Writing a Pitch for the Next Novel (Pregnant Again?!)
Pitch writing—so hard. I place it on the same ugh level as the book synopsis, and both are required for so many parts of the publishing journey. How do you condense years of effort into one or two succinct sentences? Or even a few pages?
Pitches are those punchy descriptions that start a query (if you’re after an agent), get submitted with your book to editors, and eventually get used in your book promotion.
This week, I’m back to writing them. Because I’m pregnant again—with the next book.
I’m not literally pregnant—let’s get that out of the way, right off. My son is happily 29 and on his own. My spouse and I are empty nesters (although raising two puppies sets us back into parenthood frequently). And I don’t want to dishonor parenthood by equating it with a book birth, because raising a human kid is hard work. Nothing like it.
But books are babies too. They are grown and nurtured and worried over for years. My last one (A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue) took ten. I almost gave up on it so many times. Now it’s out in the world, entering its own life apart from me, in the hands of readers and happy to have that freedom. Books stay around for years, at least mine have. So I wish it a long and happy adulthood.
Now my attention is on the next baby, still in incubation.
Last Bets is my next novel. This will be my third in fiction, my fifteenth in every kind of book. I’m going to turn 70 the month it’s released (April 2024). When I look back at my career as a writer, starting with food journalism and ending up with three novels, I’m happy to have birthed so many books I’m still proud of and are still on the bookseller sites.
I didn’t originally plan to have two novels released so close together. I’m not inclined to that, personally—I like taking my time. But Last Bets was my distraction book while A Woman’s Guide was with my agent. I didn’t expect to get into it so deeply or to finish it so fast. But I loved the story and I loved writing it, so it provided very effective distraction and a new book. My agent says it my best yet, which makes me very happy. We should get better as writers, right?
Being pregnant again is fun in a creative sense. If seeing a book from final revision to publication takes about nine months (some writers average less, some more), then I’m in my second trimester this month. Enough growth inside to feel the weight of the impending birth, enough weight to make me achy with worry some mornings and slightly nauseous at the thought of doing all that promotion again so soon. How will I not neglect A Woman’s Guide, which readers and reviewers are still loving and posting about? How will I give this new baby enough of my love?
That’s limited thinking, I tell myself. But it’s a reality. I’ve been immersed in A Woman’s Guide all year. I’m afraid Last Bets is going to feel smaller in comparison to its older sibling, because the novel just published has made so many reader friends. I’m afraid Last Bets won’t be received as well.
A few weeks ago, when Last Bets was uploaded to the publisher for first printing of review books (ARCs), my editor sent me a lovely email with congratulations and these lines: “I was also struck all over again by how good this novel is, Mary. I'm looking forward to when it's officially out in the world!” How heartwarming. She likes the story a lot too. So will others.
But what crazy timing! Most of my writing friends are asking why not wait? Why are you doing this so fast?
I wanted to wait, but this new novel is pushing its way into the world, carried on the momentum of the first. I asked for counsel from my marketing guru, Dan Blank, and he gave me an insightful response. How hard it is to generate momentum, actually. How good to keep going when you have it.
My biggest challenge, then, is that pitch, that description. I’ve got one I used to sell it to my agent, to submit to editors, but now I know more about the meaning of the story, having lived with it all these months. Like A Woman’s Guide, I want to create a pitch that really describes how the book is for me, now.
Writing a pitch for a new book
Momentum is great, but if the two books are not at all alike in subject matter, plot, people, or setting, you can’t really use the current momentum to create a new pitch.
But you can dive into the meaning, to the particular fascinations that are present in both.
First, let’s talk about writing pitches. You’ll need one, if you haven’t done this already. You’ll also need time to craft it, because it’s so hard.
What does a pitch do?
It answers the question, What’s your book about?
It becomes a primary marketing tool for online booksellers, social media, your website.
It is something you can use in conversation (at the dentist the other day, the assistant asked that question (What’s your book about?) for A Woman’s Guide and I used my pitch. She got very interested and is ordering the book. And I was glad I’d spent so much time crafting that sentence).
