NYC Pitch Conference (formerly NYC Pitch and Shop)

Toothpaste said:

dragonjax, just bookmark it and read it slowly over time and savour it. It's bloody brilliant!

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I just spent about an hour going through it all. Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

My favorite bit is where JF threatens to drive up to Tor HQ (in 40 minutes or less! sweet!) and complain of Teresa to Patrick and Patrick's boss. That sentence is just a joy to unpack. I mean, so many unfounded and offensive assumptions all revealed by so very few words. It's like poetry.

Sadly, that appears to have been JF's final appearance. And I so very much was looking forward to the encore.

Edited To Add: Squawk! Bwahaha....

That is one thing you can say for those types of crazies, they always leave you wanting more!

I read through the ML thread for the payoff -- the unmasking of the Pitch Bitch. How sad for her. Just shows you there's no real anonymity if you work on the web. Reminds me of the old live radio program days, when the first lesson was "Every microphone's an open microphone".

I had to stop reading the responses on the ML thread -- I was starting to get suspiscious looks from my co-workers. I'll have to finish it tonight, but what I've read so far is hysterical. No, there is no such thing as real anonymity on the web.

The comment thread was a great read, but I'm feeling concerned about some of the data people (especially Greg London) were digging up. It looked to me like Kaley Noonan/Pitch Bitch/Julie consciously intended to commit fraud by using sockpuppets to falsely praise the Pitch 'n' Shop, and drown out legitimate commenters on venues like Lulu because they were saying that the Pitch 'n' Shop was nearly useless for aspiring writers, and at five hundred bucks a head was a very poor value.

There's a lot of money at stake here.

But at least after all the exposure none of it will go to Pitch Bitch.

Gah! They're up to 430 comments!!!

(They'd barely reached 300 yesterday!)

Pitchie has taken her blog down, but she's still around: http://nycpitchconference.com/pc-pitchbitch.htm

The question I want to ask her is: "How's that working out for you?" She's apparently a veteran of four of these things (and planning to do a fifth), but hasn't managed to sell her book yet.

My advice to her would be to use different words in another order to tell a new story. It'll take a long time for postage costs in submitting her next novel to add up to $600.

I googled from Uncle Jim's post and found this: http://www.3ammagazine.com/short_stories/fiction/feminist_fantasy/page_1.html

The author tag line at the bottom includes is interesting.

Look at the age of that page, Rllgthunder.

That novel of hers, Backwoods East Jesus, has vanished from her on-line bibliographies. Instead, the novel she was apparently working on at the time (and the one I suspect she's been pitching) about the lobsterman and his retarded girlfriend is, I suspect, The Ghost Trap, still unsold after four times in the Pitch 'n Shop barrel with a fifth in the offing.

Yep, I did see that, Uncle Jim. I also just found the reference in the Making Light Jan 2007 archive (Jan 22 post).

She's a keeper.

Kaley Noonan lives in Maine and ekes out a miserable living as a waitress and a writer

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Well, at least she has them in the right order.

By the way, Jim thanks for the web page linke to 'jump-kits'. It's a keeper.

Regards,
Scott

Making Light has now decided that the NYC Pitch and Shop Conference is a scam.

I thought this was the one TNH had warned against.

It is.

CaoPaux said:

FYI - This conference have been revealed to be not worth the money: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008901.html#008901

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The link is a little bit misleading. She writes, "Nobody buys first novels through a pitch." Well, if Algonkian's website it to be believed, one of the former attendees of the conference had her novel bought after meeting an editor at the Pitch-and-Shop.

And I'll put in this:

This conference helped me TREMENDOUSLY. Tremendously. I did a few things in New York that were of help: I changed the title of my manuscript after it was clear that our group didn't really care for it, and the title change helped me realize some of the book's themes; I was asked to submit my manuscript to an editor at Penguin (something I put on my query letters); and I tightened my query to the point where I was 90% succesful in terms of agents asking for partials or fulls. I also met some good people and some good writers there.

