Pitchapalooza Mini-Documentary from Albany Daily Gazette
Book editors and pitchapalooza inventors The Book Dcotors, as featured in s mini-documentary from albany daily gazette
http://www.dailygazette.com/videos/2013/apr/07/1444/
21013 NaNoWriMo Pitchapalooza Winners
It was an dreadfully difficult decision. Over 600 entries. Astounding pitches of every ilk. Just as in National Novel Writing Month, we consider everyone who submitted to be a winner. But we had to pick one. And readers had to pick one. So… (drumroll) our winner is:
Stacy McAnulty. Her awesomely awesome pitch about a boy who hatches a dinosaur egg made our lizard brain hum and our caveman heart laugh. Congratulations!
Our popular winner was Katie Nepiris, for her stunningly stunning pitch about a group of friends who undergo seismic changes in the year after high school. She got over 1,000 votes!
FYI, we’re honored to be doing a Lights & Letters Webinar on May 14: The Art of the Edit: How to Revise Your Novel Successfully. It’s going to be a blast, we promise. Here’s what we’ll be covering:
- Starting off with a bang, Character arcs, Pacing, Building suspense, Opening & closing chapters, Avoiding repetition, Great titles, Knowing when to show and when to tell, Avoiding clichés, Keeping dialogue real, Checking for words you use over and over and over again, Reading aloud, Killing your babies, Finding beta readers, Getting objective,Using your pitch to perfect your plot.
The Book Doctors will also randomly select a number of first paragraphs from attendees’ manuscripts during the webinar to demonstrate what a professional edit would look like. Send your first paragraph in the body of the email to nanowrimo@thebookdoctors.com when you sign up.
And as always, any Wrimo who buys a copy of The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published gets a FREE 20 minute consultation with the Book Doctors. Just email proof of purchase to sterryhead@gmail.com.
Thanks to everyone for participating. See you next year. And keep on writing!
The Book Doctors Interviewed by the Fabulous Caroline Leavitt
David Henry Sterry on Dawn Smith: How to Get Published, Reading, Writing & Confessions of a Sex Maniac
Interview about how to get published, reading, writing, sex and life on Dawn Smith Books. Buy the printed version of my new novella Confessions of a Sex Maniac for $4.99 & get a free 20 minute consultation for your writing worth $100 from The Book Doctors. (with proof of purchase)
Nura & Ayesha Get Published, or From ‘He’s just not that into you’ to ‘As good as it gets’ in under one minute
From ‘He’s just not that into you’ to ‘As good as it gets’ in under one minute
by Ayesha Mattu & Nura Maznavi
We came to the Book Doctors with our book on life support.
Three years earlier, we had an idea for a book: a collection of stories written by American Muslim women about love, dating and courtship. We scoured every book publishing website and blog we could find and worked diligently on our book proposal every weekend. Our efforts paid off – within just a year, we acquired an agent and started shopping our proposal to large publishers.
That’s when everything fell apart.
We received the same line from each publisher who rejected us: wonderful, novel and interesting idea…but we’re going to pass. It was like a break up scene from a bad romantic comedy on repeat – “it’s not you, you’re great.” If our book was so great, why didn’t publishers want to be with it?
After six months of “we’re just not that into you” from publishers, our agent dumped us. Our enthusiasm was zapped. We both had family and work obligations that had overtaken our lives in the period our proposal was being shopped, and we no longer had the time, energy or direction to find a new agent and start the process all over again.
We did nothing but mope about our bad luck for a year. Whereas before we couldn’t stop talking about our book – stopping strangers in the coffee shops we worked out of to tell them all about it – we now grew irritated when family and friends asked us about our progress, telling them, “Why the hell do you keep asking us about the damn book? Back off already!”
And then we heard about Pitchapalooza.
Ayesha is a long time San Francisco Litquake volunteer and forwarded Nura news of Pitchapalooza’s first appearance at Litquake in September of 2010 with a note:
We’re going for this, it’s our last chance.
ps. You’re pitching.
pps. No pressure.
After reviewing our proposal, we decided to write our pitch from scratch. We knew we were pitching a book on two subjects that, individually, have been written about in tired and clichéd ways: love and Muslim women. How best to combine the two into a pitch that would be compelling and fresh? We decided to use an unexpected twist: humor.
On the night of Pitchapalooza, we were so excited and nervous that we showed up almost an hour early. Our names were the first ones dropped into the pitching hat. But as the night progressed and our names weren’t called, we grew anxious. The other pitches were a blur – after each one that resulted in thunderous applause from the audience and accolades from the judges we’d turn to each other and whisper, “Oh man, that one is totally going to win,” and “I’m so sad that our book will never be in print.”
