Enrich Your Pitch
Take Your Elevator Pitch From Zero to Thirty (Seconds)
Every writer has to pitch their project sooner or later. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but one day soon you’ll pitch it to an agent or editor or publisher, or to a director or producer, or to a literary magazine or a prize committee, or perhaps directly to your readers. Unless you intend to lock that manuscript up, never letting it see the light of day, you’re going to have to write a pitch.
You probably already knew that, that’s not insightful. I know, okay? That’s just the setup. Here’s the part you might not already know: Drafting the pitch can help you out of some of your toughest manuscript-writing spots.
Plus, of all the manuscript-related activities writers love to procrastinate with—like making mock-ups of the front cover or dream casting all the actors who will be in the Netflix adaptation—this one has value for your project.
I’ve only just realized how difficult today’s article will be for me given that Shelf Life is a profanity-free zone and one of my all-time favorite words rhymes with pitch. Anyway, the silver lining here is you’re at least not trying to pitch a startup, which I understand involves a slide deck. Pitching a manuscript also hard but you don’t need to know PowerPoint.
Speaking of Microsoft Office—I hate writing pitches and blurbs but you know what I like writing? Resumes. The pitch is your manuscript’s resume. It’s the piece you send out into the world to represent your manuscript as a whole to convince someone to take a chance. It’s also a format that has no room for extraneous bells and whistles—it must contain everything important about your manuscript, in exactly the order the audience is expecting to see it, in a terribly limited amount of space.
You’d think this goes without saying but do not print your pitch on orange paper or spray it with perfume to get the audience’s attention.
Let’s hop to it. Get in winners, we’re condensing your 50,000, or 100,000, or 150,000—hopefully not more than 150,000, you better not be writing War and Peace over there—words down into a spiel you can lay down in two minutes or less.
War and Peace is more than half a million words long and nobody has time for that. Tolstoy wrote short stories too—here’s today’s real pro-tip—if you read one of those you can say you’ve “read Tolstoy.” I suffered through Anna Karenina; learn from my fail.
Let’s talk about pitching. When people talk about pitching a project to someone who can pony up the funds to get the project off the ground, that use of the word pitch comes from the filmmaking industry. It’s very common to pitch film projects before the screenplay is written, which is great because you know before you put the work in whether you can make money from this idea or not.
Novels do not work that way (neither do memoirs). With your first novel, you have to have the whole thing finished before you try to sell it. If your first novel does well, you will already have an agent or editor standing by to sign future ones as you finish them. You don’t have to go to your agent and pitch the idea for your next novel, although agents can provide helpful guidance to savvy authors who know how to listen.
The use of pitch in the film industry comes from sales pitch, a concept everyone is familiar with, where a salesperson tries to convince you to buy whatever they’re selling like a product or a service. Recently someone sent me an email sales pitch whereby they offered to make a $50 donation to the charity of my choice in exchange for a thirty-minute meeting to hear their sales pitch. It was a sales pitch to get me to agree to hear their sales pitch.
Young man it’s just sales pitches all the way down!
It all comes back to the same root. Anyone who is pitching something—a product or service or project or screenplay or novel manuscript—has to persuade the listener to invest. Tacking elevator onto it has to do with the timeframe in which you may deliver your full pitch.
The duration of an elevator ride is anywhere from thirty seconds to two minutes. If you should find yourself in an elevator with your dream literary agent, or a senior acquisitions editor at a big-five publisher, or a famous film producer, you will have them captive for the duration of the ride to convince them to invest in your idea. The second those elevator doors open at their floor, whether in thirty seconds or two minutes, if you haven’t completely sold that person they are going to walk away.
It’s now or never. They are a busy person. They shoot down fifty great ideas every day before lunch. They are not going to stand there and patiently let you finish a ten-minute explanation of your complicated plot, subplots, plot twists, and interesting angles. You have to get the whole concept communicated successfully in almost no time at all.
