Whether you've written a brilliant story or just have an idea for one, consider this: Does it truly sound as good as you think it does? Most likely, it does not. This little five-lettered word is the bane of many a writer's existence. It has a lot of power. And it will also drive you insane.
Make sure you remain aware of that buzzing, incessant whisper coming from the left side of your brain. It will tell you if something feels wrong, or if something seems to be missing. Keep in mind that the inner editor needs to go to work after you have done what needs to be done.
The pitch is the most important part of hooking an agent's or a publisher's attention. Why? In the pitch, your entire book is summed up into a single line—and some-damned-how, it was interesting. It was a breath of brilliance.
Without a good pitch, you are not likely to snag the attention of an industry insider--or even the first person you're trying to sell your book to on the street. That means they will not read your query or want to listen to you—the next most important thing—or anything thereafter which is related to the project at hand. You will get a rejection, and it might be agonizing.
We've all heard about the writers who get rejected, and also about how there are several that finally get accepted after so many tries. But the ratio of successful acceptances to failures is staggering. Me? I had yet to receive any kind of acceptance before I decided to go on my own journey to Self-Published Land--where everything is much harder if done right, because you become not only author but art director, marketer, bookkeeper, developmental and line editor, copyeditor, formatter, web designer, etc. Yay, crazy! More hats than I wanted! (But more control, muhahaha.)
The pitch is still important for Indie Authors. It's part of the marketing. It becomes your tag line, it becomes the gateway into other people's lives--hell, we're lucky if people spend one minute and twenty-eight seconds on a single web page of ours before visitors bounce off. (Conversions and analytics talk. Delish.) So the tag line has to be good from page one. From the very first earful or eyeful. Or if the audience is both deaf and blind, then the very first handful. Hahahaha...see what I did there?
Is it even possible to sum up a book into barely a sentence? Yes. Yes, it is. But you must know what goes into it first. One soul, the left ventricle of your heart, both of your kidneys and ureters, your left pinky, and your right thumbnail's daughter—haha, just kidding.
One way to do it is to use a formula, so to speak, made of specific elements. You can twist those elements, turn them into a cake (or a dukey, depending on how bad it actually is), or you can shave the elements in order to incite questions in the intended reader's mind. Sometimes you can strike gold by also stirring in hints of theme. (Or, you might be a freak of nature and succeed with a pitch that defies all of this, in which case you will have sparked my jealousy and made me love you all the same. But for the rest of us...difficulty is the more likely approach. And some tears. And maybe a lot of growling.)
Every pitch must tell us these things (most or all):
Main character — The pitch can either name the character or give us a trait and/or an occupation. Example? "Housemaid must blah-blah-blah." Or... "James is blah-blah-blah."
Main character's goal — What is this person after? What is at stake?
Obstacles to Main character's goal — These can be real, imagined or emotional, but they are obstacles and they are the backbone of the book.
Antagonist and how he/she/it intends to stop the main character — Villains aren't the only kinds of antagonists. And the best kinds can scare us because we can relate to their morals and empathize with their positions.
BUT THE BEST PITCHES GO DEEPER.
They include theme and hint at a major dramatic question.
They hint at the target audience and genre.
They are written in present tense. <—- (Required for agents and publishing houses!!!)
This is important to all pitches - do not try to be vague in order to conceal information that you don't want to be known yet. Don't play coy here; being mysterious is a turn off every time for an editor or agent, and worse, if you're trying to sell to a customer on the spot, they're going to look at you with blank eyes and either a frown or a fake smile while trying not to act or look confused.
Remember that the sales mark on the street may not need or have time for this, but an agent or a publisher will need to know every single detail of the book—no mysteries allowed—in order to know what they have to work with. This gives them adequate knowledge to decide whether to accept or reject. Clarity of intent is the goal here. If you want an agent or a publisher to get interested in your work, or that lady on the sidewalk to do so, you must let that sales target know what is going on in your book. In the pitch, that means you must do so in as short a sentence as possible. (But I don't mean just walk up to someone and say a single word like "Death" while holding out your book. For God's sake, don't do that.)
The best pitches are only 10 to 15 words.
Do NOT bog the pitch down with wordiness. Make sure it can grab the agent's or target's attention at a glance, and that it is written with very concise words.
That means no tautologies or redundant, obvious statements, like, "As a housemaid who had to clean her boss's dirty house on a schedule that gave her the days off she was given, which were the only two days left in the full time work week of forty hours..." Ugh...How I shudder at the number of things that should not have been said there. Just, "Housemaid." That will literally cover everything there. Everything else could be deleted!!!
A housemaid has a job, therefore days off are assumed, and because she's a character she's going to automatically have her own issues. Thus, my point. Too many words, and those many, many words cannot be said in a single breath--let alone that the point is lost among those many words.
You could literally recite the ABCs seven(+) times in a single breath, you know.
So if everything you need to start spelling words in the English language can be said in less than that one single breath because we didn't bog down the ABCs, then why should we bog down our pitches?
The pitch line? It's something you can tell people in an elevator, or in passing as you give them your business card. You could have the single verse typed on that business card, which would still have an elegant design and room for other pertinent information and images. It could be a single line written on custom bookmarks you leave behind or give away. Very fancy!
Here is an example social banner with a less than 9-word pitch, to give you an idea how pitches can be used in advertising and in grabbing attention. They can be used on the actual product, if they're good enough.