And then, David announced that they had time for only two more pitches. We held our breath and then – NURA MAZNAVI was called! Nura would be the second to last person pitching for the evening. She made her way down to the side of the stage to wait on deck for her turn. She didn’t realize she was holding her breath until Chris Cole (the fiction winner for the evening) leaned in to her and said, “You need to breathe.”
And then it was time. Nura had memorized the pitch but couldn’t remember a single line as she took her place behind the microphone and realized that the future of the book lay in the next minute. Clutching a wadded piece of paper she had brought with her just in case this happened, she began:
Muslim women – we just can’t seem to catch a break.
The audience erupted in laughter.
Emboldened by the audience’s reaction, she pushed on. And, amazingly, as she continued to pitch, the audience continued to laugh, clap, and then cheer. By the time David yelled, “TIME,” the crowd was going nuts!
The judges agreed with the audience, telling us that the book sounded fun, new and exciting. And then they clued us into why we maybe hadn’t been successful in shopping our proposal: “Large publishers can be cowards. Sometimes, if a book is about a subject that hasn’t been written about before, they are nervous about being the first ones to publish it.” They suggested that we do more research on marketing and on our target audience, and approach smaller and independent publishers who are less risk averse.
We had to sit through only one more pitch before the winners were announced. The fiction winner and the non-fiction winner – US!
Winning Pitchapalooza resuscitated our book, but listening to The Book Doctors as they advised us after the competition is what landed us a publisher.
We’d initially envisioned Love, InshAllah as a light and amusing look at the search for love—with a Muslim twist—to be placed on bookshelves somewhere in between Pride and Prejudice and Sex and the City.
But, we had edited our proposal – based on our former agent’s suggestions – into an academic work that was not at all funny or, frankly, that interesting. The book went from being placed squarely on a woman’s studies shelf to an amorphous space between religion and politics that no publisher wanted to touch.
The Book Doctors reviewed our proposal and gave us great advice, encouraging us to go back to our original hunch to go light. David wanted us to think big, think fun and carry that theme from the introduction right on through the marketing plan. Arielle’s insight helped us see that our book was the crest of a Muslim explosion – a literary one!
We retooled the proposal incorporating all their suggestions and within a month, The Book Doctors introduced us to Laura Mazer, Managing Editor at Soft Skull Press. The rest, as they say, is history. Laura loved the proposal and just six short months after winning Pitchapalooza we were offered a book deal! And in just two more weeks – on January 24 – our anthology Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women will be on bookstore shelves everywhere!
Ayesha Mattu & Nura Maznavi are the co-editors of the groundbreaking anthology, Love, InshAllah: The Secret Love Lives of American Muslim Women” (Soft Skull Press, 1/24/12).
Follow Ayesha Mattu and Nura Maznavi:
Website: http://loveinshallah.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LoveInshAllah
Twitter: https://twitter.com/LoveInshAllah
Amazon: http://ow.ly/8p8qT
Changing Hands Bookstore Indie Author Publishing Conference & Pitchapalooza in Phoenix, AZ
On February 25, Changing Hands, one of the great bookstores in the world, is sponsoring the Book Doctors to come out to the Wild West to put on Pitchapalooza. It’ll be a great conference, with lots of top drawer publishing professionals. Attendance is limited, so hurry & sign up.
Texas Book Festival Pitchapalooza Pitchers Pitches
RJ Julia Pitchapalooza Pitchers & Pitches
Keeping Austin Weird: The Book Doctors Take Pitchapalooza to the Texas Book Festival
Keep Austin Weird! We kept seeing that slogan plastered everywhere: on clubs with Tex-Mex music blaring, on the sides of restaurants with Tex-Mex food wafting, on t-shirts sported by ancient shitkickers, dreaded-up post-hippies, and UT hook-’em-horns, Bevo loving students. And it is weird. In the best way. Where else could you be signing books across from Lisa Loeb, & the dude who wrote Go the F*ck to Sleep. We ate amazing “Interior Mexican” tacos, we swam in a Texas sized fresh water pool, we saw protesters fighting the death penalty.
