Practice Your Pitch In Unexpected Places

Last week I was on vacation with my husband and his family in the Catskills. The trip was very nice, and I had a lovely time. And there are some places that are just too scenic not to be inspiring. I love mountains. Mountains are my favorite places to vacation. (Other than cruise ships, that is.)

But I'm back from vacation and Moonlight & Magnolias is only a few days away. And I have plans to pitch my current urban fantasy project there. I've been polishing my manuscript and fine-tuning my pitch for weeks. And this past week, I got some unexpected practice.

This is the first time since I started writing full-time that I've been introduced to a large number of people. Invariably, when you are plunked down in a small talk situation, people ask what you do for a living. And for the first time, I decided to answer the question with "novelist". I might not have had anything published yet, but writing novels is what I do after all.

This, of course, led to that terrifying question "so, what do you write?" I've posted before about the benefits of contests like TwitchWeek for coming up with the one-line answer to this question. But sometimes you have more time than that to talk, and the dilemma becomes how much information is too much. You never want to tell someone interested in your book "it's complicated" or "it's a long story" or "it's hard to explain". At the same time, you don't want to launch into one of those boring, long-winded, why-don't-we-just-sit-down-and-I-can-recite-you-my-entire-manuscript-verbatim explanations.

And then my opportunistic side took over: What a perfect opportunity to try out that two-minute agent pitch I'd been working on!

After all, there was no pressure here. These people were just random people I met at a vacation resort. The odds were pretty slim that they were in any way involved in the publishing industry. But if I could take people with only a fleeting, polite curiosity and get them really fascinated in under two minutes, how much better prepared would I be for someone who started out interested?

Several people glazed over and zoned out well before my pitch was done. But not everyone. And by the end of the week, I was much more comfortable with talking about my book.

Do Not Skip Ahead

I've been having a little trouble lately reining myself in. I finished a first draft recently and there's a huge part of me that just wants to query the heck out of it, even though it's nowhere near ready for submission. I know better, and I will restrain myself, but every time a "perfect" opportunity shows up on my radar, I have to talk myself down.

A few weeks ago, one of my favorite agents opened back up for submissions on a very limited basis. And she's asking for Urban Fantasy.

And then I saw mention of a contest that looks oh so very cool.

New agents with an interest in my genre are popping up left and right.

And urban fantasy is on the rise.

Look hard enough, and "perfect" opportunities will just jump out of the woodwork at you.

Except that they're not "perfect", because my manuscript is not done. As I have to remind myself every single time I see one of these tempting blog posts or tweets or news articles, trying to query right now would be bad for me.

Why? Well, there are many, many reasons. And don't worry. I'm going to list my favorites here! (Admit it; you were worried I was just going to say that and run, weren't you? Okay, maybe you weren't, but I'm going to list them anyway.)

• Agents and editors say it all the time. "Do not query your novel before it is finished!" I literally see someone tweet or blog about this at least once a day. Sometimes as often as ten or twelve times a day. With so many "unspoken rules" and "unseen observers" in publishing, breaking a rule that all the gatekeepers are shouting at the top of their internet lungs on a daily basis just seems like a bad idea.
• I know, in the logical side of my brain, that my WIP isn't ready to be seen by anyone outside my critique group yet. So why would I send out a query that would just make me afraid that someone might request the manuscript? What would be my plan really? I query, and then when I get the request, I scramble and try to force myself through the revisions in the amount of time I could reasonably pass between receiving the request for a full and sending it? In today's instant gratification, technology on demand world, how much time is that really? It's not like I have the US Postal Service to blame for a delay if the agent asks me to email them the file. How much time would I really be able to buy myself then? A few hours? A day? A weekend? Not enough, no matter what kind of excuse I came up with.
• Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I did manage to buy myself a few weeks so I could crash through the revisions process. It can be done. I've seen it done recently to marvelous success. Some people are capable of that kind of thing. I envy those people, because I am not. I know it would show in the manuscript I sent out, and then, when I got the inevitable rejection, I would always feel like I blew a great opportunity. Sure, I could revise it and requery, but I think agents and editors are probably inclined to look even more critically at a second submission. Why raise the bar for myself needlessly?
• In business, they say "dress for the job you want". As an unpublished novelist, I don't want to put anything less than my absolute best work in front of industry professionals. I'm sure, as a newbie, I'll still make a ton of rookie mistakes. Adding an extra one that I know about just seems silly.

