Agents and Editors Conference 2008: Friday, 20 JuneI arrived early, ate lunch, signed in, and wandered. My first memorable event was a collision – quite literally - with a woman who recognized my name from the promotional brochure but expected me to be 55 years old and bald (I'm 45 and have most of my hair, thank you very much). We ended up in a terrific discussion about her book. I met several other people before heading downstairs for the pitch workshop at 3:30. That's when the roller coaster started. It didn't stop until Sunday afternoon. 
Chuck Sambuchino conducted our pitch workshop. Chuck edits for Writer's Digest Books. I'm sure he would appreciate the brevity of the job description; were I to tell you what he really does, I'd still be writing next week.
Chuck is a bright, funny, smart-alecky guy who has forgotten more stuff about writing and publishing than most of us could ever hope to know. I'll tell you one thing he definitely knows: how to craft a pitch. He advised, we pitched, and he edited. On the spot. In seconds. Off the top of his head. What took us three or four minutes he knocked down to twenty seconds. Like magic. Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat! “Hi,” I said. “I had you on my short list, but I wasn't sure you liked supernatural stuff.” “I love it if it's fresh,” he said. “What's your book?” I pitched it. Terribly, I might add. Literally five minutes out of the workshop door, had I developed it properly? Not so much. I stumbled through, Uwe laughed (a friendly, nonthreatening laugh), and said, “well, I like the water thing. Go ahead and query and we'll see what happens.” I query constantly. Don't we all? How many query letters have we written? If we could turn them back into trees, we could reforest those bald patches of Amazon rainforest and restore balance to a ravaged ecosystem. Lots of queries, yes. But he asked for this one. I don't even have to kill a tree to send it to him. He likes email queries. And after spending an entire weekend hearing Uwe talk about books, I know exactly how to tailor the query to appeal to him specifically. After the reception, I went upstairs and practiced my pitch for two hours. It took me a full hour just to get myself to stop rambling and focus. I kept at it until I thought I was in pretty good shape. Then, completely exhausted, I fell into that deathlike, dreamless slumber I mentioned earlier. Click here to see what happened on Saturday! Click here to return to the Conference Main Page
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With Chuck, that trick always works. I took what I learned, walked across the hall to the reception at the Rojo Red Restaurant, and bumped into Uwe Stender, an agent with Triada US Literary Agency.