The Book Doctors Do Bi-Coastal Pitchapaloozas in 24 Hours
2 Pitchapaloozas in 24 hours. 3,000 miles apart. They said it couldn’t be done. They were wrong.
It all started on a beautiful Virginia Saturday afternoon at the James River Writers Conference, in the shockingly excellent city of Richmond. JRWC came into our lives as the result of brutal failure. Two years ago I set up a DC area mini-tour for an infamous book I put together. My girl Shawna Kenney (whose memoir I Was a Teenage Dominatrix–which is about when she was a teenage dominatrix) was just optioned by Vince Vaughn) booked us into Poets & Busboys in Washington (packed to the rafters!), Atomic Books in Baltimore (filled to the gills!), and Chop Suey in Richmond. When Shawna and I walked into Chop Suey, there were exactly 0 customers in the store. There were
about 15 folding chairs. None of them had audience asses in them. Just as we were ready to call it a day, in walked a couple of brave souls who looked like they actually wanted to be there. One of them was a colleague and dear friend of Shawna Kenney named Valley Haggard. A ridiculously intimate show like that can actually be liberating, because let’s face it, since there are only four people, it really doesn’t matter, and you can just let loose. So I actually had an ecstatic rhapsodic performing experiences. This is one of the reasons I do it. Afterwards, Shawna and I went out with Valley Ha
ggard. First of all, is that not the greatest name ever? Valley Haggard. Born to be an author. Or a country singer. Second of all, she was so smart, and funny, and generous, and goofy. At a certain point she told me she was part of a writing group: The James River Writers. I told her about Pitchapalooza and BOOM! Next thing you knew, we were on a beautiful Virginia Saturday afternoon about to unleash Pitchapalooza on Richmond. Beautiful old buildings, a rabid writing community, and the sheer NICENESS of the people make it a go-to destination. And I am not being paid by the Richmond Visitors Bureau to say that. Although if they did want to pay me, I would certainly take their money. One of the cool things about doing a writer’s festival is that you get to actually hang out with lots of pretty spectacular authors and writers. Plus, I did about a dozen seven-minute consultations.
It’s shocking how fast get to know someone in seven minutes. So it was fun to see all these people that we had connoitered with, filling the auditorium. By the time we started it was pretty much full, 150 writers and those who love them waiting in breathless anticipation. We had a very funny and savvy panelist, Michelle Brower, from the Folio Literary Management. As we do at every Pitchapalooza, we heard many crackerjack pitches. A middle-age dragon (Michelle said that a menopausal dragon would be hysterical, and in doing so brought the house down). I Do, I Did, I Don’t, a novel about a society where marriages have to be renewed every 10 years. Dystopian apocalypses, literary opusi, zombies, werewolves, vampires and hard-boiled dicks. But our winner was a cut above. He’s a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, where he worked very closely with trained military dogs. Dogs of war. His novel, Boots on the Ground, Paws on the Ground, about soldiers battling in life and death circumstances, and their relationships with these brave, loyal, and extraordinary canines brought Arielle to tears. In 1 minute. Plus, his man’s-man lantern jaw, buff hulking hunky humble manner, and his AWESOME story made him an absolute crowd favorite. Hurt Locker meets Rin Tin Tin, it just seemed to have bestseller written all over it. And it was just one of many pitches that screamed: BOOK!
As soon as Pitchapalooza Richmond was done, and I had said heartfelt thanks to my new Richmond peeps, I whipped back to the hotel, grabbed my baggage, got the kind of hug only a four-year-old can give from Olive, kissed Arielle a fond adieu, and was whisked away to the airport. It was a mad blast to have Olive with us, but we had decided she would go back with Arielle on the train, while I would fly solo to San Francisco, and do Pitchapalooza in San Francisco all by myself.
Having been awakened that morning at 7 AM by Olive begging me to play Biting Piggy (a game we made up about a month ago), I stumbled, mumbled, bumbled and numbled my way off the plane at 1 AM (4 AM EST!), feeling like someone had inserted nozzles into my ear holes and blown cotton candy into my skull. Red-rimmed pupils, baggage under my eyes bigger than the suitcase I was lugging, guts rumbling from too much bad trail mix and caffeine, I shuffled through the disorientating post-midnight fluorescence of SFO. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve heard too many zombie pitches lately, but being in an airport in the wee, wee hours will totally make you believe in zombies. As I threw myself into bed at 2 AM (5 AM EST!) I felt the sting of a tickle catch in my throat. A cough barked out of me. Followed by another cough. Then another. I could actually feel a flu bug attacking my larynx. HACK! HACK! HACK! Knowing that the thing I needed most in the world was a good deep night’s sleep, I tossed and coughed through a miserable night’s stupor. In my fevered dreams, zombies were pitching me books about werewolves, vampires, hard-boiled dicks, and yes, zombies. All while eating chunks of my flesh. It’s so depressing when you get out of bed in the morning, and you’re more exhausted than when you got in the night before.
