We ran the second mock pitch this week, and this time I drew the short straw. I was the publisher.
I assumed it would be easy. After a week of being on the receiving end, I had a whole list of questions I'd have loved to dodge, and I figured I could just ask those. What I hadn't expected is how uncomfortable it is to be the one doing the asking. These are people I work with every day, and I'm sitting there in a deliberately flat voice saying "so why should I believe you can finish this?" It felt rude. I kept wanting to soften it, add a "no offence, but", and offer them a way out before they'd even asked for one.
Our pretend publisher last time didn't do that, and it's exactly why it was useful. So I made myself stop cushioning. The questions got better when I did. Once I quit apologising for them, I started noticing the gaps in the answers, the little pause before a number, the sentence that sounded confident and said nothing.
The person in the hot seat did far better than I did last week. They answered, stopped, and let the silence sit. I counted the seconds and nobody died. If anything, the silence made the answer sound more certain, which is a trick I'd like to steal and probably can't.
The odd side effect is that I now understand what's probably going on in the other chair. A real publisher is skimming dozens of these. They aren't trying to catch anyone out. They're trying to work out, quickly and politely, whether the people in front of them have thought about the boring parts. That's a much less frightening way to picture it, and I wish I'd had it a week ago.
We've agreed to keep rotating. Everyone plays the publisher at least once, partly for the practice and partly because it's weirdly bonding to have been unkind to each other on purpose and then go for lunch.
Nothing about the waiting has changed. But we feel more ready than we did, and that's the only part we get to control.
— Thiago, apparently quite good at asking awkward questions
Posted by Thiago Moreira · October 15, 2026
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