Imperfect Pitch

With another choral concert in the offing, I’ve been conscious recently of my far-from-perfect pitch. Alas, it’s not just musically I’m challenged, but I’ve been struggling with pitching my fiction since an agent workshop around eighteen months ago when I failed dismally to reduce my oeuvre to three sentences, despite my novel being in a not-at-all-desperate state of health. Although I’ve improved dramatically since then, I still find pitching difficult and I’m reassured when bloggers such as Clare O’Dea confirm I’m not alone in this. We don’t all possess the talents of Fay Weldon, coining and promoting advertising slogans like Go to work on an egg alongside writing literary fiction but, in this highly commercialised era, it’s incumbent on writers to try.

While a pitch to publishers and agents is not the same as a blurb, and both are distinct from a 140-character enticement to click on the link to a blog post, I’ve learnt a bit on pitching from observing how others market their work on Twitter. It takes a lot of discipline and focus to whittle down the gist of one’s outpourings into a few captivating words.

But the ideal pitch isn’t solely down to the writer’s capacity to précis. I don’t think I’m making excuses when I say that some fiction is easier to pitch than others. In an effort to convince you this isn’t only me being precious about my own stuff, I’ll illustrate this but by comparing my Twitter pitches for two of the stories I especially enjoyed from a recent anthology in which my story “A House for the Wazungu” also appears. I’m interested in your views, but I think my first pitch:

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Imagine a world where sight is a handicap – captivating #shortstory by @DeborahKlee from @ChuffedBuffBks

— Anne Goodwin (@Annecdotist) October 23, 2013

is more enticing than my second:

Lily is rather mesmerising in this moving #flashfiction by @HettieAshwin http://t.co/jgXpKZabqo

— Anne Goodwin (@Annecdotist) November 14, 2013

although I thought the stories themselves were equally strong. The first story, “A World of Difference”, practically pitches itself through the intriguing setup that is spelt out on the first page. “Lily” has an equally fascinating issue at its core, but its essence isn’t obvious until the end and to flag this up prematurely would destroy the reading pleasure. I had a similar experience reading Zarina Zabrinsky’s  “Ava, Leigh, Sarah, Minnie, Annie, and Me”, which turns out to be another clever take on the ‘we’ theme but, as yet, I haven’t even tried to pitch it!

It could be that my pitching still isn’t sufficiently sophisticated to embrace it, but I think fiction with an embedded secret or twist is the more difficult to promote. This was something I was keen to explore in my Q&A with Claire King because one of the things that especially delighted me about her novel can’t be discussed with anyone who hasn’t yet read it. (If you haven’t, though, why not?) Here’s part of what Claire said regarding the marketing ofThe Night Rainbow:

the crux of the novel is the unreliable narration of Pea, rather than any specific ‘twist’, so we tried to avoid bigging that up (and having people trying to second guess, which would spoil their read).

Fortunately for Claire – and her readers – Pea’s voice is sufficiently beguiling to sell the novel from the first page, but I do wonder if other fiction might be disadvantaged because some of its pleasures can only be discovered on further reading. Am I right, or do I just need to work harder at my pitch?


So that’s my post finished. Now, should I spend the rest of the day pitching it, researching #PitMad on Twitter, or would I be better devoting the time to trying to get to grips with this score?

If you’re interested, the music is Mozart’s Mass in C minor and you can listen to a perfectly pitched version of it here and, yay, there's a female conductor.