March 4
- Rules of the Game on March 6
- Formatting Instructions March 7
- Submission window will be on March 10 and will be open for 24 hours
- The first slush round will be March 11-12
- The final round will be March 13-17
- The top 60 picks for the agent round will go up on the blogs on March 18 at 12:01AM EST (NY time)
- March 20 at 12PM EDT (Noon) the agents requests are revealed, and right afterward is the tying agents challenge round
- There will be a #PitMad Twitter Pitch Party on March 25 from 8AM to 8PM EST. Check here for rules of the Twitter Pitch Contest.
That’s it for now. Come back on the mentioned dates to learn more about the slush readers, hosts, and agents!
Are chapter book authors (target age around 6-9) welcome to participate?
So sorry, but due to the agents’ likes in my contests, the youngest we go is middle grade.
So excited for this! Time to polish my submission materials again, haha.
You host the best contests. 🙂
What about the other direction, adult? I’ve noticed that agents in these contests seem to be primarily middle grade and young adult. I don’t want to barge in if this isn’t really meant to go beyond that.
Adult is included in the contest. I work at getting a variety of agents with a wide range of tastes, but I can only get the ones that are interested in participating. We’ve had many successes in the Adult genre as well as the other categories.
Great, just wanted to be sure. 😉 Thanks!
I noticed many agents list they are looking for pbs, but your contest guidelines are suggesting mg and up. So, no pbs then? Just want to make sure and not take up someones times.
thanks.
I’m sorry, we aren’t including PBs for this one. But you can pitch it during #PitMad 3/25. Also, NestPitch does accept PBs their submission is 4/1.
So, if my YA is around 19k, but it’s not a stand-alone book, I can’t send?
You can submit it, but the word count is too low. When choosing we tend to go with what the agents are looking for. This is the standard word count we follow: http://literaticat.blogspot.com/2011/05/wordcount-dracula.html
I figured as much from the previous P.M.
I like your word count guide, but I noticed that it only goes up to YA. My fantasy is definitely adult, and is at 180,000 words for book one. I aimed deliberately at a style that sounds older and more mystical, so that impacted my word count. For adult fantasy, is this word count out of bounds?
Also, if the contest is for unpublished works, what about self-publishing?
It may be kind of high for agents to consider. I do also use this post when determining word count for my work: http://theswivet.blogspot.com/2008/03/on-word-counts-and-novel-length.html
I appreciate the feedback. Should I scale back the word count, or try to find the right agent/publisher to take it as long as ait is?
I just want to say, “Thank you!” This is fantastic, and you are a gem!