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

[dsgood]

Perhaps someone can use this as a pitch:

"Dracula with vampires."

[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

[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

[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."