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Writing

What Is a Pitch?

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What is a pitch?

“What Is a Pitch?” by Joan Y. Edwards

The pitch is the structure of a story in a nutshell. A pitch is an eye catching, heart trapping short summary of your book or article. It can also be called your “Hook” or “Logline.” It’s a great selling point to include it in your query, cover letter and use it as a blurb on the back of your book. Get the pitch as close to 25 words as possible.

Write your pitch on a 3″x5″ index card. If you can’t get it all written on the front side of the card, it’s too long.

It’s a good idea to outline your plot and write your pitch first to make sure your plot works. To make sure that your plot is logical and events follow as a natural consequence. You can make sure the action your main character takes will help really solve the problem that is keeping him from achieving his goal.

Here are three examples of a good pitch.

  • Can clumsy Jill win beauty queen of her high school in spite of the fact that she dyes her hair purple, tripped their football team’s quarterback, and  spills red punch on the principal’s white suit?
  • Jason wants more than anything to be a pilot for Avery Aviation but his father won’t hire anyone in the family as a pilot.
  • Title: Tasteless Writer -Adam Conway- Genre: Comedy
    A world renowned taste tester/food critic loses his sense of taste and struggles to discover who he is once his one defining characteristic is gone.

A Good Pitch

Tells WHO A pitch tells you an adjective and the main character to answer the question who? a sixteen year old girl; a five-year-old boy; an anxious daughter; an obnoxious son, an honest clerk, or a feeble man.

Tells WHERE A pitch tells or hints at the location (the setting): beach, high school, desert, bedroom, top of skyscraper, city, small town

Tells WHEN (Especially, if it’s historical fiction)

Tells What Main Character WANTS  A pitch tells you what the main character wants more than anything else in the world. He is  willing to take death-defying action and change to get it. He will not stop until he gets it. Getting it is an obsession with him. He wants a skill, a prize, a friend. He wants to defeat an enemy. He wants to stop someone from doing something. He wants to get someone to do something.

Tells WHY? Why does this matter so much to the character? Why should we care?

Tells WHAT STOPS HIM? A pitch tells the lowest point of the story from which readers doubt that anyone, especially this character with these flaws, can succeed.

Questions to help you check the plot of your manuscript which might help you pinpoint ideas to put in your pitch.

 
WHAT’S your main character  WILLING TO DO? HOW IS HE WILLING TO CHANGE IN ORDER TO GET IT? WHAT IS HIS INNER AND OUTER STRUGGLE?

WHAT FIRST ACTION DOES HE TAKE in your story THAT HE FIRMLY BELIEVES IS GOING TO HELP HIM, but alas and alack, it puts him farther from his goal.

WHAT SECOND ACTION DOES HE TAKE that he believes  will help him and it puts him AT A DEEPER disadvantage.

WHAT THIRD ACTION DOES YOUR MAIN CHARACTER TAKE THAT PUTS HIM SO FAR DOWN IN THE DUMPS HE ALMOST GIVES UP.

UNTIL HE HAS AN AHA MOMENT AND FIGURES OUT THE IDEA AND ACTION THAT TAKES HIM ACROSS THE GOAL LINE OF SUCCESS

I hope that this blog helps you have a better idea of how to write a pitch. All points in the plot are interrelated and lead the main character to get what he wants or face defeat.

Resources

  1. 7 Reasons to Create a One-Page Pitch Before You Plan …
  2. How Writing Concept First Will Help Your Script & Pitch
  3. Top 100 Loglines for Scripts

Please let me know what techniques and guides you use to write your pitch.

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What is a pitch?

Joan Y. Edwards, Author
Copyright © 2015 Joan Y. Edwards
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Writing

How to Write a Pitch, Summary, and Synopsis That Sells

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“How to Write a Pitch, Summary, and Synopsis That Sells” by Joan Y. Edwards

In a pitch, query, pitch summary/chapter summary, or a synopsis:

  1. Mention the genre and the number of words.
  2. Use Times New Roman, Size 12 Font.
  3. Use One Inch Margins.
  4. Single or double-spaced according to the guidelines of the publisher or agent. If there are no directions online, go with your best gut feeling or the advice of someone you trust.

 A Pitch is the shortest summary of story that captures the core emotional conflict of a story. A selling pitch is short with an emotional tug.

Best selling short pitches use only one or two sentences. They call a pitch for a movie a logline. Your pitch’s job is to tug at the reader’s heartstrings and cause him to feel empathy, sympathy, compassion, respect, favor, understanding, and/or support for the main character’s predicament along with an unstoppable curiosity to find out if and how he solves his problem. If your pitch doesn’t do that, simply it does not sell. The reader closes his mind to your story and that’s it.

A Pitch tells Who, What, When, Where, and How and Why should I care? 

In the Short Selling Pitch -Elevator Pitch – (one or two sentences – 25 words or less is BEST. Keep under 60-100. Get readers to relate to your main character.Short Selling Pitch Describe an ironic emotional situation that your main character is in that cannot be solved unless this character changes. The pitch must have the biggest conflict mentioned so that the emotional pull is there for the audience. Describe his present condition in the inciting incident at which he has no hope of winning or getting what he wants (reaching his goal). In many stories, characters don’t get what they want, however, they get what they need.

Longer Selling Pitch is also only about the Main Character and one or two others in the main problem or conflict. This longer selling pitch is used as the blurb on the back of your book in a paragraph or two. It can be used as the plot summary for Amazon or Barnes & Noble to help sell the book. This longer pitch can be 60-200 words (100-300 for a romance). Lean to the fewest words you can use and still tell the story and pull in with emotion.

