Pitch Slam Submission Details!

T-minus four days and counting until Auditions open for Pitch Slam. Who else is excited! I seriously cannot wait to get this party started, but we need to share a few more details beforehand so everything can run as smoothly as possible.

This contest is for COMPLETED and POLISHED manuscripts, not novellas, not poetry, not screenplays, not short story collections, not collections of any of the aforementioned nots. Pitch Slam is open to all Adult, New Adult, Young Adult, and Middle Grade stories of all genres.

You’ll need a 35 word pitch and the first 250 words of your manuscript to enter. The 35 word pitch is a hard number, meaning 35 is the number of the words thou shalt pitch. Any previous number is acceptable. 36 is right out. Pleeeeease don’t make us give you the X over something like that.

For the first 250, don’t stop in the middle of a sentence, but here’s the thing about that. If you have 247, 248, 249 words and the sentence stops, end it there. Don’t go to 250 and then up to 260 or something cause the first word was the 250th.

A couple of reminders about the rounds:

Auditions open 4/20 at 12:00 am EST and will stay open for a full 24 hours. During this time you submit your 35 word pitch ONLY. Feedback* will be given.

Call Backs open 4/23 at 12:00 am EST and will stay open for 24 hours as well. During this time you submit your first 250 words ONLY. Feedback* will be give.

VEGAS! opens 4/26 at 12:00 am EST and, yup, will stay open for 24 hours. During this time, submit your revised pitch and first 250 TOGETHER. This is the pool managers will pull from.

Managers will make their picks and those will go up 4/29 for the Execs to make requests. For a more in depth look at the rounds, go here.

Okay guys, pay attention to this part. Just as agents have submission guidelines, so do we at R&R Management. Again, please don’t give us a silly reason to discount your entries, cause we wanna read all of the awesomeness!

The format for each round is the same. Every time you submit, the entry needs to be single spaced with one line between paragraphs and NO indentations. This goes for pitches and first 250.

I understand sometimes email clients screw stuff up, but a way to avoid this is DON’T copy and paste directly from your document into the email message. Instead, paste it into a new document and clear all of the formatting, then apply the contest requirements. It’ll seriously take two minutes, if that long, and save everyone–yourself included–a lot of headache in the long run.

This is what your entry should look like:

Name: Real name (Writing as such-and-such if you’re using a pen name)

Genre: This includes both age category and genre. Fiction is not a genre. YA/MG etc on its own is not a genre. Please pick ONE genre and possibly a sub-genre. Adult Paranormal Romance is a proper genre. YA Sci-Fi Horror is a proper genre. MG Magical Realism Paranormal Romance Horror is not a genre. An easy way to do this is ask yourself, if my book was in a store, what would the sign on the shelf say?

Title: Your story

Word Count: xx,000. Round to the nearest thousandth.

Song: This isn’t gonna influence anything. It’s more for fun, so don’t stress about it. Tell us what song best exemplifies your story!

Pitch and/or 250: For the first round it’ll be pitch only, second round first 250 only, third round both together with pitch followed by 250.

Please type Pitch Slam: TITLE into the subject line for each round.

And that’s it! Simple right? Oh, you probably need the email address you’ll be submitting to, that’s kinda important. ALL entries are to be sent, during the appropriate submission window, to pitchslamcontest (at) gmail (dot) com. For anyone who may have skipped everything else to get to the email address, please read the entire post for info on how to avoid the boot.

NOW that’s it. Any questions, concerns, hit us up in the comments. I hope you guys are pumped, cause I’m pumped! And I can’t wait to hang out on the #PitchSlam hashtag with you all during the week. We have lots of fun events planned for Twitter, check out the rounds postfor details on those shenanigans. Now, I have just one more question to ask…

Dooooooom is reeeeaaadyyyyyyy!

***Feedback provided will be general but still helpful. In other words, no line-edits.

READ THIS! – Anything sent before or after the entry windows of the second and third rounds will be discarded. Any entrant who fails to supply their work for said subsequent rounds will be disqualified from the contest as a whole, and no submissions will be accepted for ANY round unless the entrant participated in the previous ones. What this means is, in order to make it to VEGAS, an entrant needs to have participated in both the Audition and Call Backs rounds. No trying to squeeze an entry in at the last minute. Also, no switching up manuscripts in the middle of the game. You pick a story, that’s the one you carry through with.