Secret Materials- Haven and the Titans and how to find an agent (Patreon)

I didn't get a chance to do a proper tutorial this month because we've been working on this! Haven and the Titans, a middle grade graphic novel proposal! So Instead of the writing tutorial I'm gonna go over what you need to do to pitch to an agent and give you all some sneak peeks! 

So we originally pitched this story for a Graphix contest. The contest required 12 inked pages, a 600 word synopsis and an artist bio. It ended up not going through, but we still had a lot of material we could use so we decided we would pitch it again one day when we got the chance.

(A panel from the original pitch)

Well that chance came sooner than expected. In September, there was a twitter event called #PitMad and it's designed to help writers and agents find each other. Basically you type your pitch in a few exciting lines with maybe a few pictures, then add the #pitmad hashtag along with other hashtags that describe the kind of work you're pitching. Then you wait to see if an agent likes it, and that will give you permission to query them. Well we decided to go for it on a whim and made this tweet:

The event ended up being very successful for us and we got 20 likes from agents. After the event was over we went through the list and chose about 15 agents to query that we thought we might fit with. We spent the next few days writing query letters with our Graphix pitch attached.

The next few weeks was filled with a lot of rejection, and a few interested emails from agents. Out of the 15 we queried, 8 were not interested, 2 did not know how to edit graphic novels and 5 wanted to see the full manuscript. This was the part we weren't prepared for..

Normally a graphic novel pitch doesn't have a full script, and we had only written about 3 chapters worth. So the full manuscript request totally took us off guard. We told the interested agents that we didn't have a full script but if they would give us till the end of November, we would have it for the first book. After a month of intense brainstorming and writing, we sent it in, and the waiting began. Two months later, we got 3 offers of representation. 

So if you are interested in pitching a graphic novel to an agent, here are the things I would suggest having ready to go in a PDF.

🔸Sample pages. At least 3, we had 2 colored and 10 inked. 

🔸A synopsis. This should be exciting, easy to understand but not too long (ours is about 2 pages). It should also cover the story from beginning to end.

🔸A script for the first volume. Ours is about 40 pages. It doesn't need to be strictly formatted but it should have clear dialogue and describe the action and setting so it's easy to grasp.

This should give the agent enough info to know if they want to pick it up. 

Lastly, don't be discouraged! The road to success is paved with a heck of a lot of failure. Sure, you may get lucky but more than likely it will take a many tries to get your idea through the slush pile. Even if you have a agent there's no guarantee that the idea will get picked up by a publisher. And sometimes you have to try a different idea. But know that every time you try, you're gonna get better. And even if it seems like you failed there may be chance to use what you did later. 

We're happy we tried out the contest because it gave us a chance to flesh out this idea and actually make something we could show. Though it didn't go through the first time, because we tried we were ready for PitMad when it came around and it gave us a second chance.

Now we're moving toward the submission stage. We're finishing up the new pages, editing the synopsis and script and when our agent gives us the ok, it's off to the publishers to face another round of rejection and hopefully (crosses fingers) some interested editors. 

Now just for you guys, here's some screenshots of the finished colored pages~