Thread by @50storieslater

And we're back #WXR18! DongWon Song @dongwon The Pitch

.@dongwon #WXR18
Authors vs Writers. Anyone can be a writer. Big achievement! craft skills. MFA, writer’s groups. A professional author is a different job: career management, workflow, deadline/time management, networking, marketing and promotion, PITCHING.

.@dongwon #WXR18
Always be pitching. Your pitch is not only for agents, it’s also for publishers, editors, marketing/publicity, sales. Build a readership, network with your peers, connect with booksellers, convince your family. A good pitch is a key element of achieving goals.

.@dongwon #WXR18
Pitching is giving your audience clear coherent reasons why they should be reading your book when they could be doing a million other things with their time.

.@dongwon #WXR18
Pitching is a skill. Practice with your book, and with other books, movies, series: on your friends, your crit group, your partner, don’t be a monster, but try it out on people. PAY ATTENTION. What excites them? Where were they bored?

.@dongwon #WXR18
Publishing is always about the audience. How do you stand out? how do you reach readers? Agents/editors/salesforce are proxies for readers.

.@dongwon #WXR18
Humans do pattern recognition and storytelling is matching patterns to a series of events. Fiction is a way of exploring potential failure states. Fit to an expected pattern then deliver them the new and exciting thing.

.@dongwon #WXR18
COMP TITLES. Publishers think in comp titles, come up with your own or they will do it for you. A+B = Awesome. Control the field of play so we match the pattern you want to, know who the audience is. Venn diagram: have to have the most narrowly defined intersect

.@dongwon #WXR18
Comp examples:
- Red Rising: Battlestar Galactica + Hunger Games
- Six of Crows: Oceans Eleven + Sarah J Maas
- Kings of the Wyld: Spinal Tap + D&D

A+B is not enough. You need to add context. “Nigel from Spinal Tap dropped into D&D”. A+B defines the territory, you need to explain how your book fits the territory. Ideally your A and B are v. successful books published in the last 3-5 years. At least one should be a book.

.@dongwon #WXR18
Don’t pick Star Wars, GoT, Harry Potter because it tells the publisher nothing about the target audience (everyone who’s ever read a book). Can pick individual elements to include in the context, e.g. Hermione Granger, Hogwarts.

.@dongwon #WXR18
Hooks: glimpse through a keyhole. Hook is the thing that sets you apart. Don’t start at the beginning, start at the awesome. Most of your book will never make it into the pitch. Let go of 99% of the good stuff in book and show off the most cool component

.@dongwon #WXR18
A Taxonomy of Hooks (like the MICE quotient!): Plot, Idea, Setting, Character. Almost always combine character beat with something.