Yesterday I was in Inverness, live pitching my novel Sackcloth on Skin to a panel of publishers in front of an audience. It was an event staged as part of #XpoNorth, Scotland’s leading creative industries festival, which is held over two days in Eden Court Theatre. It’s a vibrant mix of music, film, digital technologies, publishing, seminars and trade stands (including Moniack Mhor). The atmosphere was fantastic, with live music and interviews taking place wherever you turned.

The Writers’ Pitch panel was chaired by agent Jenny Brown, and included representatives from Sandstone Press, Hodder / Sceptre, Canongate and Birlinn. What a line up! Around 120 writers had applied to pitch their work to the panel, and 18 of us had been selected, divided equally between non-fiction, literary fiction and commercial fiction. We sat in the room glancing at one another nervously, working out who else was pitching, and encouraging one another. There were two really interesting discussions between the panel members about trends in non-fiction and fiction publishing. Each writer then had five minutes to pitch their work, and then received feedback based on both the pitch and their original submission. It was a real privilege to listen to some of these fantastic ideas, and there are a few books out there I look forward to reading in the future!

So what about my own first experience of pitching?

It was a huge encouragement to have been selected in the first place alongside some seriously talented writers.  Since the start of the year I have sent off my synopsis and extract of my manuscript to a number of agents with very little response, so I’m so grateful for the opportunity to get some first-hand professional feedback. Of course it was terrifying, but I was determined to enjoy the experience and to try not to second guess the outcome. I was happy with the way the pitch went. The panel members were positive about the stories, characters and themes in my book, which was really encouraging. Some people from the audience later spoke to me too and said how much they’d enjoyed it.

I did receive one piece of feedback consistently from the different panel members which was to do with the complexity of the structure of the novel. It’s definitely a fair point, and something I think I can address. If anything came through to me yesterday it was how quickly the focus moves from writing a book – alone, in a wee bubble – to working out how to sell the book. While keeping its integrity, it’s important to work out if there are aspects which will get in the way firstly of me trying to ‘sell’ the book to an agent or publisher, and then their challenge to sell it to their colleagues, booksellers, and ultimately the public.

Of course it would be easy to be discouraged because I didn’t walk away from XpoNorth with quite the result I might have wanted, but this whole process was never going to be easy! So it’s back to the keyboard, which is the aspect I love so I’m happy enough with that for now. I’ll then have to see whether I believe the new structure is an improvement, and try sending it out once more.

Walking through Inverness to do my pitch yesterday morning, I came across this paving stone. Indeed.