Pitch Possible: Resources for Writing the Perfect Pitch

The exercise of writing a pitch for your work in progress or finished manuscript can be daunting. Where to start? What little darlings to include? I know every detail of my story and every bit is important, right? Wrong. Every word in the pitch counts, but it shouldn't be bogged down with description like a book report. Thanks to the great minds of a few fantastic experts, I have managed to finally write a pitch for my story that weaves the tale I'm trying to tell without including every plot and pinch point. The pitch I wrote recently was for the NaNoWriMo Pitchapalooza being put on by the marvelous people at The Book Doctors, Arielle Eckstut and David Henry Sterry. Check out their January 12th blog post about the Sixth Annual NaNoWriMo Pitchapalooza for more details and a complete list of their 10 Tips for Pitching.

I have tried and failed to write a good elevator speech several times, but every time I had the same problem - I had no idea what I was doing. My least favorite question regarding my writing is "What is your book about?" How do I even start to begin? There's so much to tell and what if I don't express myself correctly. After all I'm a much better writer than I am speaker. I find comfort in the fact that several successful authors have admitted to dreading the same question. Writing is very personal and telling people about the wild things that live in a writer's imagination can be very intimidating. But, we are writers after all and we want to share our worlds regardless of the great risk of being rejected or worse getting "the look." You know the one that says "yeah, that sounds good" with a strong dose of sarcasm. Then that person never asks you about your writing again. Besides we need to master our pitches for when the time comes for us to wow our future agent and/or editor. So where to begin?

With the deadline for Pitchapalooza on the horizon I ventured out to write the perfect pitch with the help of the Book Doctor's 10 Tips for Pitching and the advice from Writer's Digest's editor blogger, Chuck Sambuchino on The Writer's Promise: How to Craft a Book's Pitch. I was finally able to see the path towards writing a pitch worthy of sending out rather than throwing into another black hole of failures. The three most important truths I took away from these great resources were:

1. Let your pitch sing. The tone should be poetic. Avoid at all cost being so descriptive that it reads like a middle school book report on the ancient Egyptians. (That was my favorite book report as a kid. I still remember writing all my bullet points on notecards and lining them neatly on my small fiberglass desk.)

2. Use your words to invoke emotions. No one wants to read a book that reads like the agriculture report. If your pitch only provides information without the meat that pulls a reader in than no one is going to ask to read the rest of the manuscript.

3. Reach out and grab the reader. A pitch is your first chance to make your reader lean-in. To make them pull your book off the shelf before the one next to it with the gripping battle scene on the front. The agents and editors we query are our first audience. Introduce them to the soul of the character, the truths of the story, give them something they can relate to, and then leave them with a cliff hanger that will have them begging for more.

As an exercise of humility, I've included below the first and last two sentences of the pitch I sent the Book Doctors. For the sake of self-preservation and privacy, I've omitted the middle of the pitch. I'd enjoy hearing what you think. And once you've carefully critiqued / judged my pitch, go try your hand at your own. Good luck and keep writing.

"Andy Holbrook lived most of her life in the dark underbelly of a secret world where monsters and magic existed. Now her parents are dead and she must be the one to solve their murders in order to avoid the exposure of the very secrets they died protecting." 

"...is a young adult fantasy thriller that encourages hope even in the darkness and raises the questions what if we were limitless? What if buried in our history was a time and place where anything was possible?"