In these cost conscious times, the Algonkian Pitch and Shop Conference is good value and well worth those nickels and dimes in your change jar. I say that not in jest, because you can do this conference on an extremely tight budget, if you need to. The cost of the 4 day conference is $600. It’s in Manhattan but many of the participants found places to stay on the cheap ($35 a nite for a hostel). Of course, there are other more pricey places to stay as well. Food? The cost of food in NYC ranges from single digits to the price of a used car. Me? I stayed with a friend and packed my own food and brought it with me. My costs came to +/- $700 including the gas in my hybrid to get there. I attended in Dec 2008.

The conference is for writers who have finished (worked and re-worked) a novel and are ready to pitch it. The conference is solely for drafting and polishing a pitch for your novel. And then you practice pitching it to acquisition editors from major houses.

I found the conference enormously useful for understanding the acquisition market and also getting access to acquisition editors. It also gave me an up-close and real picture of the human element in today’s publishing business. Editors at every house fear losing their jobs—and fear makes people risk adverse. As a result, many editors tend to prefer a story that is similar to some other story that has sold well. (Beware using obscure novels as comps when describing your novel! ). The reality is that many publishing houses have been bought up by mega-corporations who now dictate a bottom-line profit margin for every book, rather than allowing a house to have a variety of books, with block busters carrying the load. In my old life, when I was a Wall Street attorney I was once asked to investigate why a subsidiary of a multinational corporation was losing profits. After months of research my conclusion was that the guys at the top were setting unrealistic performance goals which was distorting the normal operation of the business below. Hmm. . . sounds familiar.

At the conference, in my group, a very high percentage of participants were asked to submit their novels. (Higher than what the conference quotes on their website.) If your novel is seriously literary, this might not be the venue for you, but if you can fit your novel into commercial, mainstream, women’s, ect, I’d absolutely recommend it. And anyway, the trend now is to let the pitch suggest the marketing niches (there can be, and perhaps should be, more than one.)

The first pitches are done in a group so we can hear each other’s pitches and learn from them and there were several excellent young adult (YA) fiction pitches in my group. And even though there was no YA acquisition editor at this particular conference, one of the editors from Penguin asked to see these novels to pass on to a colleague. Also, agents frequently “sit in” to hear the pitches. For instance Tina Wexler from ICM sat in one session and then asked all three YA novelists and several others to send her their work. There were even some participants who already had agents but wanted more direct access to acquisition editors.

For me the best part of the conference was the corroborative attitude of the participants. I came to the conference because I couldn’t write a pitch or query letter to save my life. The atmosphere was cooperative rather than competitive. While I personally am a dunce at pitches and wasn’t able to perfect mine during the course of the conference (despite lots of help), three of the participants offered to continue helping me after the conference, two of whom read my entire novel to help write the pitch. That’s real kindness. I’m happy to say that with the aid of four minds, my pitch is much stronger. The agents and acquisition editors also gave openly of their time and information-base and all were very encouraging.

Sometimes success comes by a circuitous route. I remember thinking that as I walked to the conference hotel before my first pitch. It was raining and as I walked by a small construction site I noticed how the rain hit a tin roof, then slid to another roof, and then another before running to the pavement near my feet. I thought, that’s how my novel is going to get published. I have no doubt that as a result of this conference my manuscript will find a home. I now have a strong pitch to help me market it. A strong pitch, by-the-way, is very important to acquisition editors because they too, have to pitch your novel in-house to get it bought. There are layers upon layers in the process of getting a novel bought in today’s crazy times.