Guest Blogger: Diane Whiteside and her Sure-Fire Six Step Pitch

Today, we'd like to welcome guest blogger Diane Whiteside to TM! I had an opportunity to attend a pitch workshop that she and Treva Harte conducted at RT back in April. Their technique made so much sense to me that I left the room feeling excited and ready to tackle that cover letter again!

Diane, thanks for agreeing to share your technique and your Friday with us!

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Hi, Mel! It was great meeting you at RT! Thanks for inviting me here to Title Magic to talk about my Sure-Fire Six Step Pitch, a method for cramming a beautifully layered book into a ten-minute pitch.

Once upon a time, I was [more or less] happily employed writing non-fiction. Then I ran into a real-life story, which hit me over the head and demanded that I retell it as a romance. After years of struggle, I found myself at my local chapter’s annual conference holding an appointment with the only editor in New York or small press at that time who might publish that book.

Talk about pressure? I was scared spitless! What could I possibly say to convince her to buy my manuscript?

My first breakthrough was realizing I didn’t need to convince her to buy my manuscript. This appointment was like a business meeting, almost like sending out a resume. I wanted her to be so smitten by my pitch that she’d ask me to see my manuscript, which is a much easier thing to pull off than selling it.

Whew! My breathing started to slow down. But I still had that ten-minute appointment staring me in the face. Ten minutes…

Breakthrough number two: treat this appointment just like a business meeting. Use time management and presentation techniques from business. Ten minutes is basically the same amount of time it takes to present SIX PowerPoint slides.

Ah ha! In my ten minute appointment, I could present
A TOTAL of SIX slides,
Each containing FIVE bullets,
Preferably 6 words per bullet but no more than 20 words per bullet.

Just to make it more fun, every word counted, even the small ones like a, and, of, the, etcetera.

Are you with me so far? Great!

But what on earth would I fill my six slides with?

Breakthrough number four: I asked my buddy, Treva Harte, the editor-in-chief of Loose-Id Publishing. After some brainstorming over really good Thai food, we came up with the following.

Number One: Always tell the genre, your manuscript’s approximate length, targeted line (if you know), and your name and contact information (however casually you want to say it). Treva gets very testy about this last bit. Me, I’ve heard legends about pitches being given for “the brunette drinking mojitos in the bar.”

Number Two: Always tell what makes your manuscript special. Focus on conflict, emotion, and what makes your manuscript unique.

This all sounded like really good stuff but I still only had ten minutes and six slides! I loved my characters! I could bore my friends for hours with my plot. I had albums of pictures of my setting. How on earth could I condense this?

Breakthrough number five: Code words. (To borrow a phrase from spy novels.) Every genre has its own set of “code words” which summarize important aspects of the story. If I used code words, I could say a lot about my story in a very few words. If I combined code words or contrasted them, I could heighten conflict and emotion.

For example, everyone has a pretty good idea of what a “modern day Cinderella story” is, when describing a romance. Poor girl meets rich boy, nasty stepmother gets in the way, yada yada yada. Right? “Navy SEAL” is a code word for hero, which has different implications from “English duke.” Similarly, “The Ton” is a common setting for Regency romances, as is the “royal court” for medieval romances or “high society” for twentieth-century romances. While similar, each of those settings has their own rules, which are subtly different to the cognoscenti, and a futuristic author would carefully select which one she wanted to base her world on. Code words can come from almost anywhere, including movie or book names.

Now I could see where I was going! It was hard, though, and it took me over four hours to write that ten minute pitch. I came up with an outline for those six slides along the way, which friends have used.

Hey, I was on a roll! I came up with a two-minute pitch by reducing each slide to a single bullet.

Gritting my teeth, I came up with a ten-second pitch by reducing those six sentences to a single sentence. (One clue: genre and length each became a single word. I got setting down to a single word, too, because my manuscript was a historical.) Of course, it’s easier to come up with a ten-second pitch if you start with the code words. For example, the pitch for my fantasy ménage is “THE MUMMY meets MURDER ON THE NILE – and the men who loved her then still love her now.”

Thankfully, my dream editor asked for my manuscript and it became THE IRISH DEVIL. You can read more about it here or read its first chapter here.

What do you think? Does this sound like something which could work for you and your manuscript? One friend uses it as a test for how well she understands her manuscript, even when she’s not planning to pitch it.

Good luck with your pitch!