If you’re trying to get an agent, the pitch becomes an important part of your query letter. Then the agent uses the pitch to sell to editors. And the editors use it to sell to booksellers . . . and on and on.
A wonderful article by Joel Schwartzberg on Medium explains the challenges we writers have with the pitch. We tend to describe our book when asked What’s it about? We describe what happens. We don’t share the meaning of what happens. As Schwartzberg says, “Describing conveys ‘what.’ Selling conveys ‘why.’ Describing promotes inventory. Selling promotes a point. Describing is the table of contents. Selling is the blurb on the inside cover.” One of my favorite examples in this article is when he says that Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time isn’t a YA science fiction story about a family and three witches. “It’s about a girl who must fight through time and space to save her family.”
So not only do you have to know what happens, you need to know why. What’s the message, the meaning, that readers will gain from the story?
It reminds me of a course I once took in business marketing. The teacher encouraged us to avoid listing features of a product. Instead we were to focus on its benefits. Not too far off from writing a pitch.
Practicing the pitch
Feedback is one of the best ways to practice your pitch. I also recommend reading how books are listed online—what short blurb accompanies the title? What logline appears on the front or back cover?
A good formula to start with is:
Who is involved
What happens
Where does it happen
Why does it happen
I’d add a final one, which may not come into your pitch but is always asked of authors in interviews. Why did you write this book? What fascination does it hold for you?
Here’s the long description of Last Bets, my new novel (thanks to my writing buddies for a LOT of help with this!).
Portrait artist Elly Sorensen leaves her Washington, D.C., life for the Caribbean island of Bonaire, hoping to find refuge from personal tragedy and financial fallout. Instead, she is confronted by old demons, including a gambling underworld that taps paranormal talents she would prefer to leave dormant. On the island she finds an unlikely kindred spirit in teenager Rosie Ryan, an Australian with a gambling father and artistic talents of her own-and a penchant for breaking and entering, particularly into the rooms of other guests. Against a backdrop of a gathering storm, Rosie is blamed for a freak diving accident, and the stakes at the gambling table mount. Nobody is safe, least of all Elly, whose whole life, it seems, hangs on one final game. Underestimated by the men around them, Rosie and Elly must conquer forces they never imagined and fight for a future that promises real freedom.
And here’s the pitch I’ve worked out so far.
Escaping tragedy, portraitist Elly Sorensen flees to Caribbean Bonaire, only to be drawn into an unlikely friendship with an Aussie ex-juvie teen and the danger of the island's gambling underworld that taps her dormant paranormal talents.
Still clunky. But it took so much work to get even to this point. I benefitted from a word limit, so I’ll give you one to play with in this week’s exercise.
A final word (or two) on creative pregnancy
An author buddy and I were on the phone a few weeks ago, talking about births. She has two books published and three kids raised. I was moaning about my lack of energy and my concern that I won’t be able to muster enough to do this next book justice.
She told me she felt that way with her first child. About six months in, she began to worry whether she’d be able to stay awake long enough to care for her new infant. She wasn’t getting much sleep, she ached in new places, she still felt queasy a lot of the time. Pregnancy wasn’t the beatific process her friends had experienced. But, she said, you’re not supposed to have all the resources you need at that point in the pregnancy. By the time you give birth, you’ll be ready. You can’t be ready before it’s time.
Her words really struck me. I didn’t feel ready, I don’t feel ready. Not at all. I’m still enjoying the responses to my current novel.
But, she added, you have to love the baby you’re going to birth. And you have to find enough nourishment for yourself to keep that love genuinely alive.
I went home and did a little meditation on my new novel, the one that will be born in April. I imagined it in my hands, I visualized riffling the pages and stroking the cover. Admiring it. I’d been tired all day, weighted with all I needed to do for this newcomer. After the little meditation, I felt a surge of energy. I made a curry for dinner. I sent winners of my holiday giveaway their signed books. I found a favorite book to read while the dogs slept next to me on the couch.
Your Weekly Writing Exercise
Answering the questions above, see if you can hone a long description of your book, as best you know it now. Spend time on bookseller sites to research titles of books similar to yours, checking out how they are described.
Then, if you can, reduce your description to one sentence, max 40 words.