According to their website, three of the writers in the group I was in have made deals. I'm with Shaye Areheart; another writer is with Plume; another is with Knopf. There were 16 in the group. That tells you that, while these writers may not have landed deals with editors during this conference (I didn't; the manuscript was eventually rejected by Penguin), there is some legit talent in the groups you pitch with.

I have no idea who "the Pitch Bitch" is. She certainly wasn't part of my group. The teacher of my and the OP's group was a man named Charles Salzberg, and he did a great job.

I can only speak for myself: it was well worth the money I paid.

NYC Pitch and Shop - The Ethics of Pitching

Before debating the issue, which btw to my knowledge only came into existence on April 23/24 when Making Light posted a genuine call for writers everywhere to rise up and rage against the pitch machine, I offer this quote from a thread further down in this forum.

It is from Will Lavendar, an active member of Absolute Write and a former attendee at the NYC Pitch and Shop:

"This conference helped me TREMENDOUSLY. Tremendously. I did a few things in New York that were of help: I changed the title of my manuscript after it was clear that our group didn't really care for it, and the title change helped me realize some of the book's themes; I was asked to submit my manuscript to an editor at Penguin (something I put on my query letters); and I tightened my query to the point where I was 90% succesful in terms of agents asking for partials or fulls. I also met some good people and some good writers there.

According to their website, three of the writers in the group I was in have made deals. I'm with Shaye Areheart; another writer is with Plume; another is with Knopf. There were 16 in the group. That tells you that, while these writers may not have landed deals with editors during this conference (I didn't; the manuscript was eventually rejected by Penguin), there is some legit talent in the groups you pitch with.

I have no idea who "the Pitch Bitch" is. She certainly wasn't part of my group. The teacher of my and the OP's group was a man named Charles Salzberg, and he did a great job.

I can only speak for myself: it was well worth the money I paid."

______

Thank you, Will Lavendar. We wish you success and look forward at the NYC Pitch and Shop to helping out more writers like yourself. Having said, let's move on to discuss the ethics of pitching, since some well-meaning people have somehow determined the issue actually exists.

Whatever the "uselessness" of certain types of pitching, one must admit that most pitching can be useless, but no more so than most query letters or other methods of getting the attention of an agent or publisher. Those in the business know there is a right way and a wrong way to pitch.

Therefore, no real ethics is involved with the act of pitching itself, or pitches, any more than with query letters -- rather a simple right way/wrong way. Now, if an event that maintained a pitch environment was knowingly ineffective yet pretended to be otherwise and then trick writers with advertising copy into attending and wasting their time, an ethical question exists regarding the nature of that particular event. And as much as Making Light attempts to make this argument, in one way or another, the argument can only be made by not checking the facts, or by obscuring them. Whether unethical intent exists or assumptions are made out of good will, not an issue here.

Just to clear the air, the NYC Pitch and Shop (though the website makes all this evident), holds pitch training sessions, pitch review sessions, and actual pitch sessions with editors from major houses in NYC including Ace, Random House, Viking, and others. Commenters on the blog are confused by all this and can't seem to understand who does what or what is being done or whatever. Now it is clear. Also, the pitch workshop leaders and editors discuss the market mechanics and structure of the novels involved with an aim towards improving them. Bonus.

Thanks again to Will Lavendar for his post and good luck to all the science fiction writers attending the "speed dating" pitch sessions at the upcoming SFWA event in May. I hope they are as well trained as our writers at the NYC Pitch and Shop.

Cheers

Oh and ...

btw, before the conspiracy theorists get started, I'm not Kaley Noonan; and she is in no way involved with the pitch conferences.

With all due respect, if a highly regarded editor in the field thinks Pitch and Shop is a waste of time, why should we believe you? I would think she is the one who would know.

Mr. Grinch, (heh)

Is there a reason you aren't posting your point over at Making Light?

You just got here, Mr. Grinch.
No one knows from whence you came.
Your platform's a little funny,
and I'd rather keep my money -

Mr. Griii-inch!