Pitching Your Book

Writing your book is one thing. However, getting it published is quite another. It's all well and good to say that you want to write for the sake of writing--you need to love this career if you want to make any money, however, it is still nice to....actually make money. And if you want your book to be picked up by a publishing company, you're going to have to find a way to make it stand out.

Here are two main pieces of advice.

1) Elevator Pitch.
Imagine you're traveling in the elevator with someone and suddenly the lift freezes and you are both stuck there. Now normally that's horrible, but let's pretend that the one other person you are stuck with just happens to be working for a major editing company. And since they're trapped with you, they HAVE to listen to your idea for your book! There is no escape for them! (laughs manically)

...Ahem.
However, because you also want to make sure that your friendly book editor does in fact, become interested in your book and not just feign interest, you want to work on your pitch. Find a way to summarize your story in 30 seconds or less. The first part of these 30 seconds should be based on summarizing the exact plot, and in that short time you need to mention three things--the conflict, your character, and what makes it unique.

Remember these three tips--short, sleek and sexy.

Then the next part of your thirty seconds should be based on emphasizing your tagline. What would that be? Well you know how everyone likes to say, "It's the next Hunger Games!" or "It's Star Wars meets Harry Potter!" As eye roll inducing as these can be, they say a lot about your story and what makes it unique.

After that, the only thing that matters is combining the two and trimming them down. After all, you're going to be trapped in that elevator for likely only a short time, and you want to make sure that you leave the editor with something.

And that's how an elevator pitch works. Now you'll be ready for when you meet with your potential publisher. Even if that exact circumstance will probably never happen. Unless you.....arrange it yourself.

Writing Query Letters!

All of us who want to get our writing published need to know about querying. It can be kindof a scary step in writing & publishing, but there are a lot of resources out there to help us along the way.

Writer's Market is great for finding who to send the letters to, and it's always a good idea to find out what the SPECIFIC publisher/agent wants. Sometimes you can find information like that in the entries in Writer's Market, or visiting their website.

Here are some good quick tips for writing query letters:
- You ALWAYS want to know about who you are submitting to. It's a little embarrassing to send them fantasy if they only publish historical fiction or romance.
- Know who to address the query letter to (it's better to have a name rather than "To Whom it May Concern" (it'll show that you took the effort of five extra minutes to figure out who the person is. Even if it isn't listed, you can probably find it on their website)
- be formal, and without grammatical errors. Some places toss letters with a mistake without a second look.
- new/different/original idea, present it soon in the letter (they read a lot of letters, don't want to take a lot of time)
- SHORT - only one page for the query letter.

Also, here is a great blog for learning about query letters:
http://queryshark.blogspot.com/