Pitch Magic

Th is week I've been editing a novella and tweaking my submission package for my novel Combined Cognition.  And one of the things an author has to do if they're serious about getting a publisher to buy their work is to pitch their novel.  And pitching is definitely a fine art.

In the 'old days', writers were supposed to have an 'elevator pitch' for their novel.  We were to imagine that we had a captive agent or editor in the lift with us.  We only had the time it took for the lift to reach their floor to sell our novel to them.  These days the elevator pitch has morphed into a 280 character or less Twitter pitch, and there are several pitching contests on line.

Some writers pitch their books in Hollywood terms.  "It's Jaws meets the Terminator" they'll say, or some other instantly recognizeable mash-up of successful stories.   I've used that a few times myself.   my novel Starfire can be described as "Vatta's War meets The Pride of Chanur". 

Another way the elevator pitch has changed is by morphing into a one sentence summary of your novel.  Yes, really,  now we're supposed to get all the complexity of our novel into one sentence. How the hell do you do that?  You have to pare back the story to its absolute bones, but the brutal descriptions I come up with don't reflect the story at all.  They never could in one sentence.

Then there's the blurb for the book.  In a pitch letter you put in the one-sentence pitch first, then expand on it in the blurb.  The blurb is effectively the back cover copy you see on a published book.  It sets the scene, it teases, but it shouldn't give the end of the book away.

Most authors find creating blurbs and pitches far harder than creating the book itself.  I have computer files for one-sentence pitches and blurbs for each novel.  These files contain half a dozen variations on each sentence or blurb, and every time I come to submit the novel I review them again.  And most likely edit them again too.

If you're brave you can send your pitch letter to queryshark.com, where a well known agent will take it apart for you - and often tear it to shreds.  But you can read the comments she's made on other people's pitch letters too, and those are invaluable.  

Pitching is most definitely an art, one that I'm constantly learning about.  And I'm constantly refining my own pitches too.  Hopefully one day one of them will catch the interest of that elusive editor or agent.