Why I can't take pitch lines seriously.

[barbarienne]

First, the disclaimer: I have great respect for both Caitlin Kiernan and Merrilee Heifetz. The below commentary is in no way whatsoever intended as a dig at either them or their professionalism.

On to the post:

In today's Publisher's Lunch, under the recent sales, we have the following:

Caitlin Kiernan's BLOOD ORANGES, pitched as "if Quentin

Comments

[dulcimeoww]

Huh. I'd always heard one should avoid pitch lines like that because they sound unoriginal and don't demonstrate your writing abilities at all. Perhaps I have been reading all the wrong blogs, websites, and books.

Though, personally, I don't think a pitch line has ever been the deciding factor in what I'll read. The way to get me to read a book is to put it in my hand, or even just leave it lying around conspicuously in reach. I almost never decide not to bother, I even finished the romance novel that desperately wanted to be hard science fiction and was cursed with many pages of dry exposition before it got around to introducing a plot, even if I did then leave it behind in my hotel room with a warning written inside the cover. I can only think of two recent examples where I chose not to finish a book that I'd started. One was a romance novel with the most entitled uptight bitch of a heroine ever (to the point where I was actively and loudly wishing her harm), and without the writing skill to compensate. The other was, surprisingly, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, which was if anything too good. It was like some superlatively rich and sticky dessert. I enjoyed the first few bites a lot, but more was just too much.

I don't think the pitch has ever decided what I buy, either. I buy books because I've enjoyed other works by that author, even just in excerpts at the back of books I've just finished. I also buy books because I have an unhealthy addiction and want a book Right Now, so I browse through whatever genre is currently speaking to my interests and find the one that grabs me on the first page (cover design is almost certainly a factor). I buy books because they've been recommended to me by someone I trust to know what I'll like. I don't usually even read the back of the book, and I've never had someone tell me about their book at a convention or something such that I went away to look for it later. I have met authors at a convention whose books I remembered when other people told me about how they'd enjoyed them, though.

[barbarienne]

Caitlin Kiernan is not at a point where she has to prove her writing abilities. She's got plenty of books in the world, and editors in the genre are/should be familiar with them. (Also, subgenre of dark fantasy, so a natural neighbor to the new proposal.)

A really good pitch line (and I'll opine that "Tarantino urban fantasy" is a good one) works for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with readers.

An acquiring editor has to be able to get her company's sales force on board. The sales force doesn't actually read all the books a company publishes.* Then the sales people have approximately ten seconds per book to pitch them at the book buyers**. A pithy, one-sentence description helps streamline this process considerably.

Speaking as a reader, pitch lines work for me if they're interesting. They won't make me buy a book, but they will make me go look it up and see if I might like it. I do the usual cover-copy read and my "random page in the middle" test to see if I like the author's writing style.

*A large company with a dedicated sales force has too many books for anyone to read all of them. A smaller company's sales force has other client companies, again leading to too many books for anyone to read all.

**"book buyers" = the folks at B&N/Chapters/individual stores who decide what they're going to stock.

[dulcimeoww]

I didn't mean the single sentence approach was bad, everyone can benefit from doing that well (I'm constantly after my boys to practice it because they both fall into that "share all the details that I'm really excited about without actually providing any context for them first" trap all the time). I just meant that most of the "How to Get Published" types of sites say to steer away from comparisons to other creatives, so if writers shouldn't do it then it's surprising to me that publishers would.

It makes perfect sense once I think of it in wholesale terms, though. If people aren't buying things they know and care about and are instead just buying things they can resell a lot of, then comparing the thing you're selling to things they know sell well is a great strategy.

[barbarienne]

There's a difference between "My book is just like George RR Martin's!" and "My book will appeal to readers who enjoy gritty epic fantasy such as GRRM's."

There is, of course, the danger of not meeting one's own pitch, or one's pitch not meaning the same thing to all potential buyers or readers. My definition for what makes a Tarantino film would be two things: 1. Overblown violence done in a matter-of-fact way (as contrasted with John Woo's overblown but very poetic violence), and 2. Interesting dialogue, often with pop culture references.

But perhaps someone else might use Tarantino as a quick reference for "telling a story out of order" or "about a bunch of gangsters in LA" or "someone on a bloody vengeance spree."

[dulcimeoww]

It's a pretty good critical thinking exercise for writers to come up with those sorts of phrases, I think. It means figuring out what makes your work appealing (and possibly noticing areas for improvement in the process), as well as getting a good handle on who would enjoy your book, and finding an already successful example of marketing to your audience. Usually writers like to be special snowflakes (or so they often tell me), but that sort of comparison starts with finding someone bigger who is already known for doing stuff like yours outside your genre, and thus admitting you are not so special after all while still getting the ego boost of resembling the successful person.

My husband and I played with that format, and came up with "If Joss Whedon wrote epic fantasy," as a similar kind of pitch for his comic Errant Story. It has the strong female protagonists, considerable amounts of snark, rhythmic and quipping dialogue, disregard for authority, and a strongly atheistic viewpoint showing through any mention of gods or religion. It also shares the deliberate use of too many words in the dialogue, and the focus on characters as people within a plot of much larger scope. It's actually a pretty interesting comparison from my perspective, because I became a fan of both Poe and Whedon at approximately the same time for many of the same reasons, but Poe hadn't really seen anything Whedon did until years after he started the comic (and of course it's unlikely that Whedon has ever heard of Errant Story).