Emerald City Writer's Conference : Picthing!

It's the big pitch day, where most conference attendees get to panic about trying to sell their story to an editor or agent. Thank goodness for us, the industry professionals are used to nutty writers. Most are allowing us to send pages so they can see our writing, and not our ability to pitch our book!

To help the attendees know who would be best suited for their book, the Emerald City Writers Conference guru's held a Q&A. There were lots of questions, but here are some of the highlights.

What are you acquiring?

• Junessa Vilora, Ballantine - Romance all genres, women’s fiction
• Esi Sogah, Harper Collins - Romance for all Avon imprints
• Leah Hultenschmidt, Sourcebooks - Single title romance of any subgenre and YA
• Tera Kleinfelter, Samhain - All genres or romance, urban fantasy, fantasy, science fiction with romantic elements
• Angela James, Carina– 15K and up in romance and non-romance – everything from sexy to sweet and non-romance in sci fi mystery thriller. No YA, womens fiction or YA
• Suzie Townsend, Nancy Coffey Literary Agency – middle grade YA, all subgenres of romance, fantasy, sci fi,
• Jill Marsal, Marsal Lyon Literary Agency - All types of romance, paranormal historical category, nonfiction
• Melissa Jeglinski, The Knight Agency– romance in most genres except scifi fantasy and paranormal

Charity auctions – are they worth it financially for the author. Do you spend more time on the critique knowing how much the author paid for the opportunity?

• Leah – I do spend more time and only do Brenda Novak’s. Quality isn’t necessarily better, but I am aware of how much they spent and take my time with it.
• Suzie – I’m shocked by the money people spend. It does get more attention, a deeper critique. They paid for it and I’ll read to the end and put together notes for them.
• Esi – I do spend more time on it because they spend a lot of money and I want to honor it.
• Jill – there are so many submissions usually we don’t have time to write detailed feedback, but we do that on auction submissions.
• Tera – people email me, but never send it in.

What do you think about agencies that offer self-publishing to clients? Is it a positive trend or a conflict of interest?

• MJ – Knight Agency is assisting current clients to release their backlist. We take our usual agency commission, not a publisher commission.
• Suzie – a huge conflict of interest. An agent is an agent that sells books to a publisher. To combine those things doesn’t work for me.
• Jill – we offer authors a choice. For authors that are too busy for formatting, editing, etc. we have a relationship with a company that does that.
• Angela – self-publishing services are different than being a publisher. For agents who have worked with a book and the options have been exhausted, getting an agency cut on self-published books helps recoup some of that time and effort.