This is part 6/11 in our series about How to Land a Literary Agent:
- Your Fishing Guide: What I Know About These Waters
- The Prey: What Exactly Is An Agent?
- The Why: Who Actually Needs an Agent?
- Dawn or Dusk: When to Start Fishing
- The Fish Finder: Locating Agents
- The Bait: Writing a Pitch
- Casting Your Line: Query Letters
- The Nibble: When an Agent Expresses Interest
- The Bite: Getting an Offer
- The Play: Interviewing Agents
- The Keeper: Final Decisions and Next Steps
Remember how this series started out like a little fishing trip with Grandpa? And then it turned tougher and tougher, with a load of brambles along the way, a skinned knee, and then a leaky boat, a threat of rain, and maybe the wrong tackle? Like lots of adventures, it got worse the further you went.
Well, here’s the good news: It doesn’t get any worse than this part!
And here’s the bad: This part is pretty darned miserable. Writing a great pitch is hard.
You’ve probably had a zillion people ask you what your book is about, and if you’re like me, you have a hard time answering that question. I mean, maybe the book is about the tribulations of a family in Detroit, or the striving of an orphaned child on the planet Zenon. But it’s also about ambition, desire, and setbacks; it’s about the reach of the human soul and the terrors of self-doubt; it’s about our most basic needs; it’s about love and hate, mercy and vengeance; in short, it’s about nothing less than life itself!
Well, I’m afraid I’m already yawning. By the time you got to the second sentence, my eyes glazed over, and you lost me. And I’m not even a world-weary agent.
When talking about the book—and when introducing it to an agent in a query letter (that topic comes up next)—you need to present your work briefly and with punch.
The vehicle for this is called a pitch. A pitch is that wriggly minnow stuck on the hook—a delectable morsel that proves irresistible for the gaping fish you’re going to dangle it in front of.
It’s hard to get right, but the good news is that there are guidelines to composing a good pitch. No matter what kind of book you’ve written (romance, mystery, biography—all the way to the most soaring literary fiction), you are fundamentally engaged in telling a story. While you no doubt have marvelous settings, exquisite writing, and inspiring themes, the pitch needs to focus on what happens, and it’s usually broken into four steps:
- The opening situation.
- The dramatic turn.
- The challenge and the stakes.
- The overview.
Following that model, here’s a pretend pitch for a book you already know:
A motherless young girl runs free in her rural hometown, learning the rules of society through spirited shenanigans with her friends. But when a Black man is falsely accused of a terrible crime, and the girl’s father is called upon to defend him, playfulness turns deadly serious, threatening not only several lives, but also the very notions of honor and honesty that the young girl yearns to believe in.
Recognize it? Set in 1930’s Alabama, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD is a powerful tale about race and prejudice and empathy—told from the point of view of an innocent.
Do you see how that’s constructed? The first sentence gives the situation (which is already active and engaging). The second introduces the major turning point, continuing then to illustrate the challenge and the stakes. The last sentence steps back to provide the overview.
Just as importantly, let’s think about what’s omitted from this pitch: the names of all or most of the characters, the entire story of Boo Radley, the details of the supposed crime, the humor, the noble image of Atticus Finch, Jem’s broken leg… Nearly everything goes by the wayside so that we can focus on the most basic elements of the story.
Oh, and one other thing: it’s short. The pitch above is just 69 words, and that’s about all anyone wants to read. You might stretch it to 100, but I wouldn’t go any longer.
Believe me, I know how hard this is. You’ve just written a massive book (or at least part of one), and now you have to condense it into something that would fit inside a fortune cookie. It’s probably the hardest writing you’ll ever do, and it has the highest stakes.
So now let’s look at another one—this time for a book that doesn’t exist. See if you can identify the components:
Racked with sorrow after the death of his wife, SAM CURTIS holds the pieces of his life together while comforting their twelve-year-old daughter. However, when his wife’s diary suggests the girl may have been involved in her own mother’s death, SAM is thrown into a desperate attempt to clear her name. Set in contemporary Chicago, DAY BY DAY is a tale where truth and illusion collide, where the past refuses to stay buried, and where responsibility has a way of reclaiming its rights.
This one is a whopping 83 words! Remember: brevity is the soul of pitchiness. More importantly, did you see how this one moved through the same stages as the last one? There’s the situation, the dramatic turn, the challenge and stakes, and the overview.
In case it’s not clear, the pitch is not a synopsis. (A synopsis is a blow-by-blow summary of your entire book, and it can trail on for many pages. Especially for fiction, no one wants a synopsis.) The main thing is, you don’t want to tell the whole story right now. You just need a bit of bait to get a reader salivating.
The pitch is incredibly important, and it’s unlike anything else you’ve ever written. Work hard on it. Share it with friends, and listen to their feedback. Read it aloud and make sure it flows. Make it as concise and precise and evocative as poetry, but give it the barbs of a grappling hook.
All done? Phew! And also: congratulations! That means you’re ready to write a query letter. Which is how you start casting a line in the water for fish.
Read on.
Next Up: Casting Your Line: Query Letters