Hey, Pitch It! folks!
We are fully underway with our second annual Pitch It! Competition for Australian children’s writers, and wow, the entries are certainly impressive so far! Well done!
Today’s SPECIAL COMPETITION NEWS serves as an encouraging piece of inspiration that by taking a chance, having the initiative and putting your best self forward truly can, and will, pay off! Take it from our 2018 Pitch It! Competition Winner, Stef Gemmill. I’m honoured that, with Stef’s permission, we are able to offer this valuable information, as Stef says, “the writing community have been so supportive and an inspiration to me – it would be wonderful if I can give something back…”
So, here it is, the exciting news…
Following her invaluable prize of feedback from Emily Lighezzolo at Wombat Books, Stef’s winning pitch successfully made it to acquisitions at an international award winning publishing house and she is currently in the process of signing a contract. All will be revealed soon!
Hooray! Congratulations, Stef! We CANNOT WAIT to hear the rest of the story…
PLUS! Stef has generously allowed us to share her winning pitch with our readers! Here is the captivating and carefully crafted pitch for ‘Toy Mountain‘:
Toy Mountain is a 440-word picture book for 3-6 year olds. It’s a quirky, action packed story of 5-year old Sam’s chance to become a toy tester for the Tiny Hands Toy factory, reminiscent of Roald Dahl’s Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. After Sam signs up for his exciting new task, he quickly accumulates a pile of plastic, clunky toys, discarding his well-loved toys handed down to him from his Grandmother. Toy Mountain has an underlying theme of our world’s ‘war on waste’. In Australia, we generate 6.3 billion tonnes of plastic. Only 9% is recycled and 12% incinerated. The remainder goes into landfill polluting our precious environment. This story encourages the reader to cheer Sam along as he rescues his treasured old toys from being lost under a growing mound of broken plastic. Toy Mountain also draws on gatekeepers’ nostalgia for quality toys that can be cherished forever.
Stef Gemmill married the singer of a band, had a baby and swapped the sweaty mosh-pit for toys and tantrums, turning her pen to writing children’s stories. She continues to write unique stories – mostly with strong, female protagonists, and has children’s stories published in anthologies by Prints Charming Publishing and Storm Cloud Publishing. Stef has two picture books, In My Dreams and A Home For Luna due out in 2019 by New Frontier Publishing.
For more details on entering the 2019 Pitch It! Competition, please visit the link.
3 thoughts to “SPECIAL Competition News!”
Congratulations, Stef, on your competition win and publishing contract. Thanks for sharing the winning pitch, Romi. What a great competition to enter.
Isn’t Stef fabulous! The hard work pays off! Thanks for your lovely comment, Norah! 🙂 x
She is! 🙂