Get Published, Part 9 – Pitch Perfect: The Art of Selling Your Story Verbally

(Quick note: check out my guest post today on Procrastinatingwriters.com.)

It’s on.   You have an appointment with an agent at a writing conference.  Or, you find yourself stuck in an elevator with one.  Or perhaps you’ve been told an editor will be at a party you’re going to and you intend to corner her.

Heck, maybe your strategy is to trail the poor soul to her car when she leaves the office at the end of the day.  Whatever.

Moment of truth.  Do this well and the rest of your life could change. 

There are two things you need to have at the ready when that moment arrives:

1. A pitch, which will determine whether or not the agent or editor wants to hear more.
2. What to say when they do.

They are not the same thing. 

One is rehearsed, polished, stylized and powerful.  The other isn’t.  The other is organic and responsive to the moment.  It could take one minute or one hour, and you need to be ready for either.

Confusing them is the great downfall of writers who are attempting to sell their story face to face.  Not so much because the story isn’t compelling – agents are pros, they can usually weed through the chaos to find a story in there somewhere – but because the writer isn’t. 

Notice I said sell.  Not tell.  Big difference.  Critical difference.

The Key to Pitching: Knowing What Not to Do

In case the term is new to you, a pitch is an efficient and brief introduction to your story, either verbally or in writing. 

You need to understand how to execute both with confidence and elegance.

I just Googled “how to pitch a novel or screenplay.”  There are 795,000 websites available that claim to have an answer.

In order to make this answer, number 795,001, actually useful for you, allow me to approach the proposition differently.  By telling you what doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, that’s precisely how most writers do it – the wrong way. 

What not to do? Don’t narrate your story.  At least not yet.

The first thing you should do when the moment arrives – the handshakes and the small talk are all behind you – is to set-up the story before you tell it.  Do this, and do it well, and you’re already head and shoulders ahead of the pack.

Just launching into a telling of the story… that’s a major handicap.  It says all the wrong things about you and exposes what you don’t understand about publishing.

The opening of your pitch is perfectly analogous to someone shopping for a book.  Before anyone opens the cover and begins reading, they already know a short list of specific things about the story.  In fact, those things are precisely what determines if they will, or won’t, crack open the book and sample the pages.

What are those things?  Genre.  A title.  The thematic landscape.  Narrative tonality.  A quick peek at the hero.  A tagline about the plot.  Even a comparison to well known stories cut from the same cloth.

And nothing else.  At least not yet. 

In fact, if you think of the set-up to your pitch as what you’d find on the inside flap of a dust jacket, you’re well down the road toward an effective pitch.

A killer pitch has three phases to it. 

The set-up, delivering that short list of information about the story without telling the story, is the first.

An effective set-up might sound like this:

My story is a political thriller set in the near future.  It’s called Whisper of the Seventh Thunder, and it explores the possibility that certain prophesies are coming to pass on the world political stage, and the lengths opposing forces will go to in an effort to find and manipulate the truth, or at least the perception of truth,  toward their own ends.  It’s a bit like The DaVinci Code in that it blends fact and accepted theological premises with human greed and agenda, with an innocent protagonist who finds himself the pawn in a war between darkness and light, perhaps even supernaturally so, with the fate of the world hanging on his decisions. 

If that sounds like a tease, that’s precisely the intention.  The objective is to get the editor leaning forward, eager to hear more.

But this isn’t where you entertain questions.  Once you’ve completed the set-up, you plow directly into the next phase before the listener knows what hit them.

The second part of the pitch – not to be confused with the two things you need to know, as shown above; that’s coming – is a very condensed sequential telling of the story, pausing as you go to introduce the hero and the antagonist at the appropriate moment. 

The most important part of this phase — as in the story itself — is the first plot point, or the inciting incident.   Because this moment defines the nature of the dramatic tension and the stakes of the story, which are critical to the success of the story.  If you use the four parts of the story — set-up, response, attack and resolution — as context for this telling, the pitch will deliver the same power as the story itself.

It’s a mistake to describe your hero outside of the context of the story, or as part of the set-up.  Meld it into the flow of the story.

This is where too many writers screw up, either by leading with this second phase (omitting the set-up altogether), or, more likely by going into too much extraneous detail. 

Any hint of rambling or disconnected dots at this point is the death knell of your pitch.

You need several versions of this second phase: one that lasts about three minutes, and one that you can expand upon at length.

The third phase of the pitch is a summary, a retelling of the set-up – not the story itself — only now referencing the story as examples of theme and dramatic effectiveness.  This is where you overtly sell the sizzle, explaining why this will work, and how it will blow a reader away.

Be prepared to back those claims when asked.  If you’ve done your job, you will be.

Do you tell the ending of the story at this point?  No.  Make them ask you.

The Second Part of the Process

At this point you literally need to go with the flow.  The more effectively you’ve executed the three phases of the pitch, the more likely the agent or editor will grill you about it.

This grilling is usually a combination of two things: they either seek further clarification or information about the story… or they’re testing you.

Which means, you need to be ready.  They may be exploring holes in the story or trying to break it altogether. 

You need to have answers to questions about where the story came from, why it’s important for you, what readers will get out it and why they’ll be interested, how this is different than other stories in the genre, the backstory of your main characters, the motivations of both the hero and the antagonist, the thematic intentions of the story, the nature of the dramatic tension and an succinct definition of the stakes for all involved.

You need a Masters degree in your story. 

You must completely and utterly own your story.

You need to be ready to explain, clarify and defend each and every aspect of it, from concept to characters, themes, structure and even the nature of specific scenes – “so how are you going to show that moment?” – and the choices you’ve made relative to tense, person and narrative voice.

Which, by the way, are the six core competencies of storytelling themselves.

If you survive all this, if you pass this test, then chances are the agent or editor will ask to see more of your work, possibly the entire manuscript.

Bottom Line

In the entire spectrum of the publication process, we writers have control over only two things.  And just those two: our stories, and the effectiveness of our pitches.

One begets the other.  And yet they are separate skills, both of which dictate your destiny as a published author.

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