With the agent showcase coming up, I thought I’d pass on a message that applies every year. Most of you aren’t going to listen to me, and that’s cool. You are excited, and you can do whatever you want. After all, this is your shot.

Except it’s not. This is certainly *a* shot. But it’s not your only one. In fact, it really doesn’t matter at all. Because here’s the secret — the agent showcase isn’t for you. It’s a convenient spot for agents to see a bunch of great books in one place. It’s for them.

But Mike! A lot of people are going to get agents out of this, and a few of those are going to sign great book deals!

Yep. And that would happen regardless of the agent showcase. Because those people wrote great books, and as soon as they queried them, agents would figure it out. At most, the agent showcase speeds up the process…for a few people.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s awesome to be excited about it, and I’m not suggesting that you should pass it up if your book is ready. I’m just saying that if you did need to pass it up, it isn’t the end of the world.

And again, I know you’re not listening. I, or somebody like me, say the same thing every year and every year mentees ignore us. Which again, is fine. It’s your life and you can do as you choose. But as someone who has watched a few of these now, and been in one myself, I have a bit of experience.

Here are some things that I 100% guarantee will happen in this year’s showcase:

1. Someone will get 20+ agent requests, and get no offers. Probably several people. A request is 100% about the concept. Agents will fall in love with the concept of the book, but not fall in love with the execution.
   
2. Someone will be generally overlooked in the showcase but get an agent anyway and go on to have success with that book. That was me in 2015, by the way. PLANETSIDE got one agent request. It has since sold to a major publisher and earned out its advance something like 7 times over. Also note that my agent didn’t even participate in the showcase that year.
   
3. Someone who doesn’t get an agent from Pitch Wars will go on to success with their next book (or their next one after that, or something). An example: Margaret Owen was in my Pitchwars cohort (2015). Her first published novel, THE MERCIFUL CROW, was not her Pitchwars book. It’s excellent, by the way, and if you’ve been to the bookstore lately, you can see that Margaret is doing just fine.
   
4. Someone will get a really fast offer and sign with an agent, but the book won’t sell on submission. Doesn’t mean you can’t write — it just means that while agents are usually right, sometimes they aren’t.
   
5. Someone is going to get so upset about things that happen during the agent showcase that they’re going to disconnect from their peer group. (This one is the saddest, BTW, but emotions run high and jealousy is a son-of-a-bitch).

Please don’t take this as me being negative. I’m just the messenger. This is reality. Publishing is a hard business, and it really really really doesn’t care about your feelings.

Personally, I see most of this as positive. Because when you accept that the agent showcase isn’t that important, it reminds you that not everything is tied up in these few days. It’s a long, long race. Whether you’re ahead or you’re behind at the beginning doesn’t matter as long as you’re still running. Because you know what? There’s no finish line in this writing race until you say the race is over.

So how do you win Pitch Wars if it’s not in the agent showcase?

I’m glad you asked.

If you’re a better writer today than when you started, you’ve already won Pitch Wars. You’ve got new things in your writer kit bag, and you can apply them to everything you do from now until forever.

If you have learned something about yourself–how you work best, how you handle revisions on a deadline, how to work through doubt…then you’ve already won Pitch Wars. All of those things are important to a writer, and the better you handle them, the better off you’re going to be regardless of where you are in your writing career.

If you have made relationships with other writers, be they mentors or mentees, then you have already won Pitch Wars. Several of my Pitch Wars classmates regularly show up when any one of us has an event. Do you know how cool that is? Because if you’re and introvert like me, those kind of events suck. But when there are friends there, they suck a lot less. Here’s how important I think this is: I would not trade one single relationship for a chance to be in the agent showcase. Not one.

Now I know what you’re thinking here. You’re thinking, yeah, that’s easy for you to say, you’ve got an agent and multiple book contracts. And you can believe that about me if you want. But I’m telling you this: your relationships with other writers are critically important. Not only to your success, but to your continued growth as a writer, your mental well-being as a writer, and a whole host of intangible things that I can’t even put my finger on right now.

So if you’ve made friends and allies with other writers, you’ve already won Pitch Wars.

Lastly, there’s the network. As a Pitch Wars mentee, you have access to a huge arsenal of resources. Consider this: Any Pitch Wars mentor, past or present, can DM me at any time with questions and I will share with them anything I know. That means as a mentee, through your relationship with your mentor, you have that access to information. Maybe that’s not a big deal, maybe it is. But now multiply that times all the mentors and all the people who mentored in the past and all the people who will mentor in the future. To varying extents, the knowledge and wisdom of all of those people is available through one or two links if you keep the connections.

So what am I saying here?

I’m not saying that you shouldn’t be excited. I’m not saying you shouldn’t participate. It’s a big day.

What I’m saying is that if the agent showcase doesn’t work out for you for whatever reason, it’s not that big a deal. I’m saying that there are many, many things from Pitch Wars that are more important than the agent showcase, and that you shouldn’t sacrifice any of those things for a one time shot. Most important, I’m saying that whether you have initial success or not, you’re going to have to keep working at it going forward. Because this isn’t the finish line.