Writers in the Storm

Penny Sansevieri

What is an elevator pitch and why do you need one?

An elevator pitch is a short one- to two-sentence description about the book. It's the briefest of the briefest descriptions you can develop. The reason elevator pitches are important is that we have an ever- shrinking attention span, so you need to capture someone's attention in a very short, succinct pitch.

How do you begin crafting an elevator pitch?

The first step is to look at the core of your book. What is your book about, really? Looking at the core of your book will help you determine the primary message. The next step is to look at the real benefits to the reader. Not what you think the reader wants to know but what they actually need: What's in it for the reader?

When I worked with people on elevator pitches, I found that they often kept the best sentence for last. This comes from being an author and saving the crescendo of the story until the final chapter. You don't want to do that in an elevator pitch. You want to lead with the tease that will pull the reader in.

When would you use an elevator pitch? You might use it to promote yourself to the media, to book a speaking event, or to pitch a blogger. Elevator pitches can be used for a number of reasons and in a variety of ways. Once you create a great elevator pitch, you may find yourself using it over and over again. That's a good thing!

Components of a great elevator pitch

 All elevator pitches have particular relevance to them, but for the most part, every elevator pitch must:

• Have emotional appeal
• Be helpful
• Be insightful
• Be timely
• Matter to your reader!

Essential Elements of a Powerful Elevator Pitch

1. Concise: Your pitch needs to be short, sweet, and to the point.
2. Clear: Save your five dollar words for another time. For your elevator pitch to be effective, you must use simple language any layperson can understand. If you make someone think about a word, you'll lose them and the effectiveness of your elevator pitch will go right out the window as well.
3. Passion: If you're not passionate about your topic, how can you expect anyone else to be?
4. Visual: Use words that bring visual elements to your reader’s mind. It helps to make your message more memorable and brings the reader into your story.
5. Stories: People love stories. It’s the biggest element of the elevator pitch: tell the story. I also find that when the pitch is woven into the story, it often helps to create a smoother presentation.

How to Craft Your Killer Elevator Pitch

• Write it down: Start by writing a very short story so you can tell the story of your book in two paragraphs. This will get the juices flowing. As you start to edit your story down from 200,000 words to two paragraphs, you'll start to see why it's important to pull only the most essential elements from your story to craft your elevator pitch.
• Make a list: Write down 10 to 20 things that your book does for the reader. These can be action statements, benefits, or book objectives.
• Record yourself: Next, record yourself and see how you sound. I can almost guarantee you that you will not like the first few drafts you try. That actually is a really good thing. If you like the first thing that you write, it probably won't be that effective. Recording yourself will help you listen to what you're saying and figure out how to fine-tune it.
• Rest: I highly recommend that you give yourself enough time to do your elevator pitch. Ideally you want to let it rest overnight, if not longer. Remember the elevator pitch is perhaps the most important thing that you created in your marketing package. You want to make sure it's right.

Having a prepared “pitch” for your book will help you enormously, whether you are pitching the media, an agent, a publisher, or even a bookstore. Having a short, concise pitch will get and keep someone’s attention and also, increase your chances for a positive desired outcome. Keep in mind that if your elevator pitch is tied to current events, it might change as events change. A good elevator pitch can be fluid, but it should always be an attention grabber. In a world cluttered with information and filled with noise, the shorter and more focused you can be, the more exposure you will get for your message!

Have you ever delivered an elevator pitch? Share your experience with us!

 ABOUT PENNY

Penny C. Sansevieri, CEO and founder of Author Marketing Experts, Inc., is a best-selling author and internationally recognized book marketing and media relations expert and an Adjunct Professor with NYU. Her company is one of the leaders in the publishing industry and has developed some of the most cutting-edge book marketing campaigns. She is the author of fourteen books, including How to Sell Books by the Truckload. AME is the first marketing and publicity firm to use Internet promotion to its full impact through online promotion and their signature program called: The Virtual Author Tour™

To learn more about Penny’s books or her promotional services, you can visit her web site at http://www.amarketingexpert.com. To subscribe to her free newsletter, send a blank email to: mailto:subscribe@amarketingexpert.com

Copyright @2015 Penny C. Sansevieri

 

 

 Tiffany Yates Martin

Writers love their brains: We exploit our highly evolved prefrontal cortex to infuse our prose with dazzling verbiage and transport our reader to the world of our creation.

Yet for creating tension—one of the most important elements of compelling fiction—nothing beats the lowly amygdala: the primordial lizard brain that handles the most basic functions of survival.

