Your Pitch Is a Performance

by Katharine Sands

Are you writing a novel that will keep readers turning pages rather than turning in for a good night’s sleep? Does your book show readers how to talk to the dead, trim their thighs, manage their money, make better love — or all at the same time? Then get ready to distill the most dynamic, exciting, and energized points about your work — your pitch.

Your pitch is the passport you carry into the literary marketplace as you navigate the publishing industry. Whether for fiction, nonfiction, mystery, thriller, chiller, cozy, or romantasy, it’s the pitch and nothing but the pitch that gets an agent’s attention.

The writing you do about your writing is as important as the writing itself. A pitch is the best of the best of the best of your writing. If you were an Olympic skater, it would be your triple axel on the ice.

A literary agent needs to know from the get-go why you will appeal to readers. To succeed in getting an agent you must put aside your deep connection to your writing and the amount of work you’ve put into it. While many agents became agents because they love literature, venerate books, and wrote papers on the novels of Jane Austen in college, this alone does not spell success for an agent in the book business. Agents succeed through what P.T. Barnum called “the ability to see what is all around just waiting to be seen.”

To effectively query an agent, speak in the language of bookselling to answer the question posed by editor Max Perkins (who discovered Hemingway and Fitzgerald), still being used by editors today: “Why does the world need this book?” Make sure the reasons readers would like it are clear.

Here are just a few checklist items to consider:

1. Pretend you are about to be interviewed.What would you say to Oprah? What would you want your listeners and potential readers to know about your work?
2. Identify your hooks.Hooks are the most exciting elements to compel your reader and propel your story.
3. Think of your pitch as a movie trailer. Imagine your story universe for someone who has not lived in it before. You are a camera. Put the camera on one character, on the setting, on the aliens…

Writing commercially has probably been a bane to writers since Pliny the Elder plied the trade. But the truth is, writers can have the magical imagination of George R.R. Martin or N.K. Jemisin, the wit and wisdom of Frank McCourt, or the perfect economy of Hemingway, but they still need to pitch, query, and propose to further their publishing goals.

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