Left Margin LIT 2nd Annual Book Pitch Party
Date: February 29
Time: 7 pm - 9:30 pm
Hosts: Melanie Abrams and Laura Mazer
Ages: Adult
Maximum Enrollment: 10
Price: $75 to pitch your book SOLD OUT
Free to attendees who want to observe
GET YOUR PITCH ON at Left Margin LIT’s 2nd Annual Book Pitch Party!
Do you have a book idea you’re cooking up? A novel you’ve been noodling over? A tale you’re itching to tell? A how-to that can be only written by you?
On a festive Saturday evening at Left Margin LIT, present your book idea to a pair of industry insiders! You’ll get insta-feedback that you can put into action right away, such as:
-shaping your story for the readership.
-developing an attention-getting pitch.
-finding an agent or publisher.
-and more!
Here’s how it works . . .
You'll get three minutes on the stopwatch to pitch your book idea. This can be a standard verbal elevator pitch, or you can read from a query letter. Really sell it to Laura and Melanie!
After your pitch, our hosts will share on-the-spot feedback and suggestions for making your book a strong contender for publication and future bestseller-dom.
At the end of the evening, the book pitch winner will be crowned and win a $150 gift credit to a Left Margin LIT program or class.
This event is perfect for fiction and nonfiction writers in all stages of their book development. (YA and speculative fiction are also okay.) You might have a full manuscript, or just a nugget of a spark of an idea—either way, at our book pitch, the focus is entirely on the way you sell your story.
Publicly pitching your book is not for the faint of heart, so if you'd rather watch and glean some wisdom from Melanie and Laura's feedback for other aspiring authors, stop by and be a part of our live audience.
Melanie Abrams is the author of the novels Playing (Grove Atlantic) and Meadowlark (Little A). She teaches at UC Berkeley.
She’s married to the novelist Vikram Chandra, and they live with their daughters in Oakland.
More about Melanie:
Laura Mazer is the former executive editor of Hachette Book Group’s Seal Press, where she acquired adult nonfiction, such as the New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo and The Women Who Made New York by Julie Scelfo.
Before joining Seal, Laura was the managing editor of Counterpoint and executive editor of the imprint Soft Skull Press, where she acquired literary fiction and creative nonfiction. In the 1990s, she was the managing editor of Creators Syndicate, the international agency that represents some of the most widely published opinion writers around the globe, including Arianna Huffington and Hillary Clinton.
Laura lives in Oakland with her family.