Firefly photo credit: Kartheek Hegde
How a Virtual Pitch Fest Led to a Literary Agent
Courtney Zeni is a scientist by day and a fiction writer by night—or somewhere in between, if you ask her. She has built her writing life around the Project Write Now and book inc communities, working through the Book Revision Lab and Book Submission Bootcamp while also studying craft at The Highlights Foundation. Along the way, she finished a novel and a children’s book.
Then, earlier this year, she landed a literary agent for her novel LIMINAL through a Virtual Pitch Fest—a format she’d never heard of before and now is a huge fan. She writes about her journey as a debut author on her Substack, “Courtney Zeni Writes,” where she goes deep on the craft, the business, and the beautiful chaos of writing while living a full life. We asked her to tell us how it all happened.
For readers who don’t know you, tell us a little about yourself and your writing. What drew you to fiction and to this particular story?
COURTNEY: I’ve always been someone who has loved both science and art, and have spent my life trying to find ways to pursue both (and still have fun while doing it). The most exciting concept to me is the overlap between art and science, often a space where the “in betweens” live. I love to examine the infinite gray space between black and white.
I’m a scientist by training and have my PhD in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. I work at a pharmaceutical company where my role is to communicate highly complex scientific concepts to different audiences. I do a ton of non-fiction writing for work, but it was only recently that I started focusing on fiction and writing down the stories that have been brewing in my brain for years.
Writing LIMINAL has been deeply personal for me. The main character’s journey is one of reckoning with those “in betweens,” not only acknowledging the discomfort but also the potential for transformation in those areas. After the loss of loved ones and my own near-death experience, I started asking questions about life and death that I felt could not be answered, which, as a scientist, really unsettled me. Writing about this gray area has helped me process loss and convince myself that our loved ones live on through legacy, and that not everything can be explained by science, or at least by what we know today.
You found your agent through something called a Virtual Pitch Fest, which most writers haven’t heard of. Can you explain what it is and how you stumbled onto it?
COURTNEY: I heard about the Virtual Pitch Fest through a comment on a Slack message board where friends from past Project Write Now classes posted upcoming events. What attracted me even more to this Virtual Pitch Fest was that it was born in Philadelphia—a city I lived in and loved for nearly 10 years. I got excited right away about the prospect of landing an agent who lived and worked in my old hood.
I perused the Virtual Pitch Fest website and found three agents who were available and aligned with my interests. I scheduled the three meetings as quickly as I could to lock them in and not lose the opportunity. I was to be traveling for a conference the weekend of the event, so I would take the calls in the privacy of my hotel room between meetings and sessions.
How did you prepare? You mention a “one-sheet.” Can you explain what that is and why it matters?
COURTNEY: I did everything I could to prepare, including making bios for each agent and printing them out to have handy during the call. I also studied the guidance given on the Pitch Fest Website and came across the concept of the “one-sheet,” which I had not heard of before that day.
The one-sheet is designed to be a quick overall summary that you can review with potential agents on the call. Think of it as a combination of a query letter and your synopsis boiled down into a paragraph each. After the call, you can send the agent the one-sheet along with any other materials they request. To prepare the one page, I consulted many articles, which all seemed to have the same basic steps:
- Write a one-page synopsis of your work. If it does not fit on one page, rewrite it again and again until it does.
- Take that one-page synopsis and condense it into a single paragraph.
- Add your author bio, genre, approximate word count, one paragraph summary from above, and market analysis (e.g., similar books, target audience, etc.).
- Condense your paragraph into one (or two) sentences. This is your elevator pitch/logline to open your discussion. Memorize this if possible.
I then formatted all of this information to fit on one sheet and bolded the key parts, including:
- Genre/Format
- Logline
- One-paragraph
- Market (including comps and themes/hooks)
- Bio (I put this in a separate box with a headshot to make it more personal)
After preparing my one sheet, I wrote a bulleted list of items to discuss with the agents so I could stay on track in the short time I had.
You pitched three agents in one day. What was that experience actually like—nerves, surprises, anything you didn’t expect?
