MoodPitch: Fall 2022
The New Monarch of Pitch Events?
Ever since PitMad retired, the world of pitch events has felt...fragmented. Yes, many other events existed during PitMad's tenure, but PitMad was always the big one.
Of the remaining pitch events, DVPit is the biggest - always pulling in the most agents and attracting lots of attention. This is fantastic for any author that qualifies for the event, but general audience pitch events haven't had a clear leader.
Until now.
MoodPitch held it's sophomore event in the Fall of 2022, and while the Spring event was impressive, growth in the Fall was tremendous, possibly establishing it as the go-to event for both authors and agents.
Why do I say that? I'll let the numbers speak for themselves.
Overall Results
Industry Stats
Right away, we see 85 Agents and 787 Agent likes. Scanning other events, only DVPit surpasses it. Nothing else comes close until we scroll back to PitMad.
As we look at Industry participation, we see the Editor and Publisher likes are also high. The numbers aren't quite as staggering, but in my humble opinion, that's not a problem. As a pitch event, when considering Industry participation, it's best to be Agent heavy.
Where the Agents go, others will follow.
Author Stats
Over 1800 authors participated, which puts it among the top 5 pitch events that I've processed. Beyond that, 431 Authors received likes from Agents!
That is a crazy high number on it's own, but over 23% of Authors received likes, which is better than every other pitch event outside of DVPit - making MoodPitch the single best general event for Authors.
Pitch Stats
In terms of overall pitch count, this MoodPitch event had just over 5,000 pitches, which is a solid number, but not record breaking. However, the pitch count is meaningless if you don't have Industry professionals liking those pitches. Over 15% of the Pitches received Industry likes, and over 10% received Agent Likes!
Outside of DVPit, no other event has seen >10% of it's pitches get likes from Agents...and MoodPitch has done it twice!
Event Growth
MoodPitch had a strong start with their opening event in April, and they experienced phenomenal growth with their Fall event. I've captured several of the key metrics below.
Overall Industry participation grew by >60%, but most notably, the count of participating Agents grew by 85%...and the Agent like count nearly doubled!
The number of Authors grew by 57%, but even more impressively, it was outpaced by the number of Author's receiving Agent likes, which swelled by 61%.
Pitch count grew by 76% and the number of pitches receiving Agent likes grew by 62%!
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, followed by YA. Far behind both of these, we have Middle Grade taking up the 3rd position on the podium.
What's most interesting is that both Adult and YA have the same number of Agents, though Adult squeaks out slightly more Agent likes.
Sorting by '% Liked', we see that YA tops the charts with Agents - 14% of YA pitches received an Agent like. Adult and MG follow with 12.5% and ~11% respectively.
New Adult typically under-performs with Agents, but in MoodPitch, it performs decently at 8%.
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.
Picture Book and Middle Grade are leading the charge, where Agents make up over 80% of their Industry likes. While MG is regularly an Agent favorite, PB is a bit of an anomaly here - something to watch.
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.
Once again New Adult seems to garner more interest from the Industry outside of Agents, with 14% of the pitches receiving Industry likes, virtually tied with MG in 3rd place.
Genre Hashtags
In terms of pure pitch count, nothing ever contends with Fantasy. With over 1400 pitches, it has almost 1000 more pitches than Romance in 2nd place! That said, it's notably that while Fantasy has over 3x the pitch count, it only attracts about 20% more Agents than Romance, showing that while it's a popular genre to write and pitch in, it's very crowded.
As usual, it's probably 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.
Looking at '% Liked', Gothic Fiction proved to be the most popular with Agents, where 25% of pitches received Agent likes. [It also had a high ratio of Agents per liked pitch (bested only by Magical Realism).]
Four more genres had Agents liking more than 18% of the pitches:
- Romantic Comedy
- Fairy Tale Retelling
- Horror
- Romance
Looking at Industry Activity, we notice genres like Fairy Tales dropping and Westerns and Sci-fi rising.
We also see that Romance performs well across the board, with many sub-genres in the top 10.
It's always fun to see what does well with independent publishers over traditional publishing.
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, but it lags in 3rd with almost half the pitches of MV.
From an Agent perspective, POC (Person of Color) rises to 3rd. This tag is often a favorite and performs well again here.
As we dive into Agents and sort by '% Liked', we see that both Muslim Voices and Black Voices Matter do very well, with over 40% of the pitches getting an Agent like. Additionally, POC has 30%, and Latinx Voices has 27%.
One critical note: unofficial diversity tags (like LGBTQ and LATINX) are towards the bottom. It's important that you use the official tags if you wish to have Agents see your pitch!
Across the board, pitches with an official diversity tag perform better than pitches that don't. The only exception is the new Senior Writer tag. Pitches with that tag are among the worst performers. Maybe it's the tag, maybe it's that the publishing market (and particularly the twitter crowd) is younger, but hopefully it will perform better with time.
Lastly, as we sort by the last column (and ignore anomalies), we see that Agents are more likely to pursue ESL, TV, BVM and MU tags, making up more than 90% of all Industry likes against those pitches.
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.
At the bottom of the list, Immigrant joins Senior Writer as under-performers, and Fat Positive is right at the break even point. Considering how well ethnic related diversity tags perform, Immigrant could be an oversight, but authors targeting that hashtag may look to better performing tags if they qualify.
Conclusion
MoodPitch had a wildly successful event last fall and is well-primed to have yet another amazing event this spring. It will be exciting to see if the growth trends continue. If so, MoodPitch very well could become the biggest event for writers.