Pitching A Book

I’ve just been pitching my book to a literary agent, like I’ve been talking about for a while, so I’m full of hope that this will be a big turning point in my career as a writer. I have submitted to agents before, but only half-heartedly, not that I realised that it was half-heartedly at the time, it’s just that I didn’t know what I was doing.

I sent my first book, ‘Daddy’s Hobby’ in paper format from Thailand to London. It cost me £32 and when they didn’t reply, I gave up. Fifteen months later, I submitted another book to three agents by email, but when they replied that it wasn’t what they were looking for, I gave up again.

Then I bought the ‘Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook’ (http://amazon.com/B00LGPJ2B6) from Amazon, and realised that there were recognised formats for pitching a book, a few right ways, and lots more wrong ones, and my way was not good. I read that yearbook from cover to cover in two days and it is not thin at 816 pages. I learned a lot and was determined to try again.

And then Christmas came.

Now, this is one of the disadvantages of having a book in e-format: you can easily forget about it. If you have a book on your shelf you see it there every day and that is a reminder, but my book is in the cloud. It might as well have been in cloud cuckoo land, because I forgot about it and my intentions for six months, until just recently.

Next time, if I can’t get the book on my shelf, I must remember to leave it on my computer’s desktop to jog my memory.

My Dad always said: ‘If you haven’t got a memory, get a notebook’ and it looks as if that time has come for me, because I just lost a period of six months of pitching my books and at sixty-one years of age, I may have less than twenty of those left 🙂

All the best,

Owen

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Podcast: Pitching A Book