Top 10 book pitch tips from The Book Doctors
At Stockholm Writers Festival 2020, The Book Doctors will prepare you for making your best book pitch ever.
But there’s no need to wait until then to benefit from their expertise (and to start practicing for their Pitchapalooza session!) Below they share their top book pitch tips, along with three videos containing additional pitching insights.
Top 10 book pitch tips
1. A great pitch is like a poem — every word counts.
2. Make us fall in love with your hero. Whether you’re writing a novel or memoir, you have to make us root for your flawed but lovable hero.
3. Make us hate your villain. Show us someone unique and dastardly whom we can’t wait to hiss at.
4. Just because your kids love to hear your story at bedtime doesn’t mean you’re automatically qualified to get a publishing deal. So make sure not to include this information in your pitch.
5. If you have any particular expertise that relates to your novel, tell us. Establishing your credentials will help us trust you.
6. Your pitch is your audition to show us what a brilliant writer you are, so it has to be the very best of your writing.
7. Don’t make your pitch a book report. Make it sing and soar and amaze.
8. A pitch is like a movie trailer. You start with an incredibly exciting/funny/sexy/romantic/etc. close-up with intense specificity, then you pull back to show the big picture and tell us the themes and broad strokes that build to a climax.
9. Leave us with a cliffhanger. The ideal reaction to a pitch is, “Oh my God, what happens next?”
10. Show us what’s unique, exciting, valuable, awesome, unexpected about your project, and why it’s comfortable, familiar and proven.
Further Book Doctors’ book pitching resources
30+ pitch tips from Book Con Pitchapalooza
https://youtu.be/umFRGswLRWE
The Art of the Book Pitch
https://youtu.be/qlPPOF5eqDE
Common pitch mistakes and how to fix them
https://youtu.be/KYx3imJL7jE
Learn more about The Book Doctors on their website.
See all SWF20 faculty on our faculty webpage.