I've seen pitch sessions with editors and agents at other conferences (notably mystery conferences). For people who are isolated from the business of publishing and editing, a short meeting with an editor or agent can provide some useful handholding to help correct a wannabe author's errors and invalid assumptions about writing and selling fiction. Some people benefit from having their questions about "how do I do this?" and "who do I talk to?" For people who know how to write, but not how to sell, these sessions can be helpful.
This isn't much of an issue in SF, because science fiction conventions are so widespread and provide so much information and business contacts that a dedicated pitch session would for most people be redundant and not an effective use of people's time.
I have heard this explained to me by editors that they actually want to find new authors worth publishing, and the pitch sessions are a way of finding authors who are clueless about the business of publishing. While the number of immediately publishable authors may be quite small, the number of eventually-publishable authors is high enough to justify the editors' time and effort, or so I was told. It does depend greatly on the credibility of the people involved.
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| 2007 | 3 |
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