Book Pitches: For What It's Worth (CNF)
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We're accepting pitches for a new book series, For What It's Worth: short (25-30K words) works of creative nonfiction that have some pop-cultural "thing" at their center and combine elements of memoir and cultural criticism. Essentially, we want you to write about your pop-cultural obsession, but in a way that ultimately helps to illuminate something about your own life experience.
The first book in the series, which came out in May, was Andrew Bertaina's Ethan Hawke & Me: The Before Trilogy, which explored the author's lifelong obsession with Richard Linklater's Before series of films, while considering how the arc of those movies mapped onto (or didn't) his own shifting attitudes about love and relationships over the years. You can learn more about that book here.
More on what we're looking for:
- The books will be novella-length (roughly 25-30K words), but for now we just want a pitch and a sample of roughly 1K words.
- We're defining "pop culture" pretty broadly to include things like movies, music, art, music, but also topics like "suburban mall culture of the 1990s" or "weird Facebook groups about GenX nostalgia.
- We really want to know what your angle on the material will be. Ideally, this should be a subject on which you have a unique perspective, a book that will feel uniquely yours (i.e., we're not really interested in an academic treatise on reality TV, or your hot political take about how The West Wing is to blame for our current political environment).
What we'd like for the pitch itself:
- A 1-2 paragraph description of the proposed book, one that can give us a sense of your unique relationship to the pop-cultural "thing"
- An excerpt or sample of about 1,000 words. If you've published (or just written) an essay on the topic in question, one you'd like to expand into a book, you can send us that. Or just draft some pages you can send along that will give us a sense of the project.
NOTE: When filling out the form below, you can either upload a sample or link to a published piece. But please make sure you do one or the other! We won't consider any pitches that aren't accompanied by an excerpt.