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On his Substack, author-illustrator Cesar Lador shared how KidLitGN’s pitch event helped him find his agent and a publisher. And Cesar has offered to answer questions to anyone who would like to know how to better their chances of getting noticed in the upcoming pitch event (13 more days until the pitch window opens), which we will host on a thread on BlueSky today, or, you can also ask your questions in the comments section below. (BlueSky is quickly becoming a platform for authors and illustrators, so consider joining.) You can find KidLitGN on BlueSky at: https://bsky.app/profile/kidlitgn.bsky.social
A quote from Cesar’s article:
I pitched [The Fabulous Adventures of Pipo] at the KidLitGN pitch event in May 2021, alongside another more mature and darker comic story.
The middle grade story did not get any attention but the pitch for The Fabulous Adventures of Pipo got two messages from two different agents asking me to send them my pitch package for this story. And that was also the first time I googled pitch package, I did not realize that pitching a story was just the first step of a longer process. I quickly put a rough pitch package together and was able to send it to the interested agents within a month.
A few weeks later, I met one of these agents on zoom and they decided to represent me. Me, this engineer from New Zealand represented by an agent in New York…that felt surreal. She tried to sell The Fabulous Adventures of Pipo to numerous publishers with no success. But I kept working on my craft and most of all, I kept pitching work and submitting project for awards. In October 2022, I participated in another KidLitGN pitch event and got interest from Boom Studios, which was pretty amazing.
Thank you, Cesar, for sharing your success story. Please feel free to ask Cesar any questions you might have about pitching on our event here or on our corresponding thread on BlueSky.
Find Cesar’s latest graphic novels: Miles and Jones: The Anaconda Attack and Miles and Jones: The Blizzard of Blobs
I am so chuffed for Cesar and his success! KidlitGN, you rock!
Thank you Teresa, and yes, KidLit GN rocks!!