Don't Dread Your Elevator Pitch

Concentrating the essence of your story can actually help you write your book

Photo by Possessed Photography on Unsplash

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Cheers, Everyone!

New Year’s Resolutions are looming! If yours is to finish and submit your book this year, you’ll need to hone your elevator pitch. Don’t groan. Elevator pitches are difficult to nail down, but they can be your friends. Honestly.

Even if your resolution is just to complete the first draft of your novel, memoir, screenplay, or nonfiction book, this capsule summary can help you pull the whole project together and keep your progress on track. That’s why I thought this might be a good time to review the ins and outs of elevator-pitch-writing, both as a focusing practice and as a marketing tool.

What follows is distilled from a workshop I offered my MFA students.

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WHAT IS AN ELEVATOR PITCH?

When you’re asked, “What are you writing about?” what do you say?

Now, while you’re thinking about that, let me up the ante: Imagine that fate places you in an elevator with your dream agent or editor, and you have this one chance to describe your book to them, but you have to make them eager to read it before you reach their floor. Are you ready?

If you can describe the most compelling elements of your story in the 30 to 60 seconds before that agent or editor exits the elevator, then you have your pitch. And while you may never get to deliver it in an actual elevator, it will go into every query letter you send for your book. Later, when the book is published, it may appear as a capsule in marketing materials, perhaps even turning up in magazine, newspaper, and bloggers’ roundup book recommendations!

If you can’t fit your description into 60 seconds, though, your captive audience will probably get out of that real or virtual elevator and move on without giving your project another thought. It’s a truism, but busy book people do need to be hooked before they’ll commit the time and energy to read your work. That’s especially true of the people you’ll need to sell and publish your work, but it’s also true of the readers you hope will someday flock to and buy your book.

The first question everyone wants answered when they first learn of a new book is, What’s it about? The best possible answer to that question will quickly dazzle them in a way that makes them a) remember the promise of the work b) record the title and/or author, and c) commit to tracking down the book and making time to read it. That bedazzling answer is your elevator pitch.

But the value of this pitch both precedes and goes well beyond selling your book to prospective readers. Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, whether you’ve so far completed just one chapter or 25 drafts of the whole thing, it will benefit you in the writing process to periodically ask yourself, What’s the essence of my story? What is your book actually about, and what matters most in your story? This preliminary snapshot will be more aspiration than pitch, and it may change dozens of times before your book is truly finished. Still, the exercise of distilling your story down to a preliminary elevator pitch can help you clarify both your intentions and the actual story you’re writing.

That’s why you need to master the art of the elevator pitch right now.