sorry, I'm not going now but good luck and would love to hear how it goes

That's a shame. And thank you for telling everyone about it.

Yes, how did it go, Sharley and Debac?

It was okay and it was good of Curtis Brown and Conville & Walsh to put on this event (and the staff at Foyles were very helpful). However, it is as Saturday said, something that isn't worth going out of your way for.

I was allocated an agent (you just get allocated the next agent in line) who didn't say anything about my first page. Not one comment.

He did talk about my pitch though, which was useful (but I found more use in the one throwaway remark someone said later). However, it was only when I got back and looked him up I found that he reads anything but genre fiction. So it must be tough for the agents who are allocated authors whose writing is not to their taste.

My mouth-open moment was when another agent went out of his way to walk round me in his rush to shake hands with a young writer who he'd taken a shine to at a group session (he should have shaken all our hands sort-of thing). That made me feel very old indeed.

I went and enjoyed it, but I guess my expectations were pretty low, given that it was free and I live in London so didn't have a long journey.

I've been feeling despondent about novel 1 and have just started novel 2, along with a CW MA. So pitching novel 1 to Ms Conville, chatting with her, and getting a ms. request (!) (does anyone know if this is common or not?) gave me a real boost. I'm encouraged now to push through my rewrite and submit. (Not that I expect her to bite ultimately, since no one else has, but it was great to get a bit of encouragement.)

There was nothing to do in between the 20 min. or so of one-to-one and round-table discussion (mine was in the morning) and the panel in the afternoon (like others, I'd heard most of what they said before, but there was a chance to ask questions). Still, it might be worth travelling for if you didn't have other chances for this kind of contact with the industry. It can be so illuminating to hear the pros talk, instead of just reading stuff online, and it's a good reality check in various ways (for one thing, you get to see that they're human).

Hi

I'm glad you enjoyed it. I am sure most of the attendees did so too.

I wondered what the point of the pitch sessions were and realised that, for the majority, it was about the agents giving information and advice on the pitches rather than a filtering/networking system (as with the one-to-ones at conferences). Most people I know were then asked to go ahead and submit - one of them without the agent reading the person's first page!

However, I note your query about whether others were asked to do so and, although the answer is yes, that doesn't mean that yours wasn't really good. If the agent you saw specifically said to send the ms in because she liked it, then that's great and a real boost for you. Well done.

I think the time has come for me to accept I've attended too many conferences/panel sessions and, after a while, they are bound to end up repeating information I've already heard.

It's great you found it so useful and I can see it was definitely worth attending for someone who lives in London. However, I wonder if the person who travelled from Sweden found it quite so worthwhile.

Good luck with the CW MA. That sounds fantastic.




Edited by Sharley at 16:24:00 on 17 November 2013