I lost

Well, tonight was a weird experience...

When I got to the pitchapalooza 64 people had shown up to pitch. I was like uh oh. They had us put our names in a basket to be randomly selected to pitch. They said they would take 30 people. I didn't get called. Then they said they only had time for one more pitch (19 had been done) because Tattered Cover was closing early. I thought as hard as I could for them to pull my name as the last pitch.

Amazingly, they did.

From the first 5 seconds of my pitch there was an audible gasp from the panel. Then they laughed at the cadaver knee part. When I finished they even applauded me (they didn't applaud anyone else). The main guy said my pitch was perfect and that he loved it. A guy who is a book rep said he thought my book would sell really well and that if the media got their hands on me they would eat me up (his exact words). They all said there wasn't a single thing about my pitch that they would change (unlike every one else that had pitched). I told them I had gotten some rejections on my book and the book seller said "that's because they aren't reading your pitch, but that's going to change - don't see those as rejections at all".

The one woman on the panel asked if my stories were true. I said I had the pictures and witnesses to prove it which made everyone in the audience laugh (maybe because of the way I said it, I don't know).

Then the woman and the book seller went out of the room to pick the winner. I put my hat on and got my jacket ready. Everyone was like "what are you doing? you had to have won!" When the woman and book seller walked back in the room a bunch of people from the writer's group started saying "You know you won".

Which was embarrassing because I didn't win. The woman who won wrote a memoir about making a major change in her life from being a house wife to a feminist. Her pitch was so boring compared to some of the others that I didn't even remember what it was about (someone pitched a kid's book about the Cat Intelligence Agency, where cats solve crimes by manipulating humans - thought that was a great pitch).

Afterward a bunch of people came up to me, that I didn't know, and told me that they really liked my book idea. It was weird.

So, I'm going to change my cover letter to my one minute pitch. Find some agents. Send them a paper copy of my letter, chapter summaries, and the first five pages of my book. And keep going. I have to be close at this point for something to happen.