The root of the root
There’s an E. E. Cummings poem which tells us:
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life
And that’s what we’re talking about this week. The root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a book called Sales.
Or, indeed, a book called Quality.
All this is a roundabout way to say that this week’s email is going to be talking (again) about elevator pitches and it’s going to invite you to forget completely that a pitch is meant to be about sales. Forget selling. Forget marketing. The pitch I want you to find is all about finding the root of the root and the bud of the bud.
We’ll get to Feedback Friday later in this email, but for now – clear your mind and chant:
- My pitch has nothing to do with sales.
- My pitch is not going to try to describe my book.
- My pitch is going to avoid all abstract nouns. (Revenge, honour, redemption, whatever.)
- My pitch is not the house; it is only the front door.
- My pitch is going to find the one little piece of crystal that somehow embodies the novel.
- My pitch is likely to have two or maybe three ingredients, probably not more.
To explain those points in a bit more detail –
Nothing to do with sales
Take my basic pitch for the Fiona Griffiths stuff: “detective who used to think she was dead.” That pitch never featured in any marketing material, nor could it, because that sentence gives away THE big secret of the book.
Not a book description
It doesn’t even vaguely describe the book, because you don’t know where or when the book is set or anything at all about the crime or investigation on which the book centres. As a book description, the pitch totally fails.
No abstractions
There are no abstract nouns in that pitch. In practice, the book deals centrally with some big abstractions. (What is it to feel alive? The book is all about the struggle to be human.) But the pitch has no interest in those big themes, or not really. There’s a detective. She is in recovery from a strange psychiatric illness. The tiny bit of information conveyed is very specific, very narrow.
Front door only
Most pitches I see are attempting to summarise an 80,000 word book in 12 words. That doesn’t work. You can’t do that – or not in any interesting way. All you can do is show people a front door that they want to walk through. One of your pitches from last week (one good enough to get a free agent 1-2-1) was simply this:
Dirty Pitch: A refugee crisis in space.
Boom! That doesn’t tell you much about the book – who’s the hero? What’s the story? Are we near future or far future? What specific goals and obstacles define the story? But it’s a front door you immediately want to walk through. You just instantly want to know more.
A little piece of crystal
A crystal is specific, not abstract. It’s tiny, but fully formed and perfect. And in the case of your book, it’s the root of the root (the deepest thing in your novel) and the bud of the bud (the thing from which everything else shoots and forms.)
So that take that “refugee crisis in space” pitch. You can already guess that those words will hover over every page of the novel. It’s the deepest thing and the most fruitful. It’s the source of everything else. It’s also the thing you’ll recall first, when you remember the novel 20 years later. That’s a perfect pitch.
Two or three ingredients
Lots of great pitches have just two ingredients:
Teen romance + vampires
Orphan + Wizard school
Refugee crisis + spaceships
Detective + thought she was dead
Some pitches need three ingredients. One of last week’s Feedback Friday winners came up with a pitch that effectively amounted to:
Ghosts + Orient Express (or similar) + Victorian curse
Take away any one of those ingredients and the book would seem a little thin. Pop all three in the pot and there’s just a little shiver of anticipation.
Another example (again drawn from one of your Feedback Friday entries):
Murder story + 1960s America.
That’s OK, but a bit dull, right? I mean, you might like murder stories and you might like that setting, but this pitch is giving no reason to pick up that book specifically. On the other hand, what about this:
Murder story + 1960s America + NASA space programme
Now you immediately want to read that book. The combination of ingredients coheres perfectly into something yumptious. You can already feel that if you started to over-describe your book (forgetting that your pitch is offering a door, not the whole house) you’d lose that instant pop of interest.
Two last things from me before we turn to this week’s Feedback Friday.
One: A couple of people, writing literary fiction, have complained that this pitching task is one required by genre fiction only. But that’s truly not the case. I found myself using Ian McEwan as an example of how successful literary novels always have a gleam of silver at their hearts. So Atonement had a famous dirty bit, Enduring Love had a bloke falling off a balloon, Amsterdam involves a euthanasia / murder story. And so on. In each case, the deeper purpose and themes of the novel offer proper, thoughtful, literary fare. But McEwan purchases his right to do the literary stuff, but making damn sure that there’s a gleam of silver in every book. If you’re writing literary fiction, and you are less famous than Ian McEwan, then I recommend you take the same approach.
Two: Are pitches about achieving sales? Or maximising quality?
The opposition is phoney. A good pitch deals with both things. Sure, it’s about sales, as those Ian McEwan examples show. Even when you’re as good as he is, you need a spark to make the sale.
At the same time, a good pitch is fundamentally about quality. Because a good book has a kind of holism and the little scrap you use for your pitch should say something really deep about what the novel is. What it does. Why it is. Why it’s necessary.
Go back to that simple pitch: “refugee crisis in space”. Would you want to read a book about a modern-day refugee crisis? An overcrowded camp in Calais? Trafficking gangs in Libya? Probably not. Move that same basic dynamic to space and of course you want to read more. What’s more – if the book is any good – it’ll shift your view of refugees. It’ll change you.
The root of the root and the bud of the bud.
Feedback Friday
Free agent feedback: Last week, I promised that three talented people would get a free agent 1-2-1. I’ve chosen the lucky three and you can read their winning pitches here:
The Truth and Lies of Coraline Crow
Congrats to the Chosen Ones and I’ll be giving away free 1-2-1s to Feedback Friday Folk as often as the mood takes me. I’ll honestly be surprised if at least one of those three books doesn’t end up in print.
Assignment for this week: Elevator pitches again please, but a bit different this time.
- Book title
- Short pitch only (12 words or less). I’m happy with just a list of ingredients if you want: ghosts + trains + Victoriana, that kind of thing.
- One para book description. So now you can describe the book in more detail. We want to feel the connection between the book and the longer description. Make sure we can feel the “bud of the bud and the root of the root” joining the short pitch and the longer description.
That’s the assignment, share them here. I will look after Premium Members first and foremost, but everyone’s invited.
Not a Townhouse member? It’s free and easy to join. Info here.
Want to become a Premium Member? Join here. Use FRIDAY15 at checkout, and save 15%.
That’s it from me for this week. Do have a go at this week’s exercise. It’s the simplest, but most productive exercise you can do for yourself.
Over to you.
Til soon.
Harry
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