Authors of all levels can fall into the trap of intellectualized “summing-up,” which drains your writing of tension and can leave your readers unmoved, uninvolved, and disengaged. But juicy, suspenseful, irresistible fiction lies in those gut-level reactions that are so under the radar of our higher reasoning, they barely even register before the quick-thinking cerebrum analyzes and labels it.

Spotting Cerebral Sabotage

Most of us don’t react to a shark by thinking, “I’m scared!” That’s the clever cerebral cortex instantaneously putting together a slew of input (big gray fish, lots of teeth), comparing it to past experience and knowledge (Jaws!), and coming up with a conclusion to lead us into quick action (“Swim, fool!”). The lightning-fast process makes for impressive biology (and a higher survival rate), but really dull prose.

So what’s happening in that immediate, subconscious microsecond after a stimulus? Consider this scene:

The noise startled Josie, and she sat up in bed, wondering what the sound was. Could someone be in the house? Unease pricked her—Jim was still out of town. She eased out of bed, pulling a robe on over her flimsy nightgown. She reached for the penknife he’d left on his nightstand—the only thing resembling a weapon.

On the surface, that’s not a bad premise for a scene: things that go bump in the night have been a staple of suspense since Homer, and here we have a heroine in a dangerous situation—a great recipe for fiction.

But descriptions like these rob what could be a riveting scene of all its narrative tension. And no matter your genre, when tension flags, so will your reader’s interest.

Digging Down to the Lizard Brain

The writer’s job is to slow down time—to stretch out that microsecond of primitive lizard-brain reaction so that the reader can experience the scene along with the character, rather than being told about it by the know-it-all cerebrum.

Let’s take a look at the above example. Everything is in place, and we have all the makings of good storytelling: a suspenseful situation (a mysterious noise waking what appears to be a relatively defenseless character); a strong heroine we can root for (despite her fear, our brave protagonist goes to face the threat even scantily clad and poorly armed); high stakes (alone with potential danger!). Yet why aren’t we particularly concerned for poor defenseless Josie?

It’s because the writer has let her cerebrum do the writing here, when this scene calls for the remedial lizard brain.

Let’s put ourselves in Josie’s situation and prolong the lizard-brain reaction that the cerebrum processes as fear. First we might feel our heart race, our stomach hollow out; maybe we suddenly need to go to the bathroom. Perhaps our armpits prickle with sweat and we shoot to an upright defensive position almost instinctively—as a dog might when startled. That’s beat one in the Josie scenario. Only after these autonomous physiological responses have kicked in does her higher reasoning brain draw its first conclusion: There’s a noise in a house where I am alone; someone is here.

Now our brave heroine covers her near-nakedness and consciously looks for a weapon, lighting on the best option available to her in her absent husband’s penknife—resourceful, our Josie. An opportunistic writer might take another lizard-brain moment here to add more juice: perhaps her heart leaps as she sees it, then sinks even as she grabs it, her nimble cerebrum quickly concluding it’s an inadequate weapon, but all she has.

In the above example, the author has skipped over the experience Josie might be having and instead intellectualized these events—in more common writing terms, she has “told” this action, rather than “showing” it.

In actuality the first, gut-level thing we register is not the logical conclusion we reach, but the effect on us of whatever is happening.

In your writing, show us that.

Let the Reader Be the Cerebrum

What makes writing vibrant and immediate, and characters three-dimensional and relatable, is showing more of the characters’ behavior and reactions, rather than simply describing them— i.e., telling us about them. Instead plunge us directly into the scene by letting us experience the scene as the characters do, in their heads and through their eyes. It’s visceral instead of intellectual, and that’s where tension springs from.

Paint the picture for us and show us the scene; let us come to the conclusions you want us to by leading us there, instead of stating them directly for us. The idea is to lead the horse to water, not shove his head in and make him drink. Show the effect the stimulus—in this case, the noise from downstairs—has on your character, and then let the reader draw his own conclusion—She’s scared!—the same way the cerebrum takes the lizard-brain reactions and does so. That involves us, makes us more invested in the story. If you simply tell us the result (“she was scared”), you keep us at a remove—we are hearing a distant narrator describe events, but we don’t experience them in the direct, visceral way that grabs a reader by the throat and thrusts her into the story.

