Pitch Perfect - The Art of the Elevator Pitch

The elevator pitch is one of the most important elements in promoting your manuscripts successfully. Picture this: you are searching for a publisher, taking an elevator when in walks one of the top literary agents in the country. What do you do? Do you freeze up when she makes small talk or do you knock her socks off with a perfect pitch, snag her business card and score a meeting?

This isn’t a pitch to seal the deal and earn representation right there in that small, confined space. Did I mention elevators are a close second on my irrational fear list behind escalators? I digress. The whole idea behind the pitch is to keep the agent interested. If your thirty to sixty second “tell me about your book” can hook them, it’s accomplished what you’ve wanted it to do.

Chuck Sambuchino, author of Create Your Writer Platform, discussed the idea of perfecting a pitch for fiction. He asserted that to hook your audience, in our case the literary agent inside the elevator, you just needed to offer the narrative arc in the most creative way possible.

Nina Amir who blogs at the San Francisco Writer’s University blog, mentions the following steps Chuck outlined when making your pitch perfect: share details, offer a tag line,  and introduce the man characters, something interesting, the inciting incident, and the hook. Sounds pretty simple right?

I gave it a go for my next two novels and came up with the following:

Manuscript One:

Charlie Flynn wants nothing more than to keep her head down and do her job, but her meddling sister Mikki keeps interfering with her love life. After several ill-fated attempts, Mikki finally gets the match right. Unfortunately Charlie’s dark, domineering, and divine looking perfect date ends up being her new boss, Declan Pearse. She fights her attraction, but Declan brings those feelings out in her that she thought she had long buried, and she falls headlong into a dangerous, dark romance that leaves her bound by her desires. 

Manuscript Two:

All of her life Lana Aherns wasn’t someone who fit in. At twenty-four people often looked at her oddly for spending time in an old man’s diner, for driving an old lady’s car, and for owning a bookstore, but she liked her quiet life. She meets Michael, a handsome, mysterious stranger, and she feels like he is the person she’d been waiting her whole life for, maybe even eternity.  But their happiness is threatened by that very eternity, and Lana has to make a choice in order to be with Michael forever.  

 

Leave a comment letting me know which pitch works better for you.