Another Pitch Wars is winding toward its announcement, and I had just a few things that I wanted to share in the hopes that someone will find them useful.

First off, if you submitted your work to Dan and me, thank you. We really enjoyed it, and across the board this was our strongest batch of submissions ever. We received 186 submissions and requested about 18 or 19 partials. That’s down slightly from last year, when we received 199. I attribute that to having a larger field of strong SFF mentors this year, as well as not having bonus entries.

It’s really hard to say what made us request more, because it wasn’t the same with every request. One early submission I read, the writing was so good that I just wanted to see more of it. I didn’t even care what the book was about at that point, I was willing to give it a try. Another we requested even though we knew it was probably too literary for us, because I really wanted to see what happened in the next chapters.

You’ll hear this a lot, but it bears repeating: It really is subjective. How subjective, you ask? There are some authors who will be announced soon as final picks who submitted to Dan and I, and we didn’t even request their material. Without going back to look at the submission, I can’t say why we didn’t ask for more. But I think it’s an important point. The book is, by definition, good enough to make it in, and we had 18 or 19 entries that we wanted to see more. And that’s exactly it. We wanted to see them more. We ultimately picked the one that we did not because we disliked everything else we had, we just liked this one more.

As always, Dan and I made our final pick based on just a few things. First, and most importantly, we both had to like it and think that we had something to offer it. Second, we wanted an author who seemed open to the types of adjustments that we think will make the book stronger–after all, if we can’t help them because they aren’t interested, why bother? Those two factors probably accounted for 90% of our decision. The final ten percent was a combination of things…how we see the market, the writing background of the author, character arcs…a lot of things. Too many to list, really.

So what now? I wrote a post about what to do if you don’t get into Pitch Wars here.

Let me add to that a little bit. I think there’s a lot of benefit to staying engaged with the writing community. If you met people, follow up. Swap chapters. Team up and conquer the world together. Finding your tribe is an important part of this business. At the same time, take care of yourself. If you’ve got to unplug for your own mental well being, do it. If you get angry every time you see my stupid face on twitter, by all means, unfollow me. I hope that when you’re in a better place you’ll come back. I didn’t have a ton of time to get to know people this year for a lot of reasons. I look forward to seeing your stories progress in the future.

Most importantly, keep writing. If not today, then sometime soon. Take as long as you need. The words will still be there.

I’ll leave you with this. Everyone has a different path. Nobody knows how long yours is. All we know is this: If you’re not where you want to be on that path, you have to take another step. Happy trails.

Tags: Pitchwars