Welcome back to the Writer’s Secret Weapon. This is volume 7 meaning there are THREE more volumes to go before the paid subscription content starts rolling out.
If you don’t know who I am, I’m John, I help you write better and this is the Writer’s Secret Weapon, the treasure trove of my ideas about writing and creativity that I compile every week to help people like you write better.
This week I’ve got something to say about pitching, a nice little parallel between some guys on a beach and publishing, and then I’m taking the legs out from under one of the big deals in traditional publishing.
How are you doing? How’s that writing going? Need anything?
I - Thinking
So I’m sitting there the other day, listening to a pitch session of first-time authors. This is their weekly get-together-and-work time, though lately it’s been get-together-and-talk-shit-what-other-people-are-doing time. Somehow, after they’re done complaining about how well someone else is doing with finishing their draft, someone lobs out a pitch to see what people think. It’s met with silence. So they try again, a little more urgent and with more words. Less silence but still no real engagement.
Then another person tries their pitch, and soon they’re neck-deep in trying to shape epic fantasy stories into molds and templates normally used in movie trailers. Too many things start with “in a world…” or “When XYZ happens…” and that’s the moment I knew I needed to talk about pitching this week.
Because it is hard and one of the greatest problems writers have in doing it is the sameness of all the reference materials. After a while, after all the movie trailers and bullshit contests, after all the canned advice and the regurgitated blogposts, pitches start to feel like they’re impersonal machine-crafted cogs in a greater publishing machine and less like someone inviting someone else to enjoy some imagination.
Pitching is one of those Schrödinger’s Cat situations where it simultaneously has a lot of rules and no rules. I’m pretty sure that duality is one of the main reasons people get stuck with pitching, all that decision paralysis and the enormity of “I could talk about anything” making it hard to know where to begin. Compound that with the idea that some beginnings, even only a word or two in, will set you up for a weaker response and you might not even know it, and you can imagine how many knots writers tie themselves into.
So today let’s take away some of those knots. Let’s talk about two of the kinds of pitches you can use for your work and then no matter the medium you put them in (spoken, written, whatever) you’ll have hopefully a clearer idea of how to reach your goal with a pitch.
First, the soft pitch. A soft pitch puts forward an idea but either the idea itself or the way you frame the idea isn’t overtly confrontational or aggressive or intense. Soft pitches are great when used to help feel out a situation and get a sense of the person on the other end of your pitch.
A soft pitch for Lord of The Rings would be: Can small heroes cross an entire continent to save the world?
Or for the currently happening 2023 World Chess Championship between Ian Nepomniachtchi and Ding Liren: Two chess titans vie for the World title in a best-of-14 contest of chess played at the highest level.
Soft pitches often run a little vague or broad because of that avoidance of intensity. They’re useful in situations where you have the ability to follow up with more words and ideas and sentences. There’s an expansiveness to a soft pitch, a space created that you can fill with more information. Don’t let that room for expansion bring you to a point where you’re mentioning a handful of things and developing none of them though. Focus isn’t the same as brevity.
The dangers to a soft pitch though is an immediate risk of low engagement. Go too soft, and the other person will question why they should care to follow up for more information.
Contrast this with a hard pitch, one where you’re using the intensity of the idea or the framing of the idea to your advantage. It’s direct whereas the soft pitch can often be indirect.
A hard pitch for blowing off the rest of the day to watch The Muppet Show: Who the hell wants to work when we could instead laugh at timeless jokes?
Hard pitches pride themselves on the forthrightness of the emotion or concept within them. They’re great for when you want to make an impact you know will net you some response. There’s an inherent provocativeness to them.
Are these the only two kinds of pitches? No, not at all. But when you’re trying to get more familiar with how you pitch (because how you interpret and use all these tools is up to you and you’ll have you own spin on each and every one of them), knowing your hards and your softs can give you a tremendous advantage.
II - Thinking, part 2
Traditional publishing has a very bad habit of not only being slow as hell to change but when they do change they absolutely act like they thought of this change and they’re the best at it. I think this is because they’re unwilling to look at how their privilege, whiteness, patriarchy, and class insulates them from the realities of daily creativity, so they can just sit back and move from space to space to pontificate and perpetuate all the gatekeeping like nothing’s changed.
Twitter collapse? Jump to Substack and Bluesky. Manufacturing and shipping delays in physical supplies? Tighten submission requirements so there are fewer things to have to manufacture (the added bonus is that you get to complain that there are fewer “good” submissions that way). There’s always that disconnect between the reality of how people create and how traditional publishing interacts with those creations and those creators.
