To Whom Concerns Your Pitch?
Originally published on Substack on May 17, 2024.
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“Who is the most important person that you will ever pitch your novel to?”
It’s a clunky question grammatically speaking, but it’s an important one if you’re a writer. If, specifically, you’re writing a novel and want to get it traditionally published, pitching it to the right person is important.
But when most people get asked this question, I tend to think that they get it wrong.
They might answer that the most important person they ever pitch to is one of their friends or family members because they think friends and family are good about spreading the word about their writing and their book.
Some might say that the most important person they’ll ever pitch their novel to is their potential agent because why wouldn’t they be? They’re the one that you task to sell your novel to other publishing houses on your behalf. They’re incredibly important in the traditional publishing space.
Even then, others might say that the most important person they’ll ever pitch to is an industry connection such as an editor at a conference or other publishing professional. Who you know can help you get that edge you’ve needed to jumpstart your career as a big time author.
But again, for all of these hypothetical people I’ve mentioned, I think that they’re wrong and that they’re missing something extremely fundamental about the entire writing process which is the fact that it has to be fun and exciting for them.
To that end, I think the most important person you will ever pitch your novel to is yourself.
That’s right. It’s you.
It has to be you. You wrote it. You finished it. You know it best.
And despite every single time you might have wanted to shelve your novel, despite every time you’ve been told that you can’t make a living as a writer, despite every time you thought your novel idea was bad, you kept writing because something about it excited you.
Maybe your novel has a conversation on a topic that nobody else seems to be willing to have. Or maybe your novel answers a question that your favorite TV show kind of left hanging. Or, maybe you just have these characters who won’t leave you alone and demand that their story be told.
Whatever you’re writing, you have to convince yourself that it’s worth writing.
Which means you have to know it down to its very essence.
So, what does that look like?
How do you get hundreds of pages of the story you’ve written down into a single sentence?
Well, there are a number of ways to do it with some variation of success.
Some people like to do a mash-up approach where Blockbuster X meets Blockbuster Y but with special ingredient Z to make it a little unique, and that works just fine.
Other people like to ask “What if?” questions such as LaDarrion Williams who, before writing his debut novel Blood at the Root, asked, “What if Harry Potter went to a HBCU?” That works, too.
My favorite method is not as enticing as the other two, but I’ve found that it gets to the heart of things and leaves room for razzle dazzle later. It comes from Randy Ingermanson and his book called How to Write a Novel Using the Snowflake Method, which also echoes my earlier sentiment:
The first person you have to market to is yourself. You have to be excited about your story. Which means you have to know what your story is.
For the most part, I’ve kept his method and mine the same, but I’ve made some slight alterations to it. Basically, in one sentence called a logline, you need the five following pieces of information written in a way that speaks to your target audience, said audience being yourself:
your novel’s genre (A)
your lead character(s) (B)
one thing your lead character(s) has to over come (C)
one thing your lead character(s) desperately wants to achieve (D)
one thing they stand to lose if things don’t go as planned (E)
When you put them all together mad-lib style, the formula looks something like this:
My book is an (A) novel about (B) who has to (C) in order to (D) or else (E).
Seems too simple, right?
Trust me, though. This will become one of the most incredibly powerful tools in your arsenal when you plug in all the components of your novel into it. Also, as a mad-lib, it’s a novel-generating machine.
Here. I’ll show you.
My book, which I’ve just thought up for this post, is a steampunk horror novel (A) about an alchemy professor seeking tenure at her university (B) who has to team up with her rival colleague that’s more knowledgeable about eldritch entities (C) in order to solve a gruesome string of murder mysteries (D) or else become its latest victims (E).
I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a really cool novel that I’d want to read if I ever decided to write it. Maybe it’s not for you, but that’s okay. It excites me, and that’s what matters the most.
Because when I go and write that novel, this logline is my North Star. Some of the details might change as I write out the novel, for instance. Maybe my alchemy professor turns into a steampunk engineer, or I don’t lean as much on the eldritch horror aspect. But at its core, I know whose story it is, what they have to overcome, what they want to achieve, and why it matters to them.
Protagonist. Conflict. Motivation. Stakes.
That’s what’s going to be your bread and butter every time you sit down to write whatever you story that you want to write.
Okay. Now what?
If you liked this little tidbit and the way I taught it, consider registering for my Work That Pitch! online workshop on June 21, 2024 from 1 to 2:30 PM PST. I’ll be discussing this pitch strategy and more all the while helping you and other writers hone your story vision to that single sentence just for you.
I hope to see you there, and if not, no worries. May you throw your pitches ever true.