You’re not likely to find yourself in the elevator situation literally. But when it comes time to pitch your manuscript to someone, you won’t have infinite time or space to do it. If your query letter is too long, it’s getting deleted unread. You can’t fit a ten-minute explanation of why someone should read your story onto the back cover of your book. If your book description on Amazon goes on for too long and has too many details, it’s going to turn away readers. You have to distill it to a pitch.
To make sure we’re all on the same page, let me clarify that a pitch is not a synopsis. A synopsis is a brief, condensed summary of the main points of your plot and the purpose is to inform the person reading your synopsis of what the book is about. You may well be asked to provide a synopsis of your book at some point. Some agents and editors want them. That’s not what this is.
Further, if you’re pitching to a specific audience, like a literary agent, you will need to follow the accepted format for that audience, like the query letter. The pitch, as we’re working on it today, would be part of that query letter. You would also need to provide additional information (genre, word count, demographic) to a literary agent in your query letter than you would provide to a reader in the back cover copy, but the meat of the pitch would be largely the same.
A pitch seeks to inform less than it seeks to intrigue. You need to get enough of the main points in there so that readers understand what it’s about, but more importantly you need to convince them they want to read it. You don’t have a lot of time or space, so you need to be direct and concise. You have approximately 200 to 400 words (if you’re writing) or thirty seconds to two minutes (if you’re speaking).
Hey, do you know how fast radio hosts and podcasters speak? Internet says about 160 words per minute—so that means you would need about 325 of pitch to deliver it quickly but still intelligibly in two minutes. For the sake of putting a number on it, let’s say that 325 is an ideal word count, 400 is at the outside range of what you want, and shorter is always better (as long as you’re not leaving out the most important things).
What do you need to cover in those 325 words? Well, a lot:
Who is the protagonist?
What is the setting?
What’s the main conflict?
What are the stakes?
I know that seems like a lot to fit into 325 words but it’s only four things, that’s like 80 words per thing. That’s plenty of space, especially once you get the hang of making every sentence pull double duty, which we will get to in a moment.
The first two sentences of your pitch are the most important because the attention that anyone is willing to give you—for anything, not just your pitch—is ever diminishing until it reaches zero and they stop listening or reading. Just as you need to get your reader to pony up and invest within the first 5 or 10 percent of your manuscript, you need to get the person you are pitching to interested from the very first sentence. This is not the place to build up the suspense and then drop something unique and surprising on the audience in the last sentence. Frontload your pitch with the most interesting stuff.
The first time you sit down to craft your pitch, you might find yourself thinking: “There’s just no way I can condense one hundred thousand words down to three hundred and twenty-five. It’s impossible to do without leaving something important out.”
This is not a sign that your story, unlike any story that has every come before, just has too many important aspects to fit into your 325-word pitch. This is a sign that you don’t have a solid grasp of which parts of your story are the important ones.
Sorry; that sucks to hear but it’s almost certainly true. There’s no book on the planet that has so much to it that it can’t be pitched in 200 to 400 words. Not War and Peace, not the Bible, not 2666. If you’re not approaching the target word count and you’ve cut everything you think you can cut without losing what’s most important about your book, then you have to look at your story again and reconsider what’s “most” important. Most is superlative. Everything can’t be most. One (or two) character(s), the protagonist(s). One conflict, the protagonist’s. One setting. The stakes. That’s all.
This is how drafting your pitch can really help you draft your manuscript or revise it. The person who can spit out a pitch no problem on the first try and even come under the word count—that person has an excellent bird’s-eye view of their story. They understand what the main thread is and they can narrow their focus to that, ignoring all of the other threads, the subplots, the character histories, the worldbuilding—all the stuff that has no place in the pitch.
If you can’t easily condense your story down to those four elements of the pitch, then you probably don’t have the story clearly fixed in your head. This can be okay if you’re drafting and you’re a seat-of-your-pants writer, but if you’ve finished your manuscript and you’re revising—or worse, you think you’re done revising!—and you can’t isolate the main thread of your story from everything else that supports it, then you’ve got your revision work cut out for you.