This reminds me of European kings. Picture any of them, particularly those from the 17th and 18th centuries and you’ll find some people very privileged and very disconnected from anyone actually doing. Those European unelected monarchs who got to power because of inbreeding and family have very little idea how the people at the far end of the world are going through their day, in the same way that the agent with the newsletter who is telling you not to follow trends has no idea about the anxieties and frustrations you feel trying to write your book when you’re bombarded with a thousand things you have to somehow keep track of.
In the last few weeks, Substack and Substack Notes have blown up in popularity as a Twitter alternative, with people flocking to the new spaces and new potential in earnest. This opportunity could be good, a real chance to break away from how things used to be done but that’s a risk and typically publishers don’t do risk, because risk might mean things change and anything could change and that’s scary.
European rulers weren’t big on change either. That lack of change is what kept them in power, and the potential for change meant a potential for revolution just as much as a potential for a change in the status quo. Rulers love their quos to be status, so when you get some people operating outside the structures and conventions they’re used to, things have the potential to get interesting.
Buccaneers, named for the buccan, the Arawak word for the wooden structure used to slow-cook meat over a smokey flame, are people outside the European structure. (You may know them as pirates, and yes, they got called buccaneers because of barbecue, but calling the football team the Tampa Bay Barbecue sounds weird.)
The traditional colonial mercantile structure is straightforward - money flows away from labor towards the ruling class where some percentage of it trickles back down through the aristocracy until crumbs come back to the working class.
I’m trying to do this without pointing out that the money doing the flowing is often in the form of stolen property and enslaved people, which is a significant problem that should not be ignored but it’s not where I want to focus. Yes, chattel slavery and colonization are inherently destructive and are universally bad, and yes they’re factors in why pirates did what they did and how they did what they did as well as how kings stayed kings. For now though, I just want to stick buccaneers versus kings in terms of the status quo.
Because as more traditional publishing makes its way to newsletter and moderate-to-longform publication, we can be another round of buccaneers outside the system. They do things their way, the old way, the way they swear things need to be done (because it keeps them in power), and meanwhile we can the people out on the beach thousands of miles away smoking meat and hanging out and doing our own thing.
This week I want to talk about that independence. I want to talk about the conscious decision and choice to build something new when an old system no longer applies.
To save some Substack space, I did this section in audio. Enjoy!
(and here’s the transcript for that section)
III - Thinking, part 3
“My book is Little House on The Prairie crossed with Inherent Vice and Watership Down.”
“My book is Boogie Nights + Angela’s Ashes + Y tu mamá también.”
Comps, also called comparatives or comparables, are one of the common overdone parts in querying and marketing your book.
In theory, they’re supposed to represent other titles already published that relate to your work in some way. They’re titles your manuscript has something in common with, they’re titles your manuscript has been influenced by. And in theory they’re supposed to indicate to a publisher that you’re reading things in and out of your genre and not writing in a Kaczynski shack in the woods oblivious to everything that isn’t you and your work.
That’s the theory anyway. In practice, comps are overblown shorthand that allow for submissions recipients to make snap judgments both about you as an author and your manuscript as a whole.
And here’s why comps will never entirely work.
They’re more about what you can name-drop more than helping your work. Submissions people often look to comps to see if the query writer has some kind of awareness as to what books are popular and what books are at the current forefront of discussion in publishing. This poses a problem because what publishing is talking about is not the same as what readers are reading, making this something of a guessing game. What they’re looking for are references to the popular books of the last three to five years. What you might be reading might not be the popular books of the last three to five years. But that doesn’t mean what you’re reading isn’t a valid comp of your work, at least not in the way comps are intended. In practice though, there are “good comps” and “bad comps” and it so often boils down to trying to shoehorn in trendy titles that aren’t relevant to what you’ve written just because you want to impress someone.
You’re supposed to be talking about your own work, not someone else’s. If I’m writing a cyberpunk story with plenty of twists and turns and action and commentary, I should be able to take every single word I can to say as much as I can about it. I want that query reader to know that I’m proud of my work and I’m going to say as many things as I can in 300 words to make my work sound appealing and worth their time and money.
The minute I stop and reference Snow Crash, I’ve planted a seed in the reader’s mind that they need to think about Snow Crash and think about how what I’m sitting is like (but not too much like) Snow Crash and how it might be possible for my book to be successful like how Snow Crash was if my book were marketing to some degree like how Snow Crash was. More and more Snow Crash shows up in their thinking over time and that means my work, the thing I’m trying to do something with because Snow Crash is already published, gets crowded out. Even if Snow Crash shows up as part of one sentence, it’s going to suck the oxygen out of the pre-Snow Crash conversation.
