How to Pitch Your Book to Agents and Editors

A great 60-second pitch will give your book a fighting chance.

At some point, someone is going to say, "Tell me about your book." This could be a literary agent, an editor, or someone you just met at a party who's making polite conversation. Hopefully, your pitch will prompt the agent or editor to ask for the first few chapters, and the stranger at the party to say, “I’d read that,” and mean it.

To be prepared for this moment, you need a 60-second pitch.

That's it. 60 seconds. One minute. If your pitch is longer than 60 seconds, you need to trim it.

Your pitch can work for a pitch fest, an interview, a short call or email with an agent, a blog post...really any situation in which you're going to talk about your book. This works for fiction or memoir. Your pitch should include five key elements:

• Who is the main character?

• What is the inciting incident? (What starts the story off?)

• What is at stake for the protagonist?

• What is the book about thematically?

• Comps: what two to three books is it similar to (but not too similar). ___ meets ____.

You might also include where the book is set, but this isn’t always necessary.

This post is excerpted from my course Foundations of Novel Writing.

My pitch for The Marriage Pact was something like this:

When newlyweds Jake and Alice are invited to join a mysterious organization called The Pact that promises them a happy, lasting marriage, they take a leap of faith. They are drawn into the exclusive parties, the seemingly reasonable rules—always answer when your spouse calls, give your partner an unexpected gift once a month, plan a trip together every quarter. But when one of them breaks the rules, they discover that The Pact is watching, and it will do anything to keep them in line. The Firm meets The Stepford Wives in this fast-paced novel of psychological suspense that will appeal to readers of Gillian Flynn and Mary Kubika.

What You Need to Know about Traditional Publishing Rights

My amazing agent took this pitch (or some version of it—I never know exactly how she works her magic) out with the manuscript and sold the book in 31 countries. (I can’t actually recall what names we used in the “will appeal to readers of” part of the pitch, but reviewers for the trade publications later recommended The Marriage Pact “for readers of Gillian Flynn and Ruth Ware”).