Ficlets

You’ve heard of speed dating – now experience speed book pitching!

If you think speed-dating is tough, try selling your book to an editor in three minutes.

That’s what hundreds of aspiring authors were doing this week at a New York trade fair, and the odds were against them.

Literary agent Peter Miller said there were as many as 15 million wannabe writers in the United States with books to sell.

“If you do the math, it’s less than half of one percent of the people that want to get published actually get published,” Miller said as he prepared himself for a barrage of pitches.

Some advice from a writer with two agents (one for fiction, one for non-fiction): Uh, no. Don’t sell your own work short. You don’t have to boil your work down to a three-minute pitch, so don’t. This is just silly. I’d do it just for the amusement value, but to actually sell the book? I’d want to let a nice detailed book proposal speak for me.