Denver Pop Culture Con 2019 Panel Spotlight – Pitch Perfect: Crafting the Best Book Proposal

Written by Tim Girard 

​Pitch Perfect: Crafting the Best Book Proposal
Saturday June 1, 2019 3:30 pm to 4:20 pm ROOM 601 - Authors
Have a story or book you’re working on? Want to know how to put together an elevator pitch? Or even just want to know how not to bore people at parties when they ask you what you're working on? First, the panel will discuss the pitch and how to make them perfect, and then we’ll help out the audience with their pitches.
Panelists: Mario Acevedo, Vivian Caethe, Betsy Dornbusch, Travis Heermann, Dean Wyant
 
On Saturday afternoon of Denver Pop Culture Con 2019, a panel of authors assembled to help hopeful storytellers hone their ideas into a short-but-sweet and effective pitch. First, let’s make sure we are clear as to what a pitch is and isn’t. A pitch is not a query letter, which is usually about a page in length. A pitch is also not a synopsis, which usually describes the whole book to the end, but may not include every character and is usually one to two pages long. A pitch is similar to a logline, which is a film industry term, where you describe your film with one sentence (a good place to start is to search, ‘how to make/write a logline’). The pitch is the ‘meat’ of the story. It should include the core elements, with a few important details, told in a few sentences, to create interest and make the person want to know more.
 
Your pitch should be geared towards being verbal and face-to-face, not to say that you can’t put your pitch in print or post it on social media. Think of it as what you would tell someone in an elevator, at a party, or ideally, in an agent’s or editor’s office. First off, it isn’t a Hollywood trailer, so don’t start with, ‘In a world…’ unless it is vital to your story to establish how different your world actually is. Another exception is if you think the location might be a point that your audience would appreciate. For example, if your story takes place in Colorado, and you are pitching your story to people from Colorado, then by all means, mention the setting. The majority of the time, instead of focusing on the world you’ve built, you should focus on the main character(s). Who is our protagonist, and who is our antagonist? When referring to them, don’t use their names, because that won’t give us any information about them, so it just wastes time/space. The name ‘Walter’ doesn’t tell us anything, but if you refer to your main character as ‘a high school chemistry teacher with cancer who secretly cooks crystal meth,’ well, now we are intrigued. It doesn’t need to be that detailed, it could even be as simple as ‘bartender’ or ‘student’ or ‘divorcee.’ This will instantly give a more specific idea of who the character is and what their world is like. There was a little bit of discussion among the panel members about using descriptive terms. Some think that certain details shouldn’t be used, unless you come back later in the pitch to why that detail is relevant, while others think that it doesn’t need to be mentioned again, as long as it is relevant to the overall story, and helps to quickly add depth to the character. Also, make sure to mention the antagonist, so that the cause of the conflict is clear. Instead of saying, ‘our main character must keep his drug business a secret…’ say ‘our main character must keep his drug business a secret from his DEA agent brother-in-law.’
 
Once you have those two characters locked down, there are four main points you want to make sure to touch upon: (1) What is the protagonist’s goal? (2) What is the motivation to achieve that goal? (3) What is the conflict that the protagonist will face while trying to achieve that goal? (4) What are the stakes of not achieving that goal? And let’s be clear, unless you are writing a story for children, the stakes should be either death or worse than death. Being disappointed or sad if the goal isn’t reached doesn’t count as ‘stakes’ (again, if you’re writing for children, you don’t have to put Elmo in a near-death situation). 
 
After you have taken care of those signposts, then you can add some details. Is there a word or two that you could add to quickly define the genre or create interest? If you mention the ‘Space Force,’ it very quickly tells the person you’re pitching to that your story is science fiction and is interplanetary in scope. It can also be important to identify what the genre is because chances are, your listener will want to categorize your pitch… so they can re-sell it. It is a big advantage if you know who your market is so that you don’t discourage yourself pitching a sci-fi story to someone who never reads sci-fi. Another trick is to use loaded words that will instantly give weight to you pitch. Instead of ‘journey’ or ‘quest’ if you use the word ‘crusade,’ we will apply all of the implications associated with that word, setting it apart from a pitch with more vague terminology. 
 
One of my own biggest misconceptions about pitches is that I thought you were supposed to hand them your whole story, reduced to a few sentences, with no need for further discussion. This is not the case. You want your pitch to have some “things that make you go, ‘hmm’” in order to intrigue them to the point of wanting to dig deeper, and that’s how you get them on the hook. One way you can do this is to seed the questions that you want people to ask. Include interesting-sounding references to an aspect of your story, in the hopes that they will ask about it, allowing you to delve deeper than what little is allowed in the pitch itself. This can also be a good way to test your story itself. If someone asks you questions about your story, and you can’t answer them, maybe it’s the story that has issues, not the pitch.

Some authors might even start with their pitch first. If they can come up with a pitch interesting enough that they would want to read that story, then they can build on that: write the query letter or back-cover copy, then build to the synopsis, etc., all using the original pitch as a guiding light. Another way to get some ideas is to search for other pitches and learn from what they do effectively and ineffectively. Pitch your story to friends and family and encourage them to give honest feedback so that you can improve it further. For more resources, check out Pitch Wars, and follow #writerscommunity on Twitter.

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