You’ll read a lot of guides about pitching your work that fixate on the details: exactly how and where to list specifics, the perfect tone, the right voice. Where to stick an exclamation mark. These kinds of guides can often stick their exclamation marks somewhere uncomfortable, because that’s really not your focus when it comes to talking about your work. What should be your focus? They don’t want to be here. You don’t want to be here. Get out as fast as you can.
There are key areas to hit. You want to know what your work is, what it’s about, who it’s for, and why it’s a safe bet to chuck tens of thousands of [your currency] behind it. However, if you’re at a stage where they’re reading your pitch document, you’ve already got them on-side. So what? So, stop worrying about how to make them say YES and start focusing on eliminating places for them to say NO.
They’ll say NO so easily. Why? It’s less work. It’s off their desk. It makes them feel tasteful and powerful. It keeps more money in the pot for other things, better things, maybe even their own things. I don’t intend to paint your pitch-reader as cynical or egotistical: this is a portrait of the business, not the person. It must thrive on acquiring items for less money than they will make from them, working less than the other person to greater benefit, and weighing the reputation of their list against its financial efficiency. Boutique presses go bust daily, all of them with specific aims and ideas that allow for a wide variety of NOs, and a very narrow corridor of YES. Corporate publishers balance their diet, typically watering their imprint’s mission statement to painfully vague hand-gestures, alienating their purpose to keep above water. This is good. This is your way in.
The corporate publisher needs to know that your project has a proven audience, fits a proven template — in content and practical format — and communicates its point in a proven manner. If you have a reputation to put behind that, whether in published works or expertise, you’re doing well to eliminate that doubt. However, the YES will never depend on your originality, on your personality, or on your investment. That will get an editor shield on your side, a designer’s sword, maybe a whole imprint of devotees — but it won’t persuade a Sales team, or a Marketing team, and without them, you don’t have the trifecta to get a financial sign-off.
This isn’t because Sales & Marketing are the hellish depths of consumerist capitalism, thriving on the suppression of expression in pursuit of profit. The flow of staff from Sales to Editorial is a pretty open street, and most have worked both sides at one time or another. This problem occurs because it is their job to sound a warning light. You’ll rarely see an editorial team pushed into an unwilling product off a Sales incentive; ultimately, the editorial decision is protecting quality on the list, so the veto stands pretty strong. However, you can’t persuade a Sales team to ignore every reason they can’t do their job: they are talking to avenues of distribution so unconcerned with imprint reputation that the idea of bookselling may only be a fraction of their infrastructure.
How do you maximise the chances of a YES?
Simply put: you don’t. Your positives will not convince them. Your unique selling points will not do the work. Your story will not win them over, because your enemy is not boredom or skeptical enthusiasm. Your enemy is the financial veto.
Your mission, therefore, and the reason why this will feel less like pulling out your teeth than pulling out your femur, is because the only factor that can drive your pitch document will be the unoriginal, the done-before, the competition. It is every other book in your field that irritated you into writing your own. It is every author whose angle you disagree with. It is every factor that drew the lines within which you found the shape of your beloved project.
Why? Because they got their deal. Because bookshelves and standard measurement formats exist specifically to ensure nothing ever stands out. Because word-of-mouth is the only game in play. And finally, before we break, because the only way anything gets through the gate is with a neatly ironed uniform, an inscrutable face, a placid smile, and a sure, steady, rhythmic, confident stride keeping time with everyone else.
You’re not the belle of the ball. You’re the hired hand with a ladder and a bucket. You’re not here to change the game. You’re here to patch a leak they didn’t know they had, and the best resource you have to hand is pointing at a place where they’re not making any money yet, whistling with awe and apprehension at the imaginary funds they didn’t know they could’ve had, and slapping the solution down on the desk.
How does that help you format your document? How does that help you know what to say?
It doesn’t. This is Part 1. Keep an eye out, you’ll get Part 2…