Tag Archives: diane holmes

Avoiding Negative Responses To Your Book Pitch: Part 2

Today we continue our seven-part series on pitching your book with Diane Holmes, where she helps talk you through some of the potential pitfalls you may encounter when trying to bring your work to print.

Part 2 is:

#2 “Son, I think you brought a knife to a gun fight.”

Translation: “There’s a basic understanding about what we’re going to do today, but  you didn’t get the gunfighter’s memo.  Whew, kinda embarrassing.  Next time you need to bring the big (mental) guns and put away that butter knife.”

Reality: When agents and editors take pitches, they’re expecting to meet at a peer level.  They’re the industry pro; you’re the writing pro.  This means you’ve done your homework on book writing, pitching, and how this whole publishing industry-thing works.

When you haven’t become an expert on your part of the equation or don’t have a solid idea about what the other side does, it shows.

Of course, even when you’ve done this, you’re likely to feel nervous during a pitch.   That’s actually not a problem.  But not taking the time to thoroughly understand your genre, publishers’ needs, how agents work, what goes into a pitch….  That’s on you. Continue reading Avoiding Negative Responses To Your Book Pitch: Part 2

Avoiding Negative Responses To Your Book Pitch: Part 1

I’m excited to announce that we are going to have a seven-part series here on Freelance-Zone.com about how to pitch your book. Diane Holmes, founder of Pitch University, has signed on to share some great tips on avoiding the negative response to your book pitch. Today we have a short intro to what she will be sharing with us, along with the first tip–enjoy!    – Catherine

Listen up.  I’m gonna tell you How the Cows Ate the Cabbage….

As founder of Pitch University (and Texan, which explains colorful expressions), my goal is to help writers (and I am including myself in this!) become excellent at answering the hardest question people ask us: “What’s your book about?”

“Heck, if we could sum it up,” we writers want to snap, “we would’ve written a Post-It Note, not a book!”   (We’re just witty that way.)

What we don’t say is that, after we’ve written hundreds of pages, and poured our heart and soul into the complexities of our stories and topics, there simply are no easy answers.

Yet, without the ability to answer this basic question, we can’t sell our books.

This is called pitching our books.  And it’s the same skill we use when we answer the question for anyone, including agents, editors, readers, friends, family, the media, librarians, booksellers, truly anyone at all.

So it’s important to our careers.  Knowing this, we feel the stress of getting it right.   Frankly, most writers don’t, and they really don’t know what went wrong.

When you look closely, there are really two hurdles when pitching:  ourselves and others (let’s call them agents and editors).  Today, I’m taking a humorous look at the firsts of 7 possible responses that agents and editors can give us when our pitching misses the mark.  There are other tell-tale signs your pitch isn’t working, but understanding these 7 will give you a leg up on your next pitch..

Read on to see if you recognize yourself. Continue reading Avoiding Negative Responses To Your Book Pitch: Part 1