Use phrases from short and long pitches in conversations with editors, agents, and prospective readers. Use them also in query letters, cover letters, proposals, and beginning of a synopsis. It is a great marketing tool to persuade people to buy your book.

The Literary Consultancy in the United Kingdom shared a short pitch and a longer pitch for Pride and Prejudice:

 Short Pitch

Pride and Prejudice is a contemporary, literary romance about a woman who falls in love with a man she thinks she hates. (22 words)

Longer Pitch (Major Problem Summary)

Pride and Prejudice, a contemporary, literary novel, tells the story of Elizabeth Bennett, a proud, intelligent woman, one of five sisters, whose mother is committed to marrying her children off as a matter of urgency. Elizabeth meets Darcy, owner of a grand estate, but considers him over proud, arrogant and undesirable. In time, she learns that he is not all that he appears to be, and revises her prejudice, before they fall deeply in love. (75 words)

Non-Fiction Chapter-by-Chapter Summary for Your Book Proposal

In addition to a table of contents, your book proposal needs what Michael Larsen calls “chapter-by-chapter summary.” The chapter-by-chapter summary outlines what each chapter covers in one paragraph each.

Your Agent or Editor wants a Synopsis.

What is a synopsis? A synopsis is an outline of the plot of a book that is 2-5 pages with from 500-1250 words. If your synopsis is 25-30 pages long, the agent or editor might lose interest after the first 5, so be succinct. You don’t want your reader to fall asleep.

When you write a Synopsis, first start with your pitch summary from the blurb on the back of your book cover. After the pitch summary, then write the full synopsis using a paragraph for each plot point and tell the ending.

Scriptlab.com gives 5 major points in a video: http://thescriptlab.com/screenwriting-101/screenplay/five-plot-point-breakdowns

  1. Inciting Incident
  2. Lock In
  3. Midpoint
  4. Main Culmination
  5. Third Act Twist

My Plot Points:

  • Ordinary Day
  • Inciting incident with new goal to solve a really big problem
  • First failure
  • Second failure
  • Third failure – Aha moment when he figures it out and gets brave enough to confront
  • Fight
  • Win/Lose
  • Resolution What’s it like on the new ordinary day

Bonnie Adamson, illustrator and Assistant Regional Advisor of SCBWI-Carolinas shared Darcy Pattison’s article about Synopsis: Darcy Pattison. “Synopsis: A Google Search Example:”http://www.darcypattison.com/marketing/synopsis-a-google-example/. Darcy proposes a fun and effective writing exercise for crafting synopses, blurbs, elevator pitches, based on the conventions of Google search shown through 12 phrases.

Synopsis: A Google Example: Need better marketing copy for your story? Using only 12 phrases, this video tells a story and evokes emotion.

Holly Robinson gives pointers for your synopsis:

  1. Keep your language clear and active, and focus on telling the story. As your plot unfolds, write it the way you would tell about a movie to a friend, skip the dull parts and hit the main highlights.
  2. Start the book at the first scene in the book with the main character: “From the moment she woke on that chilly February morning, Savannah Smith knew without a doubt that she would divorce her husband.”
  3. Show the beginning, middle, and end with main character conflicts and resolutions. Don’t get bogged down in details. Stick to a few main characters – perhaps the protagonist and antagonist and make their core conflicts and their emotional ups and downs, with their twists and turns.
  4. When you introduce a new character, give a quick character sketch: “Burly Jones is a 36-year-old workaholic whose biggest joys in life are horseshoes, women, and his motorcycle, not necessarily in that order.”
  5. Include perhaps one piece of dialogue between the protagonist and the antagonist to give evidence of the tone of the story.

On Internet Movie Data Base website (IMBd.com), you can check the Plot Summaries against the Synopsis. The synopsis is usually much longer. Compare the Plot Summary of Gone with the Wind with its Synopsis. The Plot Summary is approximately one page. The Synopsis goes on and on and on.Synopsis.

References:

  1. Book Ends Literary Agency. “Synopsis:” http://bookendslitagency.blogspot.com/2009/02/synopsis.html
  2. Bonnie Adamson. http://bonnieadamson.com/
  3. Cliff Daigle. “How to Pitch Your Novel:” http://fictionwriting.about.com/od/thebusinessofwriting/a/How-To-Pitch-Your-Novel.htm.
  4. Darcy Pattison. “Synopsis: A Google Search Example:”http://www.darcypattison.com/marketing/synopsis-a-google-example/
  5. Glen C. Strathy. “How to Write a Synopsis:” http://www.how-to-write-a-book-now.com/how-to-write-a-synopsis.html
  6. Holly Robinson, “Synopsis Tips:” http://www.huffingtonpost.com/holly-robinson/book-synopsis-tips_b_2426724.html
  7. Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com
  8. Lee Allen. “How to Write a Book.now.com Plot Outline vs Synopsis:” http://www.how-to-write-a-book-now.com/plot-outline-vs-synopsis.html#sthash.eXbj8Uxa.dpuf
  9. Literary Consultancy: “Synopsis:” http://literaryconsultancy.co.uk/?s=synopsis
  10. Nathan Bransford. “How to Format a Query Letter:” https://blog.nathanbransford.com/how-to-write-a-query-letter
  11. Scriptlab. “Five Plot Point Breakdowns:” http://thescriptlab.com/screenwriting-101/screenplay/five-plot-point-breakdowns
  12. William Cane. “Book Proposal:” http://www.hiwrite.com/bookproposal.html

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Never Give Up
Joan Y. Edwards, Author
Copyright © 2014-2019 Joan Y. Edwards
Flip Flap Floodle Will this little duck’s song save him from Mr. Fox?
Joan’s Elder Care Guide A guide to help caregivers and elders find solutions.