Pitch practice!

[annathepiper]

So tonight, I'm in the middle of reorganizing a lot of my story notes, to get my list of various concepts that I want to work on updated. And I find myself in a position of practicing the pitches for Lament of the Dove and for the overall trilogy it goes in, The Dove, the Rook, and the Hawk. Posting this outside the Writing filter just because I want to maximize the potential set of folks who'll see this, so's to get the maximum possible feedback for this, my second exercise in writing a pitch for one of my novels. But if you don't want to know even the base concept of what Lament of the Dove is about, don't look behind the cut!


I've kind of got two pitches I'm playing with here--the one for the first book and the one for the trilogy. I'll list them both here just for giggles. Suggestions welcome on how to make 'em snappier! I'm not quite sure I'm happy with either of them.

Lament: "When an assassin steals a young half-elven healer out of slavery, the knight who is sworn to pursue them is forced to question the very order he serves."

Trilogy: "A knight, a slave girl, and an assassin uncover corruption at the heart of the Church that dominates their homeland."

Comments

[sarekofvulcan.livejournal.com]

The pitch for Lament doesn't give me any sense of why I should read this book. It's as if Luck in the Shadows were pitched as "A young man is rescued by a fellow prisoner only to find mystery and court intrigue as he follows and learns from the other."

[annathepiper]

Hrmm. I agree with you, which is the problem. ;) I shall have to think about this some more. Lament is still a work very much in progress, and although I'm getting a much more coherent idea of where the rest of the story is going as I close in on the halfway mark, it may still be too rough in my brain for me to solidly nail it down into a single punchy sentence.

[ssha.livejournal.com]

Are we talking about the back cover summary here?

[annathepiper]

Not per se. The point of the exercise I'm engaging in here is to practice what was described to me at Writer's Weekend:

1) Try to express your story as a single sentence.
2) Expand that sentence into a paragraph.
3) Expand each sentence in that paragraph into a new paragraph till you have a page. (4-5 paragraphs.)
4) Expand each of those paragraphs till you have a synopsis of the story (4 pages).

Now, using the 4-5 paragraph version of the story as a potential back cover blurb was mentioned as a happy possible goal for this exercise, but it isn't the specific point. ^_^

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

I think the single punchy sentence can be good, but if you are going to do a verbal pitch, you'll have a chance to say more - say 25-50 words, before the editor/agent's eyes glaze over. You can always do the High Concept pitch, which is how they do it for script pitches. Some folks like that method, some don't.

Who are you pitching to?

[annathepiper]

I'm not pitching to anybody, yet. This is strictly practice! Trying to do that extremely helpful exercise described at Writer's Weekend in July, in fact. :) Hoping to start with a sentence, expand to a paragraph, expand to a page, and expand to four pages.

(It's going to be more useful to me, actually, for the other two books that go with Lament--because I have only the very vaguest ideas of what needs to go into them. But I want to be prepared to pitch the whole trilogy, since it's one big story that spans three books, a la Lord of the Rings. So I damn well better know what's going on in Books 2 and 3 before I start officially pitching it to anybody!)

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

Here's a thought: I've talked with a few editors lately and they say they get way too many pitches for series. They want to see books that can stand on their own. Because what if you never sell the first book? You'll have a whole set of manuscripts that you can never sell because they'd have to read the unpublished first book to make any sense of it.

So, when you pitch, they'll usually ask you if you have anything else. They want to know how much you write, if you can write more than one book a year or decade or whatever. They want authors who are prolific and dependable. If you know how long it takes you to write a book, that's good to let them know. That's when you can tell them about the other books, if they're interested in the first one. The word is, everyone and their brother has written a series - so it's good if each book can stand on its own.

Some agents/editors are extremely annoyed by the one liner pitch, so it'd be good to find out what that person likes before you pitch to her/him. But I do find the one line/paragraph/page method a good one for getting the premise of the story and the characters and their goals, motivations and conflicts very clear in my own mind. Sometimes I have to start with the page and work back to the paragraph and then to the one-liner. But it helps me get my story clear, so that when I present it to an editor or agent there isn't a lot of stammering (toward which, you will remember, I am nearly pathologically inclined).

[annathepiper]

*nodnods* I've got several items on my list that are standalone things, so I'm not lacking for those. For example, the book I've sent to Tor! It's quite comfortably a standalone, but a couple of the items on my 'may be good to write if the first one sells' are two followups to that to turn it into a three-book story arc.

Which is not the same situation as the trilogy, but since I'm pretty darned sure I can't condense The Dove, the Rook, and the Hawk into one long single story, I'm expecting I'll have to pitch it as a set. This is why I asked about that at Writer's Weekend--and I believe it was Anna Genoese who said to me that if I were to pitch it to Tor, they'd want to see a four-page synopsis for the first book and a one-page synopsis for Two and Three.

Thanks for the tips! Definitely stuff I'll want to be thinking about.

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

pitches usually matter little to me anyway... I go by word of mouth, or catchy cover, or how much of it I can grok from the first few pages when thumbing through in the library or bookstore... basically anything that looks like it has a good storyline, I will read... Maybe that's why my collection keeps growing so much...

[annathepiper]

What do you call a 'catchy' cover? How much of that is the cover art and how much is the blurb on the back? As I have described to ssha elsewhere on the thread, while the specific point of what I'm trying to do here is not necessarily the 'back cover blurb', that is a possible use for it. :)

[shikyrie.livejournal.com]

catchy cover - to me- is pretty pictures... if i see something that catches my eye on the shelf, especially if it has star trek, sci-fi, fantasy (elves, dragons, wizards, etc- that's what got me started on Dragonlance) I'll pick it up and look at it... If a book has real good reviews (friends, magazine, tv, etc) I'll pick it up and look at it... I rarely read what's on the back cover... my attention span is virtually nil a lot of the time, and a catchy blurb on the back isn't enough to hold it... it takes a good book, and a good writer, to hold my attention long enough to make it to the end of a book (you have no idea how many books i have started, and never finished)- you get the picture... :)

[annathepiper]

Ahh, okay. When I pick up a book, usually it's because something about the cover art has caught my eye--and if I actually pick up the book, the very first thing I do is read the blurb.

Though like I said, I'm not specifically thinking about writing blurbs at the moment. Mostly, I'm thinking about how to capture the general core concept of a story and work on expanding it out into a synopsis. The main usefulness for me in doing this is to have a paragraph or so that I can stick into a query letter to send to a publisher or agent--and to take that paragraph and be able to expand it out into a full story synopsis, which I'll also need to be prepared to send when I make inquiries about novels. :)

I'm given to understand that authors frequently don't write their own cover blurbs anyway, but I haven't had enough recent updates on that to know if this is still the case for the publishers in the SF and fantasy fields. mizkit or writersweekend could better remark upon that than I. :)

[writersweekend.livejournal.com]

Um...I've heard editors from well-respected print publishers remark on how much time they spend on writing the cover copy. But for my e-pubbed book, I'm pretty much doing my own blurbage. I think some smaller and newer presses will have the authors do their own back cover copy, too. At least one of them wants you to write it so the art department can use it when they design the cover. I've never heard of anyone having control over their cover art, in any universe, unless you own the company.

[annathepiper]

Okay! Thanks for the information. :) I'd definitely heard about authors having no control over the cover art, but was less certain about the copy.