Saturday, June 17
Perfect Pitch
First-of-a-Kind Event at the California Writers Club, Sacramento
Your Live Pitch in Front of Literary Agents
Practice Your Pitch and Deliver it in Real Time
Get open feedback
Learn from watching live pitches and hearing input from agents
Practice regardless of where you are in the development of your book
Participate no matter what your genre
Even short story ideas benefit from pitch practice
Pitch in Front of Distinguished Agents
Jennifer Chen Tran, Fuse Literary Agency
Jennifer March Soloway, Andrea Brown Literary Agencies
Details
Meeting Time: 11 AM–1:00 PM (Early-Bird Tip: 10:15; guests welcome)
Cost: $15 members/$20 guests (includes lunch)
Meeting Location: Cattlemens Restaurant
12409 Folsom Blvd, Rancho Cordova
About Our Distinguished Agents
JENNIFER MARCH SOLOWAY is an associate agent with the Andrea Brown Literary Agency. She represents authors and illustrators of picture book, middle grade, and young adult stories, as well as some adult fiction.
For picture books, she is drawn to a wide range of stories from silly to sweet, but she always appreciates a strong dose of humor and some kind of surprise at the end. When it comes to middle grade, she likes all kinds of genres, including adventures, mysteries, spooky-but-not-too-scary ghost stories, humor, realistic contemporary and fantasy.
Young adult is Jennifer’s sweet spot. She is a suspense junkie. She adores action-packed thrillers, full of unexpected twists. Throw in a dash of romance, and she’s hooked! She’s a sucker for conspiracy plots where anyone might be a double agent, even the kid next door. She is a huge fan of psychological horror that blurs the lines between the real and the imagined. But as much as she loves a good thriller, she finds her favorite novels are literary stories about ordinary teens, especially those focused on family, relationships, sexuality, mental illness, or addiction. In such stories, she is particularly drawn to a close, confiding first-person narrative. But regardless of genre, she is actively seeking fresh new voices and perspectives underrepresented in literature.
Although she specializes in children’s literature, Jennifer also represents adult fiction, both literary and commercial, particularly crime, suspense and horror projects. Prior to joining ABLA, Jennifer worked in marketing and public relations in a variety of industries, including financial services, health care, and toys. She has an MFA in English and Creative Writing from Mills College, and was a fellow at the San Francisco Writer’s Grotto in 2012. Jennifer is actively building her client list.
JENNIFER CHEN TRAN is an Associate Agent at Fuse Literary acquiring both fiction and non-fiction. She is a lifelong reader, New York native, and experienced member of the publishing industry. Prior to joining Fuse Literary, Jennifer was principal and owner of Penumbra Literary LLC, and served as Of Counsel at The New Press. She has also interned at Zachary Shuster Harmsworth literary agency, was an editorial and publicity intern at Hunter House Publishers and an editorial intern at Terrain Magazine.
Jennifer obtained her Juris Doctor from Northeastern School of Law in Boston, MA, and a Bachelors of Arts in English Literature from Washington University in St. Louis, with a minor in Legal Studies. Originally a visual arts major turned English major, Jennifer appreciates creativity in all its incarnations. She was also Managing Editor of Student Life, Washington University’s Independent Student Paper.
With a legal background, Jennifer understands the importance of negotiation when securing and retaining author rights. She counsels each client on building or expanding her platform, improving on craft, and works collaboratively with her clients to obtain the best deal for each writer’s creative investment. She believes in building fulfilling and life-long writing careers and is honored to work with her client-writers.
Luncheon Information
- Monthly Luncheons are open to the public
- Cost is $15 for members, $20 for nonmembers
- The meeting fee includes speaker, lunch and beverage
- Cattlemens Restaurant, 12409 Folsom Blvd., Rancho Cordova, CA
The restaurant is located just east of Hazel Ave. at the northeast end of the Nimbus Winery complex along Highway 50. Cattlemens offers CWC a spacious meeting room with free WiFi, quality AV equipment, free off street parking and excellent food.
Victoria is the author of the novel The Bone Weaver and editor of six anthologies: He Said What?, The Other Woman, For Keeps, The Face in the Mirror, Exit Laughing, and FAITH. Her play, The Other Woman, based on her first anthology, was featured across the United States in 2015, with simultaneous readings at more than twenty theater venues. Her play Entangled, an adaptation of the memoir Entangled: A Chronicle of Late Love, was in development at Z Space in San Francisco. Victoria’s first screenplay, MAIDSTONE, is now with director Peter Werner. Her screenplay ROZZY is based on Caroline Leavitt’s novel Meeting Rozzy Halfway. Victoria is story developer and writer of Where Birds Never Sang: The Story of Ravensbruck and Sachsenhausen Concentration Camps, aired nationwide by PBS. She teaches Personal Essay in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program, is an instructor at writers’ conferences in the US, Canada, Mexico, and Europe, and teaches workshops, often with mystery writer Anne Perry and novelist/memoirist Barbara Abercrombie. Victoria is a 2010 San Francisco Library Laureate.
Though Shelley has taught college composition for twenty-eight years, mostly at Sacramento State University, she is four-years-new to fiction. Her stories appear in Eunoia Review, Mamalode, Soundings Review, Brevity and Cleaver. She has brought pieces of her novel-in-progress to Bread Loaf, Napa, and Squaw Valley writing workshops, where smart people have tried to teach her how to make a book. She has attended a variety of other residential programs, including the San Francisco Writing Conference, Book Passage Mystery Writing Conference and the SCBWI conference. Shelley will describe the good and bad of residential writing workshops and conferences. Expect to learn about her experience at:
Brooke Warner will take you on a deep dive into the fastest-growing genre that people love to hate. What is it about memoir that’s drawing more and more writers to the genre? And why is it so controversial? We’ll take a look at what memoir actually is, how to do it well, and why it matters so much, despite—and in spite of—the critics. This discussion will touch upon both craft and process and will unpack why Brooke and so many others know memoir to be a truly magical—albeit it challenging—genre for writers.