Pitching – whether online or in “real life” – is an art, there’s no doubt about it. However, whilst I’ve seen a definite improvement in one page pitches and stuff like series bibles, it would seem the notion of online pitching is pretty stagnant in terms of progress in the last few years. This is a real shame I think, since the internet is a BRILLIANT place to get ourselves and our work noticed. I spend a lot of time looking at online pitches everywhere I can and am always staggered by how bad some are. I’m sure you’ve read ones with taglines instead of loglines, lofty character descriptions or airy-fairy prose that just makes you go, “eh?” Other times, you end up just thinking “where’s the story?” or worst of all, simply: MEH.

As many of you in my social network know, The London Screenwriters’ Festival’s parent company ScriptPlus recently bought Talent Circle. Now Talent Circle has long carried pitches on its daily bulletins, some of them very good, but we’ve decided to overhaul the whole process and make it a proper Talent Circle Pitch Resource, so writers might pitch their work AND themselves in order to get the best chance of attracting attention.

Drawing on my experience of reading and developing pitches with Bang2writers, we’ve introduced a set of guidelines for pitches, which are:

1) Title

2) Genre

3) Format (ie. short, feature, web series, treatment, etc)

4) Logline (25-30 words max)

5) Short Synopsis (60-100 words maximum)

6) Writer Bio (2 short sentences max – ie. Credits? Projects? Screenwriting MA? Blog URL? Etc)

We hope these guidelines will make pitches more attractive to producers and bring as many as possible to the resource. We want to make Talent Circle THE best, free online resource for writers’ work to be seen. Writers are welcome to pitch IDEAS as well as finished scripts – and any format is allowed, so get pitching! Even better, pitch between NOW and June 30th 2011 and you will be entered into a prize draw to win a ticket to London Screenwriters Festival 2011.

For full details of The Pitching Resource, check out the Talent Circle noticeboard. Want to pitch? Then join Talent Circle for FREE here. In order to pitch, here’s how you do it:

1) Log in and create a “submit a posting”

2) Select “Notice (or just about everything else)”

3) Choose your email response.

3) Fill in the details (remembering the guidelines above please!)

4) Under “classification” choose “Script Pitch” – Submit and you’re done!

GOOD LUCK!

Please pass this great FREE opportunity on to all your writing friends!