My new book marketing strategy: Shut up about the rest

As a professional marketing consultant, I have written elevator pitches for products; I have relentlessly honed messages until they are crystal clear and easy to communicate; I have helped clients focus in with laser precision on their audiences.

Why, then, has it been so hard for me to do these things for my own fiction?

Yesterday at the San Mateo County Fair’s Literary Arts Stage, I finally realized why. It’s because authors, like parents, have an awfully hard time shutting up about their kids.

This revelation came during a workshop given by Beth and Ezra Barany called “How to Pitch to an Agent or Editor.” (Beth is an author as well as a creativity coach for writers and Ezra is author of the successful self-published thriller, The Torah Codes.) As I was working through one of the exercises we practiced during the workshop, it suddenly hit me. Here’s what’s been going on.

The art of not telling all

Writing a novel is about about creating an emotional experience. Over hundreds of pages, you let readers inside your characters’ lives, make them care about what happens, give them a feeling of inhabiting a different world. You do this with scores of scenes, tens of thousands of words—all of which are vital to the telling of the story, or else they wouldn’t be there (you did edit ruthlessly, didn’t you?)

Describing your novel—whether at a cocktail party or in a pitch letter—is about promising an emotional experience using as few words as possible. You don’t have to give them the whole experience. Well, duh! But for someone who has spent years creating that emotional experience in the form of a book, it can be awfully difficult to say one thing, say it well, and shut up about the rest.

Pitch-craft: Leave it out!

One of the exercises we did yesterday was to create a pitch with five components, including: the initial premise; the main character; the primary objective of the main character; the antagonist or force preventing the main character from getting what they want; and the disaster that could happen.

For a few seconds, my mind was blank. I had written a whole book, but I didn’t know how to describe it because I was afraid of leaving something out. Then, because we only had a few minutes, I just went ahead and wrote something: “A middle school science teacher with a quiet, orderly life suddenly finds God. Struggling to reconcile his newfound faith with his belief in science, he becomes fixated on a sculptor whose blasphemous work drives him to an unforgivable act.”

The workshop audience (yes, I was brave enough to volunteer to read it aloud) “oohed” positively and Ezra Barany said it gave him a feeling of the emotional experience the book promised. Yay! Still, there was a little voice in my head saying, “But there’s so much more! It’s written from the points of view of various characters! I didn’t tell you about the runaway teen, or the documentary filmmaker, or the science teacher’s girlfriend…”

It doesn’t matter. Readers will find out all that when they read the book. I know I could hone the pitch further, but the main point is that it doesn’t tell all.

Beth did have a helpful tip for books with multiple characters/viewpoints (which all of mine seem to be). She suggested writing a pitch for each of the main characters, which I think is a brilliant idea and plan to do.

Best of all, now I know how to work on the pitch for my current novel while I’m still writing it. Maybe by the time it’s done I’ll actually be able to tell you what it’s about.

Have you learned the art of the pitch? How? Leave a comment and let me know what works for you.

An award-winning author—me!

I am thrilled to say that my short story, The Boy in the Window, won me the California Writer’s Club award for Most Promising Writer of the Year and also won second place in the San Mateo County Fair’s Short Story division.

I’m headed off in a few minutes to a giant autograph party and reading for the anthology Carry the Light, which contains my story along with hundreds of other stories, poems, and essays and is published by Sand Hill Review Press. If you’re at the Fair, you can purchase a copy for $10.