For Wilshire Baptist Church
You stand in a hallway with a dozen nervous, fidgety people, some murmuring to themselves, others breathing hard, wiping their foreheads. And then a door opens and you all walk in and go to separate tables and sit down across from a man or woman you’ve never met before. A bell rings and you have precisely 12 minutes to describe your idea and maybe generate enough interest to be asked a few questions. But the goal – the big prize – is for that stranger to say “yes” and hand you their business card before the bell rings again and it’s time to leave and make room for another dozen people.
That is how it goes at a “pitch session” at a writers conference where aspiring authors get a face-to-face meeting with a literary agent. The “yes” they are working for is not, “Yes, I will represent you to publishers and I’ll work to get your book published.” Rather, it is, “Yes, send me a chapter or two or three and I will look at it. If I like it I might ask to see more. And if I like more, we’ll see if a publisher likes it. But let’s be honest: I probably will not like it, not because it is not good, but because it won’t sell.”
I went to one of these pitch sessions on Saturday and got the “yes.” But please, no congratulations, because I did it two years ago and got the “yes” and followed through as instructed and never heard from that agent again. And there have been plenty of unsolicited email pitches sent over the months in between with answers of “no” or more often just silence.
But please, no sympathy either, because I know there are plenty of you who walk into rooms and make pitches every day and never hear “yes” or at least a word of appreciation. And for many of you the stakes are so much higher than getting some words printed on the pages of a book.
Maybe the room you walk into is a hospital room with a hurting patient, or a classroom full of squirming children. Or an interview room with stern interrogators, or an audition hall with critics wielding poison pens. Or a corporate board room full of skeptical and jaded investors, or a church sanctuary dotted with yawning congregants. And yet you walk into that room and push aside past memories of indifference, disinterest, distraction or flat out rejection and you give it everything you have because it is who you are. You cannot not do it.
My grandfather used to ask what I was working on and I’d tell him and he’d raise his hands in a victory clasp and say, “Keep pitching.” He wasn’t talking baseball because that wasn’t his sport. He was a newspaper advertising salesman who later sold houses and insurance and he knew all about pitching an idea and getting rejected. But he also knew that you had to keep pitching if you were ever going to close a deal.
So, I’m going to keep pitching and you should too.