3 Kinds of Pitches

We're going to talk about how to talk about your work

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Today I thought we could get a little technical. Some of you have asked for a new workshop stream on pitches in more detail, and I’m happy to provide that. In the interim, how about we talk pitches briefly today?

Before We Get Started

I’ve got a few quick notes to make before we roll our sleeves up:

a. Pitching isn’t only one thing. It’s not only the quick 30-second elevator pitch and it’s not only the pitch on social media or the long salescopy to buy your book. A pitch is all of those things. It’s a logline and a query letter and salescopy and a tweet and post all at once.

b. There is no “best” pitch. There’s no magic template where you plug-and-play or MadLibs your way into maximum success. Anyone selling you any kind of formula or universal approach is selling you magic beans and hot air. Any pitch can be made effective with practice and decision making. Pitches come in a lot of different shapes and sizes.

c. Anyone can learn to pitch better. Too many people talk about pitching or selling or advertising their work like it’s some skill outside their reach or some thing they could never do. The problem isn’t knowing the mechanics, it’s a confidence and support issue. The mechanics come through practice, but the confidence comes from someone telling you what works and what doesn’t and how to fix it. If you’re struggling with pitches or promotion, ask for help.

d. A pitch’s job is to provoke a feeling in a reader and then encourage them to act on it. Whether we’re selling commemorative plates of famous sandwiches or we’re offering 30% off on custom photos or just selling your latest book, the goal of whatever we’re writing as our pitch is to try and get someone feeling a certain way so that they’ll keep reading, listening, watching or whatevering and then they’ll click the button or link to make a purchase. A pitch isn’t selfish or bragging, it’s part of the transactional nature of capitalism.

What I’ve got for you today are 3 typical pitch styles that you’ll most often see out in the world or have a chance to do yourself.

First: The Pitch In Thirds

This is the pitch you’re most familiar with, with elements divided into thirds. Whether that’s beginning, middle, end or something more like person A, person B, persons A and B together, or any combination of plot, character, and stakes, this is the kind of pitch you’ll see in a query letter or contest. It’s the pitch most people know and it’s probably what everyone thinks of when they think about structuring some ideas to convince someone else to do something.

Upsides: People are familiar with it; the format is pretty common; it lays out information in clear fashion.

Downsides: It can absolutely dull and drag on too long or meander through uninteresting patches of ideas before it gets to the better stuff; people think it’s the only way to pitch.

Second: A Spike Pitch

Use a Spike pitch when you’re building up to or around a single idea you want to the reader to most gravitate towards or remember. Whether it’s a punchline or a strong opening or attention-getting in the middle, a spike pitch helps take a single idea and puts a spotlight on it, while all the other material works in service of that highlight.

Upsides: When done well, the spike is a haymaker that can pull a whole pitch together and make a strong impression; a spike pitch is also highly emotional and provocative by design so it’s great at grabbing attention.

Downsides: Wow is this hard to do; when this fails, it tends to fail spectacularly; too often a spike doesn’t get enough support from other pitch material and the pitch as a whole ends up flaccid and hard to engage with.

Third: A Pitch With Consequences

A bit harder to describe, the consequence pitch, aka the pitch with consequences or the consequential pitch is something carefully architected where each pitch element is a setup or a payoff to some other pitch element. You bring up a character because you’re also going to say what that character wants. You mention the location because you’re trying to set mood and it’s the mood that you use to help connect the stakes to the character you already introduced. This creates a pitch where everything is dependent on the things around it in order for the pitch to maintain its shape and urgency.

Upsides: This is a great pitch for when your work has a lot of moving parts and you’re not sure which are more important because they all feel important; you can pack a lot of details and connections into it; it lets you show off.

Downsides: It’s particularly complicated to orchestrate; it takes more organization than most people are willing to invest in a pitch because they want good results quickly to mitigate their nerves and fears; it can still come across to readers like you’re throwing a thousand things at them all at once.

There is no right pitch

There are more than 3 ways to pitch. These are the most common but they’re not the only ones you’ll see out in the world as people try to navigate talking about their story as a product (we’ll pick that up next week, because it’s a whole thing) - there are inverted versions and more malleable structures that don’t entirely fit the named types of pitches too. When it gets down to it, there isn’t a “right” way to do it other than whatever way works for you.

The hard part though is figuring out what it is that works for you, and how to assemble it. The rough logistics will always include some kind of fact, something that exists in the book, along with something emotional, some way you want the reader to feel or think about the fact you already gave, and then at some point some kinds of stakes or risk or danger or reason you’re giving the reader something emotional to think or feel about the fact you started with. That whole cycle of Fact → Emotion → Stakes will continue for nearly every fact you put into a pitch, whether you talk about your main character or the kingdom they escape from or the robot horse chasing them.

But an F → E → S cycle still isn’t always what every writer wants. They want to know which facts and in what order to provide them. And sadly, this is the one thing I can’t teach. Not because I don’t want to, I super do, but because it’s incredibly variable depending on how you write sentences or shape a voice or how you want to talk about this thing you wrote.

This is where the decision making comes in. You have control here, you get to choose from all the things you’ve got some number and some arrangement of those things to best fit the idea you want to present.

So when you’re thinking about writing a pitch that highlights the kindling romance of your romance novel, pick the F→E→S that best suit it. Or which things make your thriller more thriller. Or whichever ones bring out the hard edge to your SFF in your epic. You get to choose. There isn’t really a “wrong” way to go here, it’s more like some arrangements of some words are going to be less successful working in concert than others.

If you get stuck, remember the first rule of writing: Writing is the act of making decisions, so make some.

Love you. Talk soon.