If you’re thinking of pitching your book anytime soon, like my pal EJ Murray, you’re going to need to learn a few things first. Here are my best tips & tricks for pitching your book.
- Finish your manuscript! Nobody wants to get to the end of a pitch, decide they’d love to read more, and hear “Oh, I’m nearly finished.” That means you don’t even have a first draft, much less a decent edited copy to send them. If you have a non-fiction manuscript, you can get away with a decent proposal and around 10,000 words, but for fiction, you’ll need a completed manuscript.
- Know your genre. Your agent is going to be pitching as well – they’ve got to sell your book to the publishing house. In order to do that, they (and you) need to know what genre it’s going to fall into, so they can pitch to the right editors and publishers. If you don’t have a clue, they won’t either, and they won’t be able to sell the book.
- Know your approximate word count. Round it off to the nearest hundred words. This is important because each genre has an average word count and if you’re way over or way under, they probably won’t be able to sell your book.
- Know your comparable titles. If your book is in your local Barnes & Noble, what books are going to be sitting around it? You should do enough research and reading so you’re familiar with what’s similar to your idea. You’re not going to get an exact match, but you should be able to say something like “My book would be next to Book X because we both do Y (or we both talk about Z).
- Prepare for rejection. Your book is not going to appeal to everyone. The agent you’re talking to may not handle that specific type of book (“low” science fiction vs. “high” science fiction, for example), or may have something similar already in the works. Don’t take rejection personally. After all, you don’t actually want an agent or editor who doesn’t adore your manuscript, do you? If they’re lukewarm, they won’t be pushing the sales as much as if they loved it.
Your pitch should look something like this:
My novel, MY STORY, is a 100,000 word adult historical fiction novel about X. [Give a short description of your main character (maybe two) and the major conflict, then give a couple of plot points to entice the agent to ask for more] My comp titles would be Book Y because of Z.