Stats on Pitch Wars Submissions & Requests

I wanted to do a quick post on the stats for the entries I received in Pitch Wars (an online writing contest, for those curious minds who haven’t heard of it). I’ll touch on genre breakdowns, what genres I am requesting, and the quality of queries I saw.

I’m not going to post my overall submission numbers, because as it turns out, Pitch Wars mentors are just as human (and therefore susceptible to the agonies and ecstasies of comparison) as the mentees are. What I will say is that if you subbed to me, barring the possibility of a battle for my final entry, you have a 1.7% chance of becoming my mentee.

Which sounds terrible, unless you then realize that when you query an agent, you have around a .03% chance of signing with them. And if you get chosen for Pitch Wars, your chances of signing with an agent go up significantly. Not to mention many of the people who subbed to me will receive feedback that might help them get better results in their next round of queries. I could go on, but I think we all know that even if you don’t get picked, entering Pitch Wars is ALWAYS a positive choice.

Genre Breakdown:

For those New Adult entries, here are how the genres broke down:

Quality of Queries:

I wanted to say something about this (and I’ll be doing a more informational blog on qualitative Pitch Wars trends later) because it um, sort of blew my mind. I had to stop after 15 entries and RE-CALIBRATE my rating scale because Pitch Wars subs were so much higher quality than I see in the general population. I am not kidding. This might lead you to think I’m an easy grader, but if you’ve ever had a query critique from me, you know that’s not the case. Even after the recalibration, here are the ratings for queries, and the percentage of queries that achieved that rating.

As you can see: this is not a bell curve, people! The vast majority of queries were in the 4-5 bracket. This tells me that Pitch Wars participants are, by definition, way ahead of the curve when it comes to writing queries.

Requests:

Now, before I get into my Potential Requests pile, remember that THIS MAY NOT BE ALL THE REQUESTS I MAKE! If the partials I request don’t stand up, I’ll request more. If I go back through the entries and find something else to love, I’ll request more. I might also request less, because right now my to-be-requested list is at 14, and I normally request 50 pages. Do that math and weep. Yeah. I don’t have that kind of time, and I’ll have to read a lot of fulls to make my final choice as well. Not really sure what to do about this, but as you saw above, Pitch Wars submission quality was HIGH, so I’m going to have to think of something to narrow it down.

Also, if you read my wishlist, this graph will be no surprise, as the areas I tend to be most interested in were clearly highlighted in my wishlist. Trust me, people, I have a LOT of entries in my “Good writing, not for me” folder.

That’s it for now, because as you can see, I have a lot of reading ahead of me and some requests to send. But follow this blog, because I’m going to be doing another post or two on trends I saw in PitchWars. I will certainly include information that will save you rejections in the future, and these blogs might help you decide what needs to go on your next revision to-do list.