How Do We Run KCU Pitchfest Behind the Scenes?

Our goals with KCU Pitchfest are to do 3 things:

• Offer a structured event and deadline that gives creators support to finish their pitches
• Provide a competition “post-mortem” that helps creators learn what editors and agents liked in the successful pitches
• Showcase undiscovered kids comics talent to the industry at large

We were inspired by the many competitions sponsored by SCBWI and pitch events held on Twitter, but most especially by the renowned “Unpublished Picture Book Showcase” held by international picture book art platform dPictus. The wonderful thing about dPictus is its high quality website and online presentation of artists’ work, as well as the breadth of its industry network.

Taking a page from dPictus, we deliberately assemble a diverse group of judges. Our judges included literary agents and editors from “Big 5” publishers; from small and medium sized book publishers; from comics publishers; and from manga publishers.

It was important to us to create a well-designed online gallery of artists’ work. We looked at sites like Behance and Dribbble for design inspiration, keeping the look as simple as possible. We wanted to make it easy for judges to navigate and view the pitches. Limiting the word count and how many pages to display was necessary due to the amount of pitches we would be receiving. We also wanted to make it as useful as possible for agents, editors, art directors, and others to look through the submissions and connect with creators once the voting finished.

How Voting Works

There are two stages to the voting process:

1. Each judge votes “request” or “pass” for each submission. (I.e., did they think the pitch would merit an editor taking a closer look at the full proposal.)
2. Each judge chooses their top 5 favorites among all the submissions.

From this 2-step process, we calculate a numerical score for each submission. The pitch receives one point for each “request” vote it received from a judge. It then receives an additional one point if it was selected as “fifth favorite” by a judge, two points if it was selected as “fourth favorite,” and so on to five points if it was selected as “first favorite.”

We then sort the submissions by score. Groups of tied scores are ordered alphanumerically by title.

Next Steps

We then make the online gallery public! We post two galleries of Pitchfest submissions: one gallery that includes the top 50 or so vote recipients, ordered by number of points received; and another gallery of all submissions ordered alphabetically.

And then we announce the winners and send links to the galleries to a huge list of editors, art directors, and agents. We always welcome your help in making some noise when this happens! You can help us spread the word by posting about the showcase on your social media channels, using the hashtag #kcupitchfest.