COURTNEY: The sessions were only 10-15 minutes, so I knew I had to be ultra-prepared for the rapid-fire pitches I had ahead of me. I knew I had to be concise but not robotic, and to make the pitch match not only the aim of my book but my personality as well.
I was extremely nervous, but once the ball was rolling, the stress went away and the adrenaline kicked in. For me, the virtual format really worked because I like to be able to read people’s faces when they are talking to me. It helps me to interpret their tone and get a general impression of their interest and personality. It also gave me a better chance to explain anything confusing that might have hung up the agent if they were not able to ask me about it live.
I don’t think anything was a total surprise, but I did enjoy seeing how 3 different agents who could be described similarly on paper approached the call. Each one asked different questions and pictured adapting it to the market in different ways.
I truly think so much of the pitch is about making sure your personalities match, rather than about summarizing the plot and every intricate detail. It is about communicating the story’s core idea, tone, and stakes, and showing the agent that you understand what kind of book you’ve written and where it fits in the market. In other words, they don’t need every twist or detail of every character.
They need to know why they should care about the story you have to tell, and honestly, whether you have more stories in you.
You worked through book inc’s Book Revision Lab and Book Submission Bootcamp. How did those programs prepare you for the pitch — and for everything that came after?
COURTNEY: The first Project Write Now class I took was “Extraordinary Ordinary Stories,” held in person in Red Bank, NJ. This is where I gained some more confidence in sharing my writing, and I found a true home in the community of Project Write Now and book inc. Through this class and its community, I learned about the upcoming classes I took, as well as the Virtual Pitch Fest itself.
In July 2024, I participated in book inc’s Book Submission Bootcamp, where I workshopped my query letter and synopsis. This was extremely helpful to hear from someone who “knew the business.” I rewrote my logline and synopsis more times than I can remember, and ultimately landed with a query letter pretty close to where mine ended up.
I worked on my book on my own for a bit and then decided to take part in Project Write Now’s “Book Revision Lab” – an intensive 6-month writing course where other students and teachers critique your work. I met so many great people during this class and learned so much about crafting the story’s architecture. It was so valuable to be able to bounce ideas off other authors and read their work as well. This was when I was really starting to feel good about my novel and was finally ready to send it out to beta readers and try to pitch it to an agent.
Besides keeping me on schedule and motivating me to finish my book, these classes helped me tremendously in describing my story out loud. In some classes, we broke into groups and had to read chapters out loud to our partners. This is where I got the best feedback. I was always nervous to be exposed as “not a good reader”, and my group gave me confidence that my plot, pacing, and characters were on par with some comps they had read as well. They even recommended some books for me to read that would not have otherwise been on my radar.
What’s the one thing you wish someone had told you before you started trying to find an agent?
COURTNEY: I think everyone should take a submission boot camp class. As much as you think you’re ready for the querying process, you would not believe how much your query letter can improve. One major shift for me was in my comps, and finding comps that more accurately represented the intended audience for my book.
One thing I also struggled with was genre. My novel touches on many themes (sci-fi, thriller, literary, with dashes of romance). I ultimately landed on “speculative thriller” or “literary novel with speculative undercurrents”, but I don’t know if I would have made it further than “sci-fi” without taking this class. While technically science fiction, LIMINAL did not feel as tech and science-heavy as some of the other comps I saw at the time.
What’s next for you?
COURTNEY: I am working on returning final edits to my agent so we can go on submission! He plans to submit to the big 5 publishers and then their imprints thereafter. This spring and summer I am sure I will be on the edge of my seat waiting for responses, and refraining from tinkering with the manuscript anymore. It never feels done.
In the meantime, I have started up a sequel to LIMINAL, but before saying more about that, I am going to see where LIMINAL goes and try not to get too ahead of myself.
I’ve also enjoyed putting myself out there at writing community events like Firefly: Stores on Stage, where audience members can enter to tell their 5-minute story on stage based on a given prompt. This is something I could never, ever see myself doing even a year ago, but this writing community has given me so much support that it has been a truly fun experience to put myself out there and embarrass myself on stage! Plus, I think it is healthy to keep using this creative part of my brain with these small exercises, so I am always tapped into that creativity.
Thank you for sharing your writing journey with us, Courtney. Please keep us posted on your novel’s progress!