Tag: pitchapalooza

Body Parts by Jessica Hoefer

People would kill for her body. At least that’s what her trainers told her. But what 16-year-old Tabitha doesn’t realize is that’s exactly what they plan to do.

For the last decade, Tabitha has been part of an elite foster program molding kids into the epitome of health. She doesn’t know the island community outside her training facility is full of scientists who create drugs that can grow hair, erase wrinkles and give people superhuman strength. While citizens line up for pills, Tabitha waits for the day when she’ll be matched with a family longing for a disciplined, healthy teenage girl. But when she’s finally paired, instead of being taken to a loving home, she wakes up immobile on a hospital bed.

Moments before she’s sliced open for body parts, Tabitha’s rescued by a group of renegade teenagers and learns the real reason she’s been kept in perfect health. PharmWorld, the drug company that owns the foster home, is using her as a replacement factory for clients with failing organs. What’s worse, the only true family she’s ever known, her friends from the foster program, are also in danger.

Determined to save them, she joins the rescue team led by moody and mysterious Gavin Stiles. But when she finds out his dad is a scientist, she wonders what other secrets Gavin might be keeping—and if trusting him will put the entire team in jeopardy.

Complete at 93,000 words, Body Parts would appeal to readers of Neal Shusterman’s Unwind series.

The Book Doctors:

This is a very cool story.  It is familiar, yet it’s unique, and again, this is what publishers, agents and readers are looking for. The double meaning in the first sentence is terrific.  It gives us great confidence that you know how to turn a phrase. Again, rather than just telling us she has a body people would kill for, We’d like some description as well.  We would also like to know if there’s any romance between the heroine and this moody and mysterious young man.  If there is, it sure would help.  The end is almost there, but instead of her team being put in jeopardy, we’d like you to tell us what the worst-case scenario might be.  In graphic and visual terms.  I don’t get enough sense of the environment, the place, the setting of your book.  But overall a very nice pitch.

Spy Act by Keri Culver

MI6 operative Nathalie Qadir has the head of a terrorist financing organisation in her sights. But she’s bound and shackled on a cargo plane somewhere over eastern Turkey, and mocking her captors hasn’t gotten her anywhere.

After indulging briefly in self-pity and desolation (of the “Oh heavens, I’m going to die” variety), she hears an adamant voice in her head. This isn’t over, the voice says. You’ll survive, all right, and this time you’ll stop the organisation for good.

She doesn’t know yet that her boss at MI6 has set up an ambush at the landing point, ready to steal the plane’s cargo and kill everyone inside – including her. But it’s better she doesn’t know. If she did, she would certainly leave the Service.

And what then? Go back to styling hair and acting in community theatre? That Nathalie died eight years ago, when she unwittingly aided a group of young Arab men (“my boys,” she had called them) in their three-pronged suicide attack on her native London. The little voice that had saved her then was just as insistent today: quit whinging, find a way out, and, for God’s sake, stop the next attack.

The little voice will have to get her through that ambush, too.

Spy Act is complete at 78,000 words. Fans of spy classics like 007 or Le Carré will barely recognise Nathalie’s 21^st-century espionage, unless they can imagine Smiley crossed with one of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels.

The Book Doctors:

This is a really fun idea for a book and you clearly know the genre.  We like your character by the end of the first paragraph and that’s really hard to do. But the pitch feels a little flat to us.  It reads a bit like a book report.  Your first sentence should be super exciting, but we don’t feel any real danger there.  Like you’re describing action instead of showing it, and putting us in the middle of it.  We don’t get a full enough sense of what the plot is and the twists contained therein.  So the story feels a bit thin. You’re on the right track with your comparable titles, but Janet Evanovitch, James Bond and Le Carre are so giant that they can do more harm than good. It would be better if you dug down further into spy category to trot out how very much about the category you know. This kind of knowledge impresses agents and publishers and gives them the confidence that you know where your book fits on the shelf.

The Law Around These Parts by August Samuel Evrard

There is a planet out there that nobody wants to own. It’s been conquered, terraformed, deterraformed, exodused, colonized, armageddoned, recolonized, reterraformed, invaded again, turned into a prison, liberated, invaded again, become a drug factory, become a refugee camp, invaded again, and finally given up on. Oxygen’s not that valuable. This planet has a galactic registration, but everyone just calls it the Hole: home to drug kingpins, terrorists, mad scientists, corporate lenders, warmongers, weapons manufactors, and far, far too many refugees. Paid gangs police apocalyptic city streets while interstellar mercenaries wage politely secret wars and government agents help move the drugs that everyone wants, but won’t admit to using. Many have tried to own the land, to send their own police, even to turn the surface to black glass. Each has failed.

Harima Martina Lunch is a Detroit cop with a past. She’s been fired, rehired, shot, stabbed, broken, rebuilt, blown up, fired, rehired, sentenced to death, pardoned, fired, rehired, celebrated as a hero, burned, blown up again, and convicted of most crimes on the book. (But those last ones were all when she was a minor. That record’s sealed.) It’s not until she plays a crooked politician at his own game that she loses, and bad.

You can probably begin to guess where this is going.

One woman is sent to plant the flag, and make sure it stays waving. If it stays for ten years, she’s free to go.

Sheriff Lunch is:

The Law Around These Parts.

If I Dare by Bárbara Thomé

It’s Prudence Crawford’s sixteenth birthday, but instead of having a party, she gets to meet a creepy guy named Jeffrey Han, to help organize a new deal for her father – crime boss Lionel “The Enforcer” Crawford.