Lead-headed, wheezing and sneezing, I coughed my way out the door. Luckily it was a rare robin-egg-blue sky day in Baghdad-by-the Bay, and a brisk but toasty breeze blowing lifted my spirits. Once I got to North Beach, I found, to my surprise and delight, that the massive annual street fair was raging. Columbus Avenue shut down, tables four deep set up on sidewalks outside restaurants, revelers and tourists and looky-loos cramjampacked in one of my favorite neighborhoods in the world, where Old Italian cannoli/espresso/gelato culture rubs elbows (and many other body parts) with drunken scruffy post-Beat writer types who scribble away in notebooks.
The fair was madness, in the best sense of the word. A WWII-type float with Andrews Sisters-look-alikes singing Roll Out the Barrel; a high-stepping marching band from Oakland rocking their synchronized syncopation; Chinese slow-motion tai chi masters; kilted-up bag piping bad boys; American flag flying, Harley hog-riders; wild west cowboys on a high-stepping horses, and cowgirls decked out in sparkly costumes that looked like a cross between Dale Evans and Liberace. It made me so happy to be alive.
I made my way to the Vesuvio’s, where I was going to be doing a reading for Litquake, the seismographic orgy of books that blows up San Francisco every October. For those of you who don’t know, Vesuvio’s is right across the alley from City Lights Bookstore, the beating heart and pulsating brain of San Francisco literati for 50 years. Everyone from Dylan Thomas to Lenny Bruce to Jack Kerouac have gotten polluted, plastered and plonkied while waxing poetic at Vesuvio’s. I felt a great wave of history as I walked in, an overpowering sense of honor, humility, and gratitude to be reading at this shrine where so many great writers have drunk until they passed out. The readers performed from the second floor balcony, looking down as if from Mount Olympus on the pulsating, hooch-fueled throng, shoehorned in wall-to-wall, cheek-by-jowl, the body heat wafting upwards, a crackling electromagneticity rocketing around the room, and ricocheting off those hallowed walls, which have seen so much literary history made over the years. I was up first, and my adrenal glands were spitting fire, my central nervous system all jacked up, while my heart felt like a hare being chased by the hounds. The din of the crowd was so loud it sounded like someone had turned the volume up to 11. I was worried that they wouldn’t shut up and listen to me. I underestimated the power of MC extraordinaire Mr. Alan Black, master of the pregnant pause and the growling punchline, a man who made his bones running shows at the Edinburgh Castle, where the Tenderloin sits like a festering sore on the bum of San Francisco. Like a lion tamer who uses a Scottish brogue and slashing wit as his whip and chair to control a room full of wild beasts, he subdued the crowd in 1.2 seconds. I love that feeling of a tightly packed mass of humanity waiting silently for the performer to try and conjure magic out of thin air. I took a deep breath, relished the moment, and plunged in. It was such a joy riding those words in that crowd through my story. Ridiculously gratifying.
Sadly I had to bolt as soon as I was finished, so I missed the show, and as I strolled back down Columbus Avenue toward the Pyramid Building, the adrenaline speed wore off and I was struck dumb by a numbing wave of exhaustipation. I had quite forgotten how depleted and drained my battery was, and I worried I’d have to call AAA to jumpstart me before Pitchapalooza Litquake, which was set to start in 20 min. Caffeine! my brain screamed. I collapsed into Starbucks. I coughed. I hacked. I wheezed. I drank. I made it to Market Street, rejuvenated, just in time to find the organizers starting to seriously worry that I wasn’t going to show up. It was my great good fortune to have two publishing stalwarts, Sam Barry and Kathi Kamen Goldmark (Write That Book Already!) as my copilots. They arrived like the cavalry providing reinforcement for my battle weary troops. And we were off! A meta-post-modern novel about a writer battling his own book. A rich girl getting back at her bad dad. A juicy, gossipy guide to the London Olympics. An Australian graphic novel about fast food workers who are actually crime fighters: fries and spies! Dystopian apocalypses, literary opusi, zombies, werewolves, vampires and hard-boiled dicks. But again, the winner was a cut above: a hysterically told tale set in Liverpool, where soccer is a combination of religious obsession and drunken life-and-death spectacle, and a woman finds she can predict the outcome of matches before they happen. Madcap antics ensue.
Suddenly it was over. I staggered in a stupor out onto Market Street, wrung out like a ragged rag, but wildly satisfied. That night I collapsed into bed moaning and groaning, wracked by hacking spasms. Slept for 12 hours. Next night I slept 12 more. When I awoke, the bug, the tickle, the hack and cough were miraculously gone. I’m on the plane going back to my Jersey hearth and home. Happily anticipating the kind of kiss only a four-year-old can give from Olive, and snuggling into my own bed with my lovely and talented wife.
To see all pictures click here.