Our goals with KCU Pitchfest are to do 3 things:
- Offer a structured event and deadline that gives creators support to finish their pitches
- Showcase undiscovered kids comics talent to the industry at large
- Help creators learn what editors and agents are looking for, and what they like in successful pitches
We were inspired by the many competitions sponsored by SCBWI and pitch events held on social media platforms, but most especially by the renowned “Unpublished Picture Book Showcase” held by international picture book art platform dPictus.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.
Therefore, KCU Pitchfest is closely modeled after the Unpublished Picture Book Showcase. Here’s how KCU Pitchfest works:
First, we deliberately assemble a diverse group of judges. Our judges include literary agents; editors from “Big 5” publishers; editors from small and medium sized book publishers; and editors from comics publishers. You can view the bios of our complete list of judges here.
Our goal is to present 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 want to make it easy for judges — and later, industry pros to whom we promote the gallery — to navigate and view the pitches. Limiting the word count and how many pages to display is necessary due to the amount of pitches we receive.
Finally, we want to make it as easy as possible for agents, editors, art directors, and others to connect with creators once the voting finished, so each pitch page has links to the creators’ websites, social media profiles, and email addresses.
How Voting Works
There are two stages to the voting process:
- Each judge votes “request” or “pass” for each submission. (I.e., do they think the pitch would merit taking a closer look at the full proposal.)
- 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 receives 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 alphabetically by title.
Next Steps
Once the final Showcase Gallery is published, we send an announcement to a huge list of editors, art directors, and agents.
We 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 or blog after we publish it on March 29th, 2025, using the hashtag #kcupitchfest.