Prudence can’t stomach being a part of the family’s business, but she loves her father, and disobeying him isn’t something she dares to do. That is, until she inadvertently falls in love with Logan, the mysterious boy behind intense blue eyes who gives her the birthday celebration she has never had. Prudence has a strange connection with Logan, and by the time she finds out Logan is the heir of the Montgomery family, it’s too late, and she can’t seem to stay away from him.

The Montgomerys are one of the five families which, along with the Crawfords, split San Francisco among themselves, forming the Crime Cartel. Except the Montgomerys and the Crawfords are sworn enemies, and the peace agreement that has prevented war amid the families may easily be breached.

Now Prudence has to choose between true love and family, a choice made more dangerous by the involvement of members of the organized crime, her father’s pressing new deal and her continuous meetings with Jeffrey Han. When every person around you is ready to fight and carries a gun, it’s hard to know who to trust. Prudence must figure that out, and fast, before the lives of everyone she cares about are at risk.

In Prudence’s story, Romeo and Juliet meets The Godfather.

The Book Doctors:

We love the idea of this book–the starcrossed lovers of Romeo and Juliet and the organized crime of the Godfather.  Fabulous mix! But we don’t quite get a sense of your voice in this pitch.  It all feels generic.  At the beginning of the pitch, you tell us our heroine is around some guy who’s creepy.  We don’t know what that means.  Show us with word pictures.  Dazzle me with your ability to put words together to show me a creepy guy in a way we’ve never seen before.  And try to avoid clichés like, “intense blue eyes”.  Again, this is your opportunity to dazzle us with what a brilliant writer you are.  In many cases, the pitch is the only piece of writing agents/editors will see because if they don’t like your pitch, they won’t ask for me.  Lastly, your stakes are really high, but there’s not enough detail at the end to give us a sense of just what kind of danger she’s in. Gives us some deets!

The Night Butterflies by Sara Litchfield

In a dark, poisonous, post-apocalyptic world, the surviving community of a university town in England is divided. The Men separate from society and make their home The Facility, where they develop medication to combat the radiation that would otherwise kill those left alive.

Ellie and Danny are products of Project Eden, an operation devised by Leader for the survival and betterment of the human race through engineering of the next generation, seeded in The Mothers without their consent.

Looked upon as a failed experiment, the first batch of mutated babies is burned. Ellie is confined to life in a bunker – the sole, secret survivor of the burning. The Batch-2 triplets that follow are perfectly formed but impossible to control. Danny is different from the rest. Seeking to learn why, he accidentally uncovers Ellie’s existence. When The Men come for Ellie’s Mother, her last act is to send the pair of ‘monsters’ into hiding.

But when the triplets develop disturbing abilities that sign their own death warrant and the cull begins, can Danny and Ellie remain on the run? Or will they be forced to turn back and fight the system that brought them into existence?

The Book Doctors: I just can’t tell you how many stories we get about “dark, poisonous, post-apocalyptic worlds”.  Those words have become clichés.  We’ve seen them so many times that you have to prove to us right from the beginning that yours is going to be different, unique, and shows things we’ve never seen before.  Much better to show  specific word images of what this world looks like.  Build this world for us.  This is all the more important because the marketplace is so saturated on this shelf right now. That said, we do like this idea of genetically engineered babies–Project Eden–that’s cool.  And the fact that the first batch of mutated babies is burned.  That’s really creepy in the best sense.  And that these triplets have some kind of abilities is very interesting, but you don’t give us some kind of clue as to what those abilities might be.  We can’t see it in our mind’s eye.  And we’re not quite sure who these heroes are that we’re rooting for.  You don’t give us enough of a glimpse into Danny and Ellie for us to fall in love with them.

A Tree of Pearls by Tiffany Vora 

More than 1000 years after Cleopatra, a ruthless Islamic queen fights to rule Egypt on her own terms … .

In 1249, the dying sultan entrusts his empire to his beautiful wife, Shajar al-Durr. Determined to protect her power and her life, Shajar conceals his death and draws three ferocious war leaders, all former slaves and foreigners like herself, into a deadly conspiracy against the head of a powerful, ancient Egyptian family. But when the sultan’s heir by another woman arrives to confront the Crusaders, Shajar discovers that she alone can safeguard Egypt against invasion and genocide.

Facing threats to her rule from all sides, the world’s only Sultana is torn between her dangerous passion for her husband’s dashing confidante and a political marriage with a rival that would cement her place in a man’s world. Worse, a terrifying enemy approaches from the east, leaving mountains of skulls in its wake. In the midst of a murderous intrigue stretching from the sands of the Silk Road to the blood-soaked banks of the Nile to the opulent palaces and perilous alleyways of medieval Cairo, Shajar longs to share her ambitions – and her heart. But who can she trust?

The Book Doctors:

This book has a lot on its mind that is of lots of interest.  We particularly like the themes of this book: femininity, motherhood and ambition in the last real-life queen of Egypt.  Anne Boleyn and One Thousand and One Nights.  We haven’t seen those ideas put together like this yet. There’s also a lot at stake, right from the beginning, in this book.  There’s a great love triangle.  But we would like more sense of your voice in this pitch.  For example, we don’t like the phrase “dashing confidante”.  That’s an example of where we believe the language settles for the ordinary instead of wowing us with how beautifully you can put together words.  You’re also taking us to an extraordinary world. Please show us more about this world. Instead of saying “opulent palaces” let us know what this opulence is made up of. Instead of “perilous alleyways” let us know what’s in these alleyways.

In A TREE OF PEARLS, Tiffany Vora explores femininity, motherhood, and ambition through the enthralling story of the last real-life queen of Egypt. Complete at 100,000 words, this work of historical fiction transports the world-shaking audacity of Anne Boleyn into the exotic splendor of “One Thousand and One Nights.”