But knowing all of that doesn't stop me dreaming. It doesn't stop me seeing a "perfect" opportunity arise and saying to myself "Oh, if only my novel was finished, I know that would be just right for me. . . Well, they only need a query letter and the first five pages to start with. My first five pages are pretty good. Maybe I could just submit and then revise like mad crazy, just in case I make it to the next round?"

No! Stop! Do not pass Go; do not collect $200 in imagined royalties. It can be hard sometimes, letting a "perfect" opportunity pass you by, but that's the name of the game. When the manuscript is ready, there will be other opportunities out there for me, opportunities that really are perfect. Until then, though, I just have to keep restraining myself, reminding myself.

Do not skip ahead.

Feeling Twitchy?

Today two of the agents at BookEnds, LLC started a pitch contest on Twitter. They're calling it Twitch* Week and if you want more details, click here.

There have been several of these types of contests over the past few months. The Knight Agency did their Book In A Nutshell pitch contest a few months ago. Colleen Lindsay over at FinePrint Literary Management did a Query in 140-Characters or Less contest on her blog back in January. (Our very own Darlene got a nod in that one!) These contests are all over the place if you keep your eyes open.

I love them.

There are a number of skills you must have to be successful in publishing. First, most importantly, you must be able to write. Some people will quibble over the degree of skill you must have here in order to be published, but I think we can all agree that, to at least some extent, you must be able to string together various words in a form which conveys some semblance of a story. I'd like to think you need to be able to write really, really beautiful prose in order to be published, but the cynic in me is forced to admit this isn't always the case. (The self-doubting pessimist in me is secretly glad!)

Also, because the days of over-the-transom submissions have pretty much passed, you must also be able to write a good query letter. People hem and haw over the nature of the query letter system, but right now it's the name of the game. If you want anyone in publishing to look at your manuscript, you have to sell it with a solid query letter first.

Another skill you need is the ability to pitch, succinctly and yet still coherently. Some people call it the elevator pitch, the quick little plug for your book that you could communicate to someone in the time an elevator takes to reach its destination. It's a very important skill. As writers, we attend conferences and conventions and the like and try desperately to get thirty or so seconds with our choice editors and agents so we can convince them that our book is their next big thing. It's also a skill that very few people tell you that you need when you set out to be a novelist.

I realized the lack in myself of this particular skill almost right away. Here's how: once I started telling people I was a "novelist", the following conversation invariably took place:

Me: I'm writing a book.
Them: Oh, wow. What's it about?
Me: *blinks blankly, twice, before taking a deep breath* Well, you see, there's this guy. And he thinks his life is. . . but then this other thing happens. . . and then he finds out this. . . and he has to do this. . . and this. . . and there are these other people -- they're the bad guys -- who want to do this instead. . . so then they. . . *voice trails off as previously interested person wanders away into a wall with a glazed over expression*

Oh dear, I would think. I need to come up with a better answer to that question.

Contests like this week's Twitch Week do just that. When you can only explain your story in 140 characters (actually 123 for this one, since you have to add the @reply tag in there somewhere) you learn to boil your plot down to its bare necessities while struggling to hang onto its unique voice. The first time I entered one, it was like an epiphany, a lightning bolt striking my brain. So that's what my book is about! I get it now!

Several of the Modern Myth Makers are participating in Twitch Week. I've already entered two of my projects. What about the rest of you out there? Anyone else feeling twitchy???

*For those who don't get it right away, I think the idea behind the name is something like this: Twitter + Pitch = Twitch