TOUCHY TOPICS TUESDAYS: brevity is the soul of sales

When we spend months, years, sometimes even decades working on a book, it's profoundly difficult to reduce our work into brief summary. Condensing it into a sentence, a paragraph or a page seems to dishonor the very richness and complexity we've spent so much time and effort creating. It feels almost insulting to have to lower ourselves to such a plane of oversimplification. And inevitably, whatever summary we say feels flat and silly.


That said, we have to do it anyway. No matter how painful it is.

Obviously, the effort we invest in crafting a strong brief pitch pays off because it helps us sell our books.

Less obviously but still importantly, it gives us clarity, confidence, and the chance to be articulate. Once we've constructed a strong one-sentence pitch, we know what the core of our book is. We know we can express it in any situation, at any speed. Those are not inconsiderable advantages, especially in a world where many authors can't discuss their books without hemming, hawing, or talking on helplessly for an hour.

Finally, our one-sentence summary indirectly conveys some important messages to an agent and editor. That we understand their time is limited. That we "get" that they must turn around and pitch the book to others. That we are professionals. That we don't shirk the hard parts of writing.

Here is the one-sentence summary for my first nonfiction book, which was eventually titled Home Life and published by Simon & Schuster.

Combining personal and cultural history, autobiography and memoir, Home Life is both a story of one woman's coming of age and a meditation on the meaning of home.

Here's the one-paragraph version.

Combining personal and cultural history, autobiography and memoir, Home Life is both a story of one woman's coming of age and a meditation on the meaning of home. Coming of age stories have traditionally been tales of travel and risk. Home Life turns this well-worn formula inside out, using a traditional female domain—the home and its relationships—to trace an untraditional female life.

Sounds simple, doesn't it? It wasn't. Home Life was a tricky book to explain, not just because it mixed genres but also because I hadn't consciously thought out its themes or structure before I began to write. It grew intuitively, leaving me with a finished book that I didn't really understand on any conscious level. The fact that it was my first book only compounded the problem. I'd had no practice at all at explaining my work at this point, much less selling it.

Coming up with that sentence-length pitch, and then with the one-page synopsis that followed it, took me longer than it had to write most of the complex essays in the book. I would never have done it had not Richard Locke, my kind and brilliant mentor, insisted. I suffered multitudes of false starts, created a goodly number of explanations that expressed nothing but my own confusion, and generally drove myself crazy. I knew all along that the book fit somewhere...but I was damned if I could figure out where.

But as I've said, the effort was more than worth while. I don't think that Simon & Schuster bought the book because of my synopsis. But I do think that they might not have bought it had I not been able to put it so clearly and concisely in context. And long before they so much as saw the manuscript, having a decent synopsis in hand gave me a confidence that I sorely needed. It made me feel less vulnerable to "get" my own book in this way. I no longer felt that the book or my process were quite as muddled and accidental as they had seemed.

I don't share my one-sentence summary because it's brilliant. It's not. And if you're a fiction writer, your own one-sentence pitch won't sound much like this nonfiction one anyway. I just want you to see why boiling your book down to some compelling statement of its true essentials is so important, and what the results might look like generally.

If one-sentence, one-paragraph and one-page pitches are projects you're feeling ready to take on, read literary agent Nathan Bransford's blog posts on the subject. This one explains why you need to create them. (Bransford calls the one-page version a two-paragraph version, but we're both referring to more or less the same thing.) This one explains the form of the one-sentence version with Nathan's usual clarity and charm.

TOUCHY TOPICS TUESDAYS: they've heard it all before

When I was putting myself through writing grad school I had the chance to do some preliminary submission screening for a variety of publishers and organizations. This was before email submissions, so it was dusty and surprisingly physical work. (If you've never hefted giant manuscript stacks, let me tell you that paper is heavy.) It wasn't very fun, although it sometimes was funny. But it did give me a transformative glimpse of what longtime agents and editors experience.

The most important thing it taught me was that trying to be original, startling, unique, or otherwise memorable in your pitch, as opposed to the writing you're trying to sell, just doesn't work.

It's as if you were beginning chess player trying to surprise Gary Kasparov or or Boris Spassky with your brand new opening gambit. They have seen hundreds if not thousands more opening gambits than you have. What's unique to you is not unique to them. They've heard, and played, it all before. And the less you understand that, the more amateur you seem.

What does work? In getting your writing published, I mean, not in chess, about which I know only four things. (For the record: Boris Spassky and Gary Kasparov have been champions, Bobby Fisher is one crazy dude, and chess pieces are pretty.)

It's this simple: being professional works. Submitting only those genres of work they say they actually want in the format they request (that is, really researching your submissions rather than sending out huge email blasts). Being informative rather than being "unique" or "different" or "original." Skipping the bold claims and inflated credits for confident honesty. Learning what they need to know to make a good decision, and giving it to them concisely.

Like manuscript screening, this isn't really fun. I'd personally much rather choose fonts and cook up striking first lines for a query letter. But it works. You may still get rejected, and rejected a lot. No letter can sell a work of writing if that work doesn't happen to be right for this particular recipient at this particular time.

But you'll get rejected for the right reasons, and not because you sabotaged a perfect viable book submission by, say, starting your query letter in anapestic tetrameter. That reference sounds impressive, but it's actually the poetic meter used by Dr. Seuss, a writer whose work is permanently engraved on my synapses (which is the only reason I know its name). Herewith, just to show you that I feel your pain despite the rather hectoring tone of this post, is a query for my first book, Home Life, in more or less anapestic more or less tetrameter.

To my dear Agent X: this small book I submit
In the hopes it will charm you with wisdom and wit.
My small memoir of rooms is so detailed and smart,
that its style and its grace will catch most readers' hearts.
I'm impoverished, unknown, and a novice, it's true,
But just try it and see it make profits for YOU!