Many's the writer with a completed narrative who bemoans how much more difficult marketing it is than writing the narrative in the first place, which isn't all that easy to do well to begin with. Pre-acceptance marketing, query letters, book proposals, novel synopses, release marketing reviews, post-release marketing reviews, all incorporate pitches intended to present a narrative in a best favorable light for engaging audiences' interests.
Every facet of marketing involves a product pitch to consumers. Pitch writing is a writing art unto itself, as difficult a one to master as any worthwhile activity. An ideal pitch entices consumers to purchase a product they absolutely must have.
A narrative's pitch ideally condenses a narrative down to a few enticing and memorable lines without spoiling the plot or giving away an outcome. An effective pitch incorporates four salient yet parallel points: the narrative's central dilemma to be resolved, a dramatic premise and character situation resonating with a target audience, artfully poses a central suspense question, and emulates a narrative's narrative voice.
In order to develop an understanding of the arts of effective pitching, I spent a few months immersing in the daily query screening toils of agents and editors. You-all have my deepest sympathies. I screened several hundreds of pitches and queries and dissected them as I went along, looking for strengths and weaknesses as they first intuitively then distinguishably presented. Sooner rather than later, I began to see similar issues in most of them. A very few had strong points, of which I also took note. The weak and the strong basically were the same points but were polar opposites of each other in dramatic effect.
Using a baseball analogy--not that I'm especially a baseball fan--I filtered through and labeled the pitches by their weaknesses and strengths I encountered.
- Balk; the pitcher lollygagged around the mound for awhile, wound up, then stepped off the rubber. Yawn.
- Pitch-out, pitcher lollygagged around the mound for awhile, wound up, then threw to first base to hold up the runner. For crying out loud, get on with the mother-loving game!
- Pitching a no-hitter; good for raising audience tension through personal resonance with pitchers engaged in a pitching duel, but not all that exciting a game otherwise. There's very little dramatic action on the field.
- Strike; no hit, Ball, no hit. The ball passes the hitter. Very little dramatic action on the field.
- Hit; batter hits the ball. Dramatic defensive and offensive action takes place on the field. Huzzah, game on!
- Home run; a hit out of the park! Not much defensive action, but exciting offensive action.
- Pitch spoils the plot by telling the action in a way that the outcome can be easily guessed or known.
- And Plot pitch, rote summarization of the action of a narrative; and something happens in the beginning, and something happens in the middle, and something happens in the end to no unified purpose.
- Lackluster voice that says the narrative's voice will be lackluster.
- Rhetorical questions artlessly posed tell several suspense questions of the narrative.
------ - The good pitches had unique voices reflecting their narrative's voices.
- They demonstrated a working grasp of core story craft attributes: conflict, causation, tension, and antagonism; a dilemma to be resolved; without giving away the plot or outcome.
- They didn't tediously summarize the entire narrative in a way that all the dramatic action was revealed.
- They concisely gave sufficient detail about their narratives' unifying theme.
- They artfully posed suspense questions, non-rhetorically.
- The best ones did it all in a harmonious synergy and in an economy of words that enticed me to read the narratives' openings.
