Agent in Your Pocket: How to Find the Pitch Sentence Your Nervous System Will Believe

I see this happen far too often. An author sits down, tries to pitch me a book, and then ends up floundering. It’s not a clarity problem, either, since most of them do know what they wrote. It’s a confidence problem packaged as a clarity problem. That distinction matters more than most writers want it to.

(Agent in Your Pocket: You Don’t Need to Be Confident But You Do Need to Be Clear)

Calling it a clarity problem means you don’t understand your book well enough to sit across from a stranger and tell her what it’s about. A confidence problem, on the other hand, means you understand it just fine but don’t trust that understanding when someone (new) is listening. The solution to a confidence problem is never going to be another revision to your pages or your pitch.

It’s about finding a sentence that already feels true and learning to say it like you mean it.

Authors tend to write two different types of pitches. The first sounds good because it has stakes and a hook and uses the language of the genre in just the right way. But when the author reads it back, or says it out loud to an industry professional, something just isn’t right. Sure, the pitch checks every box they know to check. It’s been polished so many times that even the delivery sounds stiff.

And then there’s the second kind of pitch. This is what an author says when someone randomly asks what they’re working on. The answer they give here is the one that’s not trying to impress anyone. They’re simply answering honestly and openly about the book they’ve been working on for months or years. Of course, that version is always less polished, but it’s also almost always the truer version of what they want to say when no one is paying attention.

That means that every author’s goal should be to take that raw and unfiltered version but make it good enough to pitch to an industry professional. Now, that’s not to say you should abandon stakes and conflict and the hallmarks of a good pitch. Instead, you need to finalize a pitch that feels honest, true, and centered around you as an author and your book.

The reason this has to happen is because your body knows when you’re describing the book in performative language. Maybe you inflate the stakes beyond what the narrative delivers or you take out the particular weirdness that makes it yours, all in service of hoping the industry professional will lean in. But your body registers that mismatch and as a result, it does something to your confidence in the background, even if you’re not aware of it.

This is why the pitch appointment goes sideways even when you’re prepared. You walk into the room and something shifts. Your voice goes flat. You rush through the middle or you get to the end and instead of landing it, you trail off. That’s when you realize that the way you’ve been practicing at home in front of the mirror isn’t the same as saying the pitch to an actual person.

It’s not nerves, though. Or, rather, it’s not only nerves. It’s that, in public, the pitch you prepared suddenly doesn’t feel like your book. So, you freeze.

Try this: Close the document. Put the pitch out of your mind. Then open your camera app and say to yourself what the book is about. This isn’t a version that will be evaluated by anyone. No one even needs to see the video. This is you telling yourself about the book. Think of this as morning pages but for your pitch.

Then open up your document and start there.

What did you actually say? Make note of what you highlighted about the narrative and what you left out because that’s where your real pitch is buried. You’ll know you’re onto something when it feels less like performance and more like simply talking about the thing you made. Think of this as the irreducible thing that makes your book yours and unlike a thousand others. Usually, it’s a collision of what the character wants versus what the story is going to make them face in the most human-like sense possible. In other words, your pitch should answer these questions: What does this person need that the story is going to make impossible to get? What does it cost them and why does it matter?

When you can name that in plain, simple language, you have a strong foundation for your pitch because now you’re talking about the actual story. In turn, this pitch is going to land because it’s going to tell the industry professional what it feels like to be in the middle of the book.

You’ve always known your book. The work here isn’t to become a more proficient pitcher. It’s to stop hiding your book behind a version you think an industry professional wants to hear. Find the sentence that’s already true and say it like you mean it.