A PITCH with a PITCHFORK

 

Querying and pitching one’s work is a craft in itself. Books and hundreds of websites of how-to are devoted to this craft and will greet a searcher.

The bottom line is that pitching is competitive, and a pitch must stand out.

 

An article I read got me thinking about a thornier matter. This article suggests writers must pitch themselves (as in “I am the product”) before getting into the work they are offering.

 

I have to say this rubs me wrong. Nay, very wrong, especially for fiction, where you can’t box the imagination and narrative powers by saying, “I did such and such.” However, as wrong as it is, it’s also part of the truth regarding successful pitching.

 

Most how-to query formats say to start with the hook of the book and end with the cook, i.e., the writer. The art of good hooking sentence/paragraph could fill library shelves, and I have one small shelf of such in my room.

 

That’s rational. That’s how it should work.

Apparently, this isn’t how it works much of the time.

Of course, if (as in the examples cited in the post) the writer has won a Pulitzer or was the first to land an aircraft upside-down, (the aircraft or the pilot being bottom up) this alone is a hook of sorts. It gets attention. Sentence one will lead the publishing professional to read the next and, eventually (hopefully), a request to see more. That’s what pitching is about, after all.

 

But few have such monumental statements to make about self, and most pitching would wind up sounding like the “fun facts” many writers mistake for an interesting bio. You know, “I finished a jar of jelly beans in eight minutes and won the Jelly Queen title at the state fair” sort of nothings. I wrote a post about this before.

 

So what to do?

 

If you won a Pulitzer, it’s worth considering the selling-of-you in the first paragraph. I’m less inclined to agree with this for most of us, good hardworking storytellers.

 

Story comes first.

The One Thing a Pitch Must Do

 

There’s a notion universally acknowledged that the one thing a story must do is arouse the listener/reader’s curiosity.

 

This goes triply for a pitch. A pitch must wake up a part of the mind and have it scream, “TELL ME MORE!”

 

Which is precisely what my first ever effort at pitching did not do.

(Does this 👆 wake up your curious bone?)

 

My first effort writing a story for publication was a noble failure. I had no idea what I was doing on the publishing front. That’s the way it is when delving into a new field.

It did get some lovely personal responses from busy editors, so I know it was not a complete dud as stories go. But I mis-labeled it, (a six-thousand word manuscript is not a picture book) it was episodic, (by then, out of fashion in publishing) and the pitch was as bad as can be.

 

The story itself was about the time in a five-year-old’s life when his sister is born and his beloved grandparent dies. Things happened. Things that mattered.

 

But from my point of interest, the real story was an interior coming-of age journey. The boy was a contemplative, imaginative dreamer who wondered about the meaning of it all. To me the real happenings were interior.

 

And so I came up with a pitch that went something like this:

“In a year in which nothing much happened, Isaac grows inwardly.”

I mean, really. Would you ask to read the rest of it? I’m amazed at the few positive encouraging replies I did get.

 

Okay. This 👆 is what not to do. For goodness sake, there was a ghost in Isaac’s house, and the most beloved person in his life was dying, and the new baby was taking all his parents’ attention and...

So just remember that a pitch has one job to do. That job is to make the recipient shout even before the end, “I must know more!” 

PITCHING

Despite the season, this is not about baseball.

Pitching is also what writers do. Writers pitch to agents and agents then pitch to editors. Editors pitch to acquisition committees. Once acquired, publishers pitch to booksellers. Lots of pitching goes on in the world of literature.

A pitch must be pithy and strong. Think of it as a strategic punch. It’s a craft all its own, and many a  good writer feels like a cow in a strange barn leaning to do it. But as wordsmiths who must use evocative language, it isn’t as far from our skillset as it feels.

Although I have a twitter account, I must confess I haven’t enjoyed it much. But it occurred to me that the site has prepared much of tweeting humanity for pitching. There are also pitching wars that go on regularly.

Check out #PitMad (next coming live 9/5/19, and also 12/5/19) for examples of energetic pitching. Read about it here https://pitchwars.org/pitmad/

[Disclosure: I’ve never done that^, but I have successfully pitched to editors and later to agents.]

 I now come up with a pitch for every story I write. I do it for my own clarity and because I’ve gotten to like it.

Have fun going to bat!