Here are some easy ways to root out and fix cerebral sabotage in your writing:

1. Look for adjectives in your descriptions: scared, happy, excited, nervous, etc. These are often red flags for the intellectualized conclusions the cerebrum has leaped right over the juicy lizard-brain stuff to reach.
2. Then backtrack: Great writers, like great actors, play “what if” wonderfully. What if you were in that situation? What might you feel before the label of the emotion registers? Or have you been in similar situations—i.e., maybe you were never in a fiery car crash, but have you had a fender-bender? Remember that sick lurch in your stomach on the second of impact, that flicker of disorientation before you processed what had happened, the flutter of panic as soon as you did? Start from that rather than using the easy label.
3. Amp it up: You’re a creative type—now take those reactions you felt or can imagine to extremes using your writerly imagination.

Think of it this way: Would you rather watch someone’s vacation slide show as they dryly narrate all that they did? Or be on that vacation with them and experience it? The latter is what lizard-brain writing does for us—puts us there, with the characters; lets us live the scenes through their eyes, in their heads. That’s why we read—to live experiences outside our own—and experienced writers know how to offer that to their readers.

Do you notice cerebral sabotage in others’ writing, or your own? Have you come up with other ways to spot it—or address it?

*  *  *  *  *  *  *

About Tiffany

Tiffany Yates Martin has worked in the publishing industry for more than twenty years, currently through her editorial consulting company, FoxPrint Editorial, helping authors hone their work to a tight polished draft. As a developmental editor she works both directly with authors as well as through major publishing houses.

As a freelance copyeditor and proofreader, she has worked with major New York publishers, among them Random House, the Penguin Group, and HarperCollins. She holds a BA in English Literature from GSU and is a member of the Editorial Freelancers Association.

Under the pen name Phoebe Fox, she is the author of The Breakup Doctor and Bedside Manners, part of the Breakup Doctor series from Henery Press.

It's finally here.

We're writing up a storm from 4:00 a.m. to midnight PDT. 

Twenty hours (almost) of opportunities to connect with others, meet goals, and get your words "on paper."

We'll be writing from the top of every hour for fifty minutes. In the interest of health, we've planned a ten minute break at the end of every hour for walking around and other physical necessities. (If you need to work on a different schedule, say around breaks and lunch at work, that's fine. Keep track of your progress and, when you get a chance, let us know how you're doing.)

During that ten-minute break, you're welcome to post your word or page counts and anything else in the comment section here at the blog or on our Facebook Event page. (No other electronic "stuff" which might end up being a time sump and stealing your planned writing time!) We'll tally numbers and post them every hour. Or so. Heck, we'll be writing, too!

We've made our first goal-a hundred commitments to join us during the day.

We're hoping for at least a novella-length combined word count. (I'm betting we can get a novel's worth of word count.)

You can commit to hours or only a fifteen minute block of writing time. Just follow through on your goal. That's how you finish a book. And today is a chance to make headway on finishing your book. As Laura Drake says, "You can't sell a book if you haven't finished one."

So let's support each other and make this fun. Because it can be, with a community. Writing is, by nature, a solitary endeavor. That doesn't mean you have to feel alone. Join us.

Here's your dance card:

Laura Drake will start the party from 4:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m.

Fae Rowen's on duty from 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.

Orly Konig-Lopez will be onboard from 9:00 a.m. to noon.

Jenny Hansen runs totals from noon to 3:00 p.m.

Fae Rowen is the clean-up batter from 3:00 p.m. to midnight. (Yes, I plan on getting a lot of writing done!)

Of course, we'll all be checking in throughout the day, even when we don't have "formal" responsibilities.

You can let us know you're writing as you begin, or you can share what you've accomplished when your writing stint is finished.

Today's the day. 

Write Up A Storm.

Share your experiences in the comments.

Fae Rowen discovered the romance genre after years as a science fiction freak.  Writing futuristics and medieval paranormals, she jokes  that she can live anywhere but the present.  As a mathematician, she knows life’s a lot more fun when you get to define your world and its rules.

Punished, oh-no, that’s published as a co-author of a math textbook, she yearns to hear personal stories about finding love from those who read her books, rather than the horrors of calculus lessons gone wrong.  She is grateful for good friends who remind her to do the practical things in life like grocery shop, show up at the airport for a flight and pay bills.

A “hard” scientist who avoided writing classes like the plague, she now enjoys sharing her brain with characters who demand that their stories be told.  Amazing, gifted critique partners keep her on the straight and narrow. Feedback from readers keeps her fingers on the keyboard.

When she’s not hanging out at Writers in the Storm, you can visit Fae at http://faerowen.com  or www.facebook.com/fae.rowen.