Pitching my novel: What I should have done

Many writers stink at the novel pitch. I am one of them.

I practice and practice, but when I sit/stand in front of an editor, I babble, I ad lib, my mind blanks and I say things I never meant to say!

It’s so frustrating!

In September of 2010, I attended the American Christian Fiction Writers conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. I pitched my new idea to an editor there. I started out rambling about my plot, the whole while thinking to myself, “Danger, Jill Williamson! You have deviated from the plan and are heading into shark-infested waters!” I finally shut up and let her read the one sheet in silence. When she finished, she said some nice things about the idea, then asked me if I was published.

I said, “Oh, yes. Ha-ha-ha-ha. I wrote this.” I handed her a bookmark for my fantasy novel By Darkness Hid. “It won a Christy Award this year,” I said.

She looked at me, raised an eyebrow, and said, “You should really open with that.”

And so when I got home from that conference, I made this video to send to the editors who requested the proposal, in hopes that it might help them pitch my story to the other editors and the pub board in the way I failed to pitch to them.

It was really hard to get through this without stuttering, you can see my eyes darting back and forth as I read my lines, and there are several places where I spoke in a ridiculous tone that I never meant to use–totally embarrassing! But it did the trick. Jason Farms, now titled Replication: The Jason Experiment, comes out January 2012 from Zondervan.

Here is the video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLZRHE2e0P8]

If you are headed to a writer’s conference, you don’t have to make a video. But you could plan to do three simple things:

1. BRIEFLY say how you came up with the idea
2. Give a BRIEF synopsis of the plot
3. Tell them a bit about yourself (And don’t forget to include things like whether you are published and have won a major award.)

I’m just sayin’.