And here is an image of an example author business book card (front and back). That tag line is recycled into multiple layouts, and it gets the point across quite well. It leaves room for other elements, especially in the case of the banner above, where the blank space on the left allows for the profile image on Twitter or elsewhere to cover it.
Most importantly, that tag line, or pitch, can be said in such a short breath, and--if you already have a cover or art for the book--it resonates with the imagery and enhances the subtle stuff behind the message. It tells you everything you need to know. (Don't go for "Housemaid seeks days off to not work, then something happens.")
It is important to realize that the longer you make your pitch, the worse off it will be. A lot of words are hard to remember—and nobody but you knows what the hell a rambooger halian angel duster is.
My book, The Violet Curse, has shadow creatures that actually have a very specific name, but that's a made-up term and would only confuse people who haven't read the book. So...as with the example above on the cards and banners, "Dark Ones" worked perfectly. Don't be too specific to your book, where no one will recognize what you're getting at.
It is the same when you are making the pitch more vague "to make it mysterious" because you don't want to reveal the secrets of the book. Remember that you are not trying to give the agent mind sex, to put that politely. That's a shoddy relationship, my cool, writerly friend.
You can get control of this elusive, wiggly beast of a task, so do! Your readers will be thankful, even if they're never conscious of where this biz could have gone.
An extra note before I move on to some more example pitches: Think of your advertising and taglines as a unit that nearly always reveals only three elements at a time. Visually, mentally, and emotionally. If you think and create in Rule of Thirds, it all becomes easier. The fourth or fifth element can be shaved down so far that way, that they really only become a tiny, enhancing addition of one of the Three. The Rule of Thirds applies in design, in pitches, and in many, many other places in life. Even music and story structure are often broken into thirds, or very close to it.
Next...
Here is an example of a set of pitches, all of them covering the same exact story and revised with explanations for improvement. Again, make sure you write your pitch in present tense.
Pitch 1: James is a sixteen-year-old in high school who has to run away before he dies.
That is a very vague, very common pitch type. It can literally cover a thousand plots or infiltrate any genre. Besides that, is it even necessary to know his age, or that he is in high school? No, it is not. Not in the pitch. If you are pitching to a YA agent, he or she will likely assume already that the protagonist is a teen because you are pitching to a YA agent. And in other genres, age is usually not the main emphasis of a story, so it is rarely EVER needed in a tagline.
For a pitch that covers a book where the premise is incredibly attached to the whole idea that turning a certain age means some kind of imminent death of the character, it may be somehow okay. Think of the book Beautiful Chaos. "Sixteen" is at the very center of the overall plot.
If the age isn't the main point of that plot, do not include words that are not vital to the core drama of the book. They are useless in a pitch. Agents and publishers need to know WHAT the book is about. So does that random lady on the street. If she's thirty-two, she'd probably feel a little weird picking up a book just because it has a sixteen-year-old in it. So, yes. Retain caution with the concept line. Agents and readers do not need to know James's age, the color of his hair, how many fingers or friends he has, or even how high he can count or in what language. They don't need to know that his dad doesn't like him, or why he wants to drink two liters of chocolate syrup—unless that chocolate syrup is the reason he has super powers to begin with, and why he must run away!
Pitch 2: When James discovers his girlfriend's mangled body in his bed, he realizes he is in danger. His father intends to kill him.
(For a shorter version, cut out the bulky "he realizes he is in danger." I think it would be obvious, if there was a mangled dead body in your own bed. It suggests someone either tried to kill him, send him a message, or set him up. That means danger is automatically present; therefore, that danger is assumed. It's redundant. It's "extra fluff," as I've started describing it recently.
Remember, the shortest pitches are usually best. I try to aim for 10 to 15 words, though I often end up with more than that. My nickname's Extra for a reason.
Now, this second version is much better than the first one, but words still need to be cut from it. It names the main character, tells us who the antagonist or assumed villain is, and even gives us some shocking information - the dead body of his girlfriend was in his bed.
We immediately want to know why her body was there, and who killed her - that means we've introduced a dramatic question. Even better, James believes his father wants to kill him. Family drama. That could be a hint at a theme. The death is a hint at the mystery genre, but it could be a different genre as well, depending on how the query / blurb is written. There is nothing quite like a good murder to shock a reader, right? Well, it isn't good if it's overdone. Always keep the pitch short and simple, but very, very direct, and as unique as you can make it. Here's another example, which shows the process of trying to cut it even more in order to make it even more concise.
Pitch 3: After what he thought was a romantic night with another woman, James discovers his girlfriend's mangled body in his bed...
That right there? Dude. Immediately, you will know you have hooked the listener's attention. Did he kill his girlfriend in a drunken stupor? Did a killer sneak in and murder her? How did she die, and why doesn't he know what happened to her? Why is she in his bed, and not the other woman? Why did he think it was a romantic night with the other woman? Did it turn out not to be? Why? What happened, and is she the one who killed his girlfriend? OMG, was she a stalker who finally got to him? What of this/that/other? Did the girlfriend somehow kill herself to set him up out of revenge?
So, you see, the pitch business is an evil aneurism-inducer, and you will probably write a hundred different incarnations of the same idea before you find the right one. Take breaks between pitch-writing sessions, and only choose the best. Then it will be up to your readers over whether or not the pitch is gripping. I usually write a LOT of them before I find one that strikes me as perfect. Honestly, though, later I often find I no longer like it, and I start anew. This is normal, so don't fret. You're not a lost cause, you're awesome.