Why Pitching a Book is Hard
You have to do it anyway but it sucks
Hey friends,
This weekend, a friend was telling me about the book he just finished: Julian Barnes’ A Sense of an Ending. I am instantly standoffish when someone recommends a book to me because my whole life is other people telling me what to read and I am a stubborn Taurus AND a productivity-obsessed Capricorn and I just have a lot to read.
But he was telling me the plot of this book and tbh, it sounded really great and I now have actual intensions of reading it. But I had pretty much heard all I needed to hear to decide I wanted to read the book about 30 seconds in. I wasn’t going to be like got it let’s talk about something else because I am not a monster and he was really into telling me about it, and it was great to see my friend so excited about a great book. Who doesn’t like to talk about a GREAT book they just read!?
At some point, however, it started to feel like when someone tells you their dreams. (This is hilarious because I tell friends my dreams in excruciating detail like three times a week.) The speaker cares immensely; the listener, not so much. When talking about books, or dreams, the speaker knows the characters; the listener has nothing more than a first name or the main character and the other guy. The speaker has to shorthand everything because you can’t fit a whole book into a few minutes of talking. It’s obviously inadequate to talk about a book. Books are for reading.
This weekend I spent my Saturday at a conference teaching classes and hearing pitches from writers. Pitches—where an author pays the conference for the chance to sit down and talk to me about their book for 10 minutes or so—are a necessary evil of conferences, if I’m being honest. They are wonderful opportunities, don’t get me wrong. Writers get to see that agents are not horrible Gruffalos out to destroy them. Agents get the chance to hear about great projects and actually meet people we might only usually email. Win-win, most of the time.
But writers FREAK OUT about pitches. There’s this feeling like if a writers doesn’t NAIL the pitch that they have NO CHANCE with that agent. This is false. Talking about a book at length (because ten minutes is longer than you think) isn’t always the best way to entice me to read something. I’m never going to remember all those details a writer tells me, espeically into hour three of hearing pitches. I’m probably only going to remember a sentence or two, fragments really. The one with the six dragons. The memoir set in Maine. The YA space opera with the black holes. Sometimes a writer will go on about an aspect of a book I don’t care about, missing out on telling me about something that would be totally My Thing. But who can know?
It is ok that in-person pitches are inadequate because I rarely reject a book from a verbal pitch. It’s not the end of the world if the writer doesn’t NAIL the pitch. I might tell a writer I’m not the right agent for their book or I don’t rep that genre (hello adult mystery novels). Or I might tell them that there’s a big road block for their book that means I know I wouldn’t be able to help them (i.e. a book that’s too short or toooooooo long). But I would never be like that sounds bad don’t send it to me to someone’s face at a conference. Again, I’m not a monster. And how would I know without reading it? The point of the pitch is to get me to read the book, not to get me to offer representation on the spot.
What’s more memorable, when it’s good, is probably what everyone calls the elevator pitch—the one or two sentence blurb that you hope makes the reader go ohhhhhhhh! Not all books have a good elevator pitch. Not all books are like What if Home Alone but fairies? and that’s ok. And it is very, very, very, very hard to distill a complicated plot into a few sentences. If you’re trying to work up an elevator pitch for your book remember, you don’t have to put it all in there. What is the absolute most interesting thing about your book? What is the central conflict? What does your main character want above all else? I hope that those things are something that make readers go ohhhhhhhh with interest. If not, then you might want to think about that more.
Again, I am not saying that ALL books have to have this Hollywood-esque, reductive, pithy, crass, plebeian pitch. It’s not a requirement. But, if you can figure out a shorthand way to talk about your book, you make it easier for everyone to talk about your book. An agent can use that elevator pitch (and other things) to get an editor’s attention, who in turn can get the attention of the editorial board and marketing team and sales team. The sales team can tell their reps who can tell retailers, who can tell customers. Those customers can tell their friends, who tell their other friends. Then everyone’s talking about What if Home Alone but fairies? It’s easy, descriptive, interesting shorthand. This is not the one true way for all books. It is a helpful, valuable thing if it works for you.
I don’t think writers should sit down at a pitch and say two sentences and STFU at conferences. We have TEN WHOLE MINUTES to fill. But if you, at the very least, think about how you talk about your book, and how the reader will receive that information, (and then probably cut out telling me character’s middle names and shoe sizes) you’ll probably be better off in the long run. As with all things book related, we all benefit when we consider the reader, and the listener.
Last week I wrote another long post for paid subscribers about how I think someone should build Spotify Discover Weekly but for Books, so if you’re an angel investor or programmer or someone with money who doesn’t particularly want to make buckets of cash on a start up but would like to change how the world finds books, go subscribe and read it and let me know if you think it can work!
OXOX,
Kate
Thank you- I truly needed this today