What Australia wants

I've just rushed home from the 2010 Sydney Writers' Festival event So you think you can write? This was an opportunity for ten people, picked at random from a crowd of 250, to give a three-minute pitch of their book to two prominent personalities in Australian publishing. By Cynthia Haskell.

The publishing luminaries were Lyn Tranter, proprietor of Australian Literary management www.austlit.com and Shona Martyn, Publishing Director of Harper Collins Australia. Sadly, I was not one of the ten selected to pitch, but the process and event was an eye-opener. Some people pitching were extremely well prepared and inspiring, others were not, and some were downright boring.

However, here are some tips and comments that jumped out at me and which might be of interest to other aspiring writers:

The form

After a young female journalist with The Sydney Morning Herald opened the event, Lyn explained that this was not the usual way in which people pitched a novel. Agents and publishers usually liked to READ an outline and synopsis first. She says she always judged people's work on the writing. Later, the author might be required to deliver a pitch to about ten people in-house. In that regard authors did need to have good oral communication skills and she suggested that 'Oratory' be a subject on university writing courses.

Finish your work first

Lyn also remarked that she would not look at any work which was not complete.

Shona said to make sure that whatever you submitted to an agent or publisher was your best final work - you only get one chance, so don't try to submit your manuscript too soon. However, because one publisher rejected your book, that did not mean that another publisher might not like it.

She also said to make sure you did your research well, although if there was not a niche market for your work that did not mean it would not sell, especially if it was well written and had something to offer the reading public that was different.

Fantasy genre

To a participant who had written a fantasy novel, both judges said 150,000 words was the norm for this type of work, and that fantasy novels usually came in threes, so it was best to have at least the first and second books written, as fans did not want to wait two years for the next book; six months was the maximum. However, as these types of books were very popular at the moment, the competition was intense.

Crime novels

As far as Australia was concerned, crime novels were very well accepted said the panel - and most readers were female. This advice came in response to a pitch by a journalist who had written a crime novel and had liaised with the Police Media Unit. This was accepted as a good marketing ploy as it gave her credibility. As I am writing a spy novel, I was dying to ask about that genre and also to ask if video pitches were accepted, but there was no opportunity to do so.

Australians don't do mismems

Australia had a good range of literary fiction we were told, but writers shouldn't discount middle of the road fiction, such as romantic comedy, especially if people could relate to the themes and identify with the characters. However, unlike in the UK, Australian readers were not interested in the intensely sad and poverty-stricken stories of peoples' lives, of which there had been a plethora in that country.

Legal issues came up quite a few times, such as someone who claimed they had been damaged for life by the corporate medical world, and someone who wanted to write a true account of events which named well-known people.

All about pitching

All in all, the piching experience didn't seem as threatening and daunting as I had envisaged. Both Lyn and Shona seemed very approachable and charming people and went to great pains to clarify what they perceived as any jargon. As this Festival attracts people from all works of life, not just writers, they gauged their audience well.

Lyn concluded that she did not think pitching at such an event would work, but she was obviously interested in two or three pitches in particular - the crime novel, the romantic comedy, and another which was a true account of someone's life in a mental institution after being operated on, which he alleged had caused him to be able to see into the future, only to be thought delusional and paranoid.

The above report is as I recall the event (Errors and Omissions Excepted). Do add your thoughts by clicking on the comment button below.