MoodPitch: Spring 2023

MoodPitch held its 3rd event in April 2023. While participation across the board steps slightly back from its fall event, it still has sky-high growth year over year, and we continue to see amazing engagement from Agents.

Without further ado...let's step into the numbers.

Overall Results

Industry Stats

Right away, we see 79 Agents and 770 Agent likes. Compared to the last MoodPitch, these numbers are off slightly, but still far and above anything else (aside from DVPit events).

Looking at overall Industry participation (which includes Agents, Editors, and Publishers), the number of participants lags the November event slightly (129 to 143), but the total number of Industry likes is greater (1260 vs 1201). Breaking it down further, Publishers make the big difference here with 326 likes, which represents a growth of 34% over the November event.

Bottom Line: Agent participation continues to be strong for MoodPitch - over 60% of the likes from Industry participants were Agents. Also noteworthy, Publishers drove most of the Industry growth for the event.

Author Stats

For this event, 1572 authors participated. While this represents a decline from participants in November, it's still among the top 5 pitch events that I've processed. Most importantly, 354 Authors received likes from Agents!

MoodPitch continues to be an amazing event for authors to get Agent attention. Over 22% (almost 1 in 4) of the participants received a like from an Agent!

Pitch Stats

In terms of overall pitch count, the trend of slightly lower numbers continues, with almost 4300 pitches and 453 pitches getting agent likes. But more importantly, the percentage of pitches getting Agent likes was once again more than 10% (in fact, it was 10.59% which is exactly the same as the November event...spooky). In addition, ~16.5% of all pitches received likes from the industry, which is higher than the fall event.

On a percentage basis, MoodPitch continues to deliver high numbers, unmatched by any other general pitch event.

Event Growth

As we've discussed, the numbers have been slightly lower in the spring than in the fall event. This could be for several reasons - I won't try to speculate too much here - but I don't notice anything alarming in the numbers. I'll explain...

While the number of Industry Participants (including Agents) fell, the number of likes didn't fall as far. In fact, the Publisher activity grew so much that overall like counts grew for the Spring event!

While the number of Industry Participants fell (by 10%), Author participation fell more (15%), which (to me) is healthier. The last thing a pitch event wants is to be flush with authors but have no agents. That's not what happened here.

The biggest affirmation of this is seen in Pitch activity. Overall Pitch Count and Pitches with Agent Likes fell by the same amount (15%), while the number of Pitches with Industry Likes only fell by 7%.

Hashtag Stats

With PitchStats, when we break down Hashtags, we generally categorize event tags into one of three buckets - Age, Genre, and Diversity.

For each category, we have three sets of views - Event Summary, Agent Activity, and Industry Activity.

Age Hashtags

MoodPitch looks very typical for a general event. Adult has the most activity by a long shot, followed by YA. Far behind both of these, we have Middle Grade taking up the 3rd position on the podium.

While Adult and YA each have almost 60 participating Agents,  Adult has 50% more likes than YA - which makes sense since Adult had 50% more pitches than YA. This tells me that most Agents pursue both YA and Adult and tend to like them at similar rates.

Once again, PB and Children pitches struggle to find Industry Participants.

Sorting by '% Liked', we see that Adult tops the charts with Agents, almost tied with MG, both with almost 13%. Just under them, almost 12% of YA pitches received an Agent like.

New Adult performs decently at 8%, but anything younger than middle grade struggles.

Sorting by the last column, labeled 'Agent/Industry %', we see the Percentage of Industry likes that are Agent likes. I often include this metric because it helps us see what categories are in greater demand among Agents - perhaps helping us identify upcoming trends or areas where Agents are leading the industry.

Middle Grade is once again dominated by Agents, where they make up over 80% of the Industry likes. YA and Adult sit at 67% and 59% respectively, emphasizing that MoodPitch is a very Agent heavy event.

As usual, New Adult is less popular with Agents, sitting at 39%, meaning that most of their Industry likes come from Editors and Publishers.

Lastly, we take an overall look at Industry Activity. Most notably, in every category except Chapter Books and Picture Book, over 10% of the pitches receive a like from the Industry.

New Adult rises to the top, though it's virtually tied with Adult as 20% of their pitches receive an industry like - that's 1 in 5 pitches!

Genre Hashtags

Fantasy regularly dominates the field, and it's no exception here with over 1300 pitches, 800 pitches ahead of Romance in 2nd place (with 487 pitches). Also, with over 250 Agent likes, Fantasy receives almost a third of all Agent likes in the entire event.

As usual, it's a good idea to sort by Agent count ('Agents') and see what genres garner little to no agent interest. If you are pursuing the traditional industry, these may be genres to avoid.

When viewing Agent Activity, sorting by '% Liked', we can see which Genres experience the most demand from Agents. Surprisingly, two tags that I manually added (unofficial hashtags) rose to the top. I typically view these as anomalies, but HORROR and ROMCOM are interesting to see, since their official counterparts also did well.

Beyond those, Graphic Novels took the top spot, with 23% pitches receiving likes. Suspense, Supernatural, and Literary Horror follow in the 19% range.

In general, it looks like a mix of dark and romantic genres as the theme.

Looking at Industry Activity: Graphic Novel, Literary Horror, and Supernatural fall away, and Suspense is joined by True Crime and Novella in the top 3. All three genres had 30% of their pitches get industry likes.

Overall, it's a very similar trend here that we saw with Agents, with less specific sub-genres.

Diversity Hashtags

Diversity is an increasingly important growth area in the publishing world, and as Industry professionals intentionally seek out diverse viewpoints, these tags become a critical means of getting these stories in front of agents.

From a Pitch count perspective, LGBT is often a very popular tag, and it leads the way in this pitch event. Close behind it is the new, more generalized Marginalized Voices tag. OWN has historically been another common general tag in 3rd.

Notably, POC (Person of Color)  is in 4th with 199 pitches, but it attracted 44 agents - which is the most of any diversity tag.

As we dive into Agents and sort by '% Liked', Black Voices Matter takes the top spot with 30% of pitches getting agent likes. Latinx, POC, and Jewish Voices were all grouped in the 25% area. Lastly, IRMC came in 5th with 20% - which is notable since it doesn't always perform very well.

Across the board, pitches with an official diversity tag tend to perform better than pitches that don't. The only exceptions are Neurodiverse and Senior Writer (SW didn't get a single Agent like). DIS and MU barely beat the baseline themselves.

It's tough to see Diversity tags that don't get attention. It's a good reminder that there's always blind spots and opportunities to reassess and improve.

Lastly, as we sort by the last column (and ignore anomalies), we see that Agents are very often the ones leading the charge (industry speaking) into diversity, particularly with Muslim Voices, Immigrant, IRMC, POC and BVM.

Overall, at the Industry level, we see similar trends that we saw with Agents in particular. This makes sense when Agents made up a large chunk of the likes for these top tags.

The only caveats are Marginalized Voices (moving up two places) and Fat Positive (which surges forward) taking the 5th and 6th positions respectively. This marks a big increase for Fat Positive, which under-performed in November.

Neurodiverse and Muslim Voices are the two under-performers at the Industry level.

Conclusion

While MoodPitch took a small step back in participation (compared to the fall), it overall had another strong event for April 2023, putting up amazing numbers with Agents and other Industry professionals.

Personally, it's a lot of fun to feel this level of excitement and buzz around a general pitch event. I'm glad to see the writing community thrive.