A friend of mine—a writer, illustrator, and animator with experience pitching shows to major networks—helps me out when I’m trying to get my mind around a new project by asking me to pitch her the idea. What I have learned from this exercise is, if you know who your main character is and what motions they’ll go through but you can’t articulate the stakes, then you have yourself a merry little character study.
You do not want to have a character study, in case that wasn’t clear.
You can go about this any way you please, but here’s how I get down to drafting a pitch. I isolate my four things—protagonist, setting, conflict, and stakes—and write a single sentence explaining each. I give each sentence as many glorious words as I can cram in, to include as many details as I can, but I keep it to one sentence per item. That means four sentences or, in a book that truly has multiple protagonists, you might have five or more. Edward wasn’t a protagonist in Twilight and Mr Darcy wasn’t a protagonist in Pride and Prejudice, but sometimes books have multiple protagonists. Six of Crows has . . . six.
Now it’s time to get condensing. Can you include the setting in your sentence about your protagonist? Can you include your stakes in the sentence about the conflict? If anything is mentioned twice, remove the superfluous mention. Combine sentences if you can. Once you’ve condensed, all you have to do is re-word the sentences that made the cut into a narrative blurb. Don’t add anymore details beyond what you included in your first round—in fact, you may be removing some!—but retell the four pieces of information as a single, flowing story that walks the reader (of your pitch) through what they can expect from your story and why they want to read it.
That’s your draft, but there’s one more thing. Remember your comps? The other books out there in the marketplace that are most comparable to yours? Read the first draft of your pitch again and make sure the elements that your story has that your comps don’t have are showcased in the pitch. Whatever it is that sets your story apart from the rest, whatever makes it fresh and unique, needs to be in there.
If you’ve written a magical school fantasy, don’t focus on telling the reader why it’s like Harry Potter. Harry Potter exists. They can read that anytime they want. Tell them why yours is different from Harry Potter, why it’s special. This is probably what caused you to write it in the first place—if the thing you wanted to read already existed, you would have just read that. You wanted something different so you brought it into existence. Tell us why yours is something different.
Now that you’ve got your pitch crafted, just a few more things to consider. Let’s circle back to my earlier assertion that the pitch is your manuscript’s resume. There are three important things about resumes that you should keep in mind vis a vis your newly minted pitch:
One universal resume can’t answer every job ad you see; and
Iterate as you receive feedback (as with all things); and
Don’t leave yourself scrambling to put your resume together (or update it) when a golden opportunity comes along.
Item 1 means, you’re not done once you have your basic pitch drafted—that’s just your baseline pitch. Check it each time you prepare to send it out to see if it can be further honed or revised based on the audience it’s going to. Let’s say you’ve found three different agents on Manuscript Wishlist who would all be good fits for your project, but they’ve each stated they’re wishing for slightly different things. Make sure you’ve honed your pitch so it’s as appealing as possible for each individual agent. Pitching to beta readers or critique partners? Get your red pen out and start revising.
Item 2 means, if you’re getting feedback that the pitch isn’t working you need to change it up. What’s feedback that the pitch isn’t working? There’s obvious direct feedback like what you see on Query Shark or what your friend or writing coach tells you, and then there’s that sneak critique I’ve warned you about—the no-feedback feedback. If you’re getting all form rejections and no personal rejections, something’s not working with your pitch and it’s time to reconsider.
Finally, item 3: Just like your resume, you should be updating your pitch every time something changes. Graduated? Update your resume. Just landed a new job? Update your resume with the job ad you still have handy. New certification? Update your resume while you’re thinking of it. Don’t wait till you see a job ad that’s perfect for you and then scramble to get your resume together.
Every time something changes in your story, reevaluate your pitch to see if it can be improved. If the conflict changed, or the stakes, or the protagonist turned out to be someone other than you originally thought it would be, update that pitch. Keep it updated with the latest and greatest. You don’t want to be three versions behind when you find yourself in an elevator with the person who has the power to make your publishing dreams come true.
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