Writer self-care ,
What I Look for in a Pitch
By Helen Lane
The first thing is that all agents will be drawn to different things. I am not a visual person so I am often not drawn to mood boards (I find them overwhelming), and I will scroll past most pitches that rely upon listing tropes. This is because many books in the same genre will be able to list the same tropes and it doesn’t really tell me anything about your book.
Six key tips for pitching:
- Genre/ title/ word count is really important. At a first glance it tells me if a project is something I COULD work on.
- A snappy one-line pitch is helpful, and I have requested many pitches over the years based on a hooky one-line. But they are hard to do well. So I am really looking for a short pitch that can tell me: who I am following, where we start, inciting incident (doesn’t have to be action but it will be the catalyst that changes things for the main character) and then where we are going/ who we are going with. This last bit will set up if it’s a new romance, if it’s a horror story, if we’re going on a quest, involved in a battle and so on. Whatever is at the heart of your book.
- Unique Selling Points are hard to get across in a short pitch but try and think about what makes your book special. When you talk about it what makes you excited? What makes your story stand out from potentially many other stories with similar plot points/ tropes? I always look for the pitches that tell me something about the book I am considering reading beyond vague vibes.
- Although I like comparisons, if you rely on the comps to be your whole pitch, I will likely scroll past. Comps help us work out the vibes of the book and how we might market it, but they do not tell us about your plot.
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By Helen Lane
About the author
Helen Lane is a literary agent at the Ki Agency, working in a very hands-on capacity with her clients to perfect their manuscripts before submission and encourage her authors to push their writing to new levels. Before becoming an agent, she spent years producing developmental edit reports for the agents she interned under. Her strengths lie particularly in identifying plot holes and pacing, world-building, and character development. Helen presently carries out Agent One to Ones with authors and has taken part in various panel events in her role as an agent.