Now imagine what would happen if I picked a more current book.
A good comp can be a bad comp. Let’s suppose for a minute that I’m writing a legal thriller. Let’s say I started writing this legal thriller because I read Presumed Innocent one summer and I really liked it so I got more into the genre and picked up a few more titles like The Rainmaker and The Legal Limit. I do all the work in finishing and polishing my book and start querying, mentioning any of three titles.
It can be absolutely true that your book shares a lot in common with those three titles, but if the query reader took one look at Presumed Innocent’s description of a murder scene or the violent B-plot climax of The Rainmaker or The Legal Limit’s slow opening and disliked all three of those books, then you’ve painted yourself into a corner by saying your book (which the query reader hasn’t read yet) is like those three books they didn’t like. In trying to give them what they wanted (comps), you’ve hamstrung yourself and you’d never know it since the query reader can reject your query and never tell you why.
You did everything right and you’re still wrong. That’s a sign of a terrible system.
IV - Feeling
Substack has really bloomed as a platform, with loads of super-smart people talking about loads of super-smart things. And this sounds great - there are people with thousands of new subscribers every day and people growing big audiences as they talk about their super-smart things.
So why do I feel stupid?
It reminds me of my twenties, where all of a sudden there were loads of people in film school who seemed to having this whole other kind of experience than I was, talking about academic and abstract things with a profound vocabulary and having people take them incredibly seriously while I was trying to get laid and learn how to cross that divide from young adult to adult without trying too hard.
There wasn’t a divide in some stated way, but it became this silent division, an us-versus-them between the erudite and lowbrow, the I-read-Proust and I-like-butts crowds. After a while I thought this was some fault of my own, that I was reading and seeing all the same things as everyone else but I was just too deficient and lacking something, some gene, some brain fold, to process things like everyone else.
It grew into resentment over time, and I looked at the growing chasm between these elite-sounding pretentious brats and everyone I hung out with to see that they were insulating themselves with all the theory and highbrow discussions and barely tolerated the peasants who didn’t care that a tree in a breeze symbolized woman’s suffrage in some Swedish art film.
That hostility grew when I moved to publishing, watching more and more people flex this us-vs-them into the gatekeeping of being “good enough” for traditional publishing that I would later build a whole career around making sure writers had plenty of tools and skills to get past gatekeeping and write whatever they want.
I don’t want art to be exclusive and elitist. I want people to be able to appreciate the Impressionists alongside political rhetoric right next to jokes about Leon Spinx. If that means we have to shove some dorks in some lockers or put some bricks through plenty of windows in ivory towers then let’s get to shoving and throwing.
In writing this section, I’ve scrolled through Substack Notes more than once. It’s packed with all the people I subscribe to, all the journalists and authors and economists who say loads of things you at times need a decoder ring to parse and I just want to yell, “Can you please just be a person for like a minute?!”
No, I don’t think they’re aliens or anything, but I think there’s a lot of artifice and presentation that’s getting in the way of real connection. It’s a kind of passive dishonesty, a façade built over time in a bubble and trotted out in front the world like a bullshit show pony.
You can be thoughtful and compassionate and intellectual without being elitist about it. You don’t have to sound like everyone’s idealized version of a glasses-wearing fop to connect with people or build an audience or be successful, though every social media platform is going to condition people towards an in-group or an outlier for the survival of the platform.
The weird codependent relationship we end up with via smartphones and websites is one entirely of our own manufacturing, but that’s no reason to forego relatability as we click and tap and type.
It just bothers me that I sound like this and seem to be invisible while they sound like that and seem to drown in attention.
I see the parallels in writing spaces too. Certain types of stories get popular, then everyone jumps to them. Other things wax and wane too fast or too contentiously and so many writers who are just trying to develop and define their creative space get left behind or disregarded because they’re “only” writing a fantasy novel or a “just” a romance.
What you’re making and who you are isn’t just or only anything. It’s as much a part of you as your hands, toes, love of cookies or your morning bedhead.
I would love to end this with great instruction or how-to on how not to fall prey to the us-vs-them, but I haven’t found it yet. I am thinking about it though, and that’s a start.
Thanks for reading this week’s Secret Weapon. The paid content starts in THREE weeks, so if you’re interested in a deeper crunchier here’s-how-to-do-a-thing dive, please subscribe. You’ll still get the Secret Weapon every week, no matter what.
Love you. Talk soon. Ta ta for now.