This post was originally published at Novelicious.com and is now at WritingTipsOasis.com. WritingTipsOasis.com acquired Novelicious.com in June 2022.
You can listen to Anna’s podcasted novel over on her website www.annabellwrites.com and follow her on twitter @annabell_writesLast week I came across a competition on Authonomy in which to you pitch your novel to chicklit author Claudia Carroll, who will then pick her favourite pitch and critique 20,000 words of the winner's book. What a fantastic competition! All I have to do is write 225 words in a pitch, how hard can that be?
Unusually for these types of competitions you didn’t have to have a complete manuscript – just 20,000 words completed (or else you wouldn’t have anything to get critiqued!) And as a bonus you could enter as many different pitches as you wanted, just as long as they were for different books. Now this competition truly was perfect for me, as what do I have a lot of is half written novels; I’d be able to pitch my completed and uncompleted books.
So, all I had to do was translate my books into pitches. I started with the book I’m writing at the moment, not only because it is freshest in my mind, but I think it is also my strongest story. And sure enough after ten minutes of writing and about twenty minutes of tidying, rereading and polishing I had a pretty good first draft of a pitch. How easy was this competition going to be!
Then I started writing the pitch for another one of my novels and, well I got the reverse of writing nothing. I wrote lots, and yet for all the words I was writing I couldn’t for the life of me explain on paper what my book was about. I deleted the pitch and started again but still I couldn’t succinctly write what my book was about. I went back to the basics and tried to create an elevator ‘tell me about your book in two sentences’ pitch, but again I floundered.
I started googling about writing pitches and came across many words of wisdom about what went into pitches and how to think about writing them. But still it did not help.
I turned my attention to one of my other partial written novels, and again I struggled. And then it hit me. My novels might have a nice enough story line, and they might be well written, but what happens if they’re unpitchable? I mean, what if the story isn’t strong enough, and therefore doesn’t translate into a pithy description. Which is a bit of a bugger when I’ve written either a full novel, or at least 20,000 words of it.
Now before I end up crying about my unpitchable work, I have to draw on the positive. Mainly my new book pitches really well, as it does have a strong story. And what I’ve learnt (the very hard way) is that when I come up with book ideas, and when I’m in my planning stage, I’m going to write a book pitch. Not only a back of book blurb, but also an elevator pitch. If I can’t sell it to myself on paper, then at least I will saved myself a lot of time and words trying!