The Pitch
Welcome, non-skycitizen traveler! Whatever brought you here, I’m grateful. By clicking the link to read on, you’re already bringing me closer to my publishing goals. Now, make yourself at home. Take a look around. This website is for you. Your participation in what I write is how I turn my writing into a career.
And that’s exactly why I need your help!
I aim to publish my new novel, My Name Is Grace000. First, I plan to attempt a traditional route. For those unfamiliar with the process, this means querying an agent — the gatekeepers of most major publishing houses. Writers can't just reach out to Penguin or Simon & Schuster. We send agents query letters pitching our novels, and agents either reject the pitch or choose to represent us, hopefully landing us a publishing house deal. Best-case scenario, it would look something like this: Me -> Agent -> Publishing House -> Netflix Original. But the chances of landing an agent have historically been slim. Now, with generative AI and social media, it will take nothing short of a small army to demonstrate that my writing can have an impact.
So, I’m forming my SkyWorld army. My goal with this website and social media outreach is simple: find more readers. With people like you following me on this journey, reading my speculative fiction, and providing feedback, I can formulate new ways to convince even more people to read it. I figure my chances landing a trad-pub deal will be infinitely improved if the people most interested in reading my book can also help me identify the best way to pitch it.
Feedback is welcome & appreciated
This blog post will become a living document where I will be developing the pitch for my upcoming novel, My Name Is Grace000. For my first novel, I Am Tamra, this was admittedly one of the hardest parts. Every summary I wrote came out different and I rewrote that first pitch hundreds of times. Still, I never really felt like I was hitting the nail on the head. Something about distilling hundreds of pages that took years to write down to the barest bones to best sell a story — like many new authors, I found the task challenging.
With the dawn of ChatGPT, I thought AI might help overcome that hurdle, but I was only half right. I couldn’t use any of the content it gave me. Everything was generic and fluffy. Even uploading the manuscript didn’t help. It either interpreted elements wrong or downright made them up without actually reading. Still, it showed me what I didn’t want. That was enough to get me started.
Chat struck out on helping me write my pitch, but I gave it another chance to critique what I had developed. On the whole, it deemed my 61-word summary “strong and pitchable.” After pushing back on its critique that “she learns” is passive and clarifying that em-dashes do not improve flow or make sentences less bulky, its remaining suggestion for improvement was to add the term “E-Pet” to “replace generic phrasing with specificity.” I feel this makes it too heavy with unknown terms.
What do you think?
The Pitch:
Two hundred years after the E-Bots took control of humanity, Grace000 grew up as the only living relic in a human museum. When she finds a clue about the world beyond and a new friend willing to lend a helping paw, she escapes to discover SkyWorld. But unconditioned to its "perfected" society, she learns what happens to those who don't belong.
Reading this aloud takes a little under 30 seconds. This is often how much time I would have to convince someone that my book is worth reading before they lose interest or cut me off. With an agent, they might not read much further past the first few words. To cover all my basees, I also plan to work on shorter one-word or one-sentence pitches for those with less attention to give, and then (for those looking for more), a 120-second pitch to elaborate.
For now, I’m seeking feedback on this 30-second pitch so I can sharpen it to be its most effective. From there, I build: my query letter, synopsis, back cover summary, etc. I plan to work this out in phases, adding updates to this blog entry as I add new versions or make changes.
For this first entry, I’ll keep it short. This way you, my readers, have more time to evaluate and opine.
But before I go, remember: your feedback will have a direct impact on how I shape my work, so please feel free to comment here or anywhere you see me post. If you haven’t yet, subscribe to catch all the updates and see your feedback manifest in my pitch progress!
More to come…
