Saturday, June 28, 2008

Desire Editor Pitch Challenge

I snipped this from Harlequin.com. For those of you who are targeting Harliquin/Desire, this is a wonderful opportunity to get your foot in the door. Good Luck! We're at it again! And this time, we've got another of your favorite lines for you to send your sassy, steamy entries to! Desire is looking for YOUR manuscript and Editor Diana Ventimiglia will be on hand to take your pitch! To enter, send a 1 to 2 line logline of your manuscript to Hosty Rae by June 30th. Five entries will be chosen by Diana and those will be announced July 3rd. Pitches will happen July 15th, at 10 am EST. But read the rules below to ensure your entry can be accepted. • You MUST be able to enter and post inside the eHarlequin.com chat room. If you are unable to use the chat room and your submission is chosen, we will be unable to offer you another venue option and it will be unfair to an entrant who is able. • You MUST have a completed manuscript that is targeted to Desire. Editors have the option to request partials or fulls but aren't accepting across the board. • You MUST be available at the given chat time. As stated above, we will be unable to offer another venue or time option. • Please include your member name, your full name along with your submission. Logline Specifications Challenge Specifics: This challenge is 1 or 2 lines (as written by the author, please gramatically ensure the sentences do not run-on in order to fit more in.). This should not look like a large paragraph. Challenge Description: A logline is a 1 or 2 line description of your ENTIRE ms, primarily what marketing hooks each ms might have (ie: Beauty & The Boss, Cowboy Lover, Pregnant Bride) but it's more than that. You will need to lay out the hooks, the conflicts, the characters and the plot premise concisely. In a query, it would go at the top of the letter, for a pitch, it might be all you use, and you have a better chance of getting editorial attention if you know this skill well because they now have a speedy way of discerning what you're trying to do in the story. Also loglines help keep the query pages short and you can be more expanisive in the synop. (I've also found that if you put it all into those two lines, you now have a small thesis statement from which to build the synop itself.) EX When pregnant Lindsay Lawson is left at the altar, no one is more suprised than Hank Handler, the man she works for, that he steps in as the role of the groom. But is the handsome, quiet rancher there to help her save face...or does it have something to do with the long-standing rivalry between their families?

No comments: