Nail that elevator pitch
If you’re an aspiring author, get ready to hear the following question approximately 10 billion times:
“What’s your book about?”
As you already know if you’ve already written a book, pretty much everyone and anyone in your life will ask you that question, from people you know well to people you just met in the waiting room at your dentist’s office. So it’s really important to be able to answer it quickly.
Short and sweet.
Make it count.
Pique their interest.
You get the point.
If you start describing your book as, “Well, it’s kind of hard to explain, but…” there’s a good chance that you’ve already lost the interest of whoever is on the other side of the conversation. If your pitch grabs someone’s attention, however, he or she might whip out a smartphone right there and then to order your book on Amazon. That’s happened to me many times, so I’m not just saying that in a “you never know” kind of way. Trust me; I know! Every interaction you have is a potential sale.
While it’s critical to have a concise, compelling description of your book when it’s available for purchase, having one as you’re writing it is also important. Why? Because it ensures that you have an interesting plot. Trust me, I know this too, because I recently spent way too many months struggling to write a novel for which I never had a clear vision. I should have realized that I was in trouble early on because anytime someone asked me what I was working on, I found myself uttering the dreaded “Um…well it’s hard to explain, but…”
You know what happened to that manuscript? Nothing! Once I (finally) realized I didn’t have an interesting story, I pulled the plug on it. It was a painful lesson to learn, and I wish I’d read a blog post like this one to save me a lot of time and effort. So please, learn from my mistake!
-Maria