Diane Whiteside

www.dianewhiteside.com

www.myspace.com/dianewhiteside

Safe till St. Patrick's Day

I'd like to welcome today's guest blogger Alethea Kontis! Alethea's a real renaissance woman in the world of publishing. She's sold short stories to Orson Scott Card's Intergalactic Medicine Show and Realms of fantasy, she's a contributing editor at Apex magazine, small press publisher of Nyx books, author of children's book Alpha Oops: the day Z went first, and, most recently, NYT best selling writer of The Dark Hunter Companion.

She might be a little away from keyboard today, but make her feel welcome so she'll have some Title Magic love when she gets back!

Safe till St. Patrick's Day
by Alethea Kontis
February 22, 2008


"Everybody, it seems to me
Just wants to be
Just like you and me…"
~John Mayer, St. Patrick's Day


The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Your life is what you make it. Be careful what you wish for. We've heard these sayings all our lives, and they all boil down to the same universal truth: perception means everything.

I was four when Mom fought the system and got me into Kindergarten. She went to the ends of the earth, her bored daughter in tow, attacking psychologists who refused to believe that her child was performing above her age level. When they finally decided she wasn't full of crap (as I was reading the TV Guide), they let me into school. It wasn't long before I was spending more time in a fourth-grade science class than I did with Mrs. Murray.

My father loves to tell the story of one Parents' Day, when a precocious young five- or six-year old approached him and announced, "Alethea can spell words I don't even know."

It was no secret: I loved school.
Of course, it helped that I had some pretty great teachers. (Mr. Stafford, Mr. Oberly, Mrs. Bowers, Mr. Hendrick…)

I started writing poetry in the second grade. In the third grade, my Aunt Theda taught me algebra and anatomy (she was premed at Duke and needed a study partner). In fourth grade, I learned the International Sign Language alphabet and used it to send secret messages to my friends. When I took French, I filled up the front and backs of test papers writing scenes using all my vocabulary words. I shaded the thirteen colonies with the flags of the states, and the class voted to give me extra credit. I passed notes in Spanish class…in Spanish. I memorized Shakespeare, and Poe, and Byron, and Carroll, and anyone else in the Literature book who lived in a pretty how town. My junior year, I alphabetized the periodic table of the elements and used THAT to send secret messages.

There are words for kids who love school. Nerd. Geek. Freak. Teacher's Pet. Loser. And there were people who made my life hell because of it.

When you're thirteen and your mother tells you that the kids only treat you the way they do because they're jealous…like hell you believe her. There is obviously something wrong with you, you're no good to anybody and never will be, and no one will ever love you. You let the jabs and whispered insults and cold shoulders get under your skin, and you wish you were dead. You shut yourself in your room and cry every day when you come home from school. You're the most miserable person on the planet and no one understands you.

And that's exactly what they want.

What your mother doesn't tell you when you're thirteen is that the rest of your life is just like high school all over again.

Do what you love and the money will follow. That one's true too, but it's really, REALLY (did I say really?) hard to get there. It's work--hard, unforgiving work--but you do it because you love it, you eat sleep and breathe it, and you can't imagine your life without it. It's an obsession. It runs in your veins.

Cut me and I bleed the publishing industry.

There comes a time in a writer's life when the veil falls away and the romance is gone. When you're slogging through the middle of a project you MUST FINISH because you have things like bills and deadlines hanging over your head. It's the last thing you want to do when you get up in the morning, but you have no choice. Then you finish the project, turn it in to the editor, and move on to the next thing. By the time it actually hits the shelves it's a bittersweet reunion, because you've long since been passionate about something else.

I live in a different world, a world of deadlines and word counts and time travel, a world where everyone I meet and everything I do is inevitably part of my next story. I write my own life, and it's a fantastic adventure.

Of course, it helps that I've had some really great teachers. (Andre Norton, Orson Scott Card, Sherrilyn Kenyon, Rebecca Moesta, Kevin J. Anderson…)

I can't tell you the exact day that I woke up and realized I was on the other side of the Looking Glass…it just happened. And what I saw when I looked back to the Real World was that all those Green People were still there thinking I was some untouchable, ethereal being, and hating me for being happy. I wanted to climb on my soapbox and yell at them, remind them that I was still human. I lost friends and missed family just like everyone else. Last year I was stripped of my privacy and my innocence, was abused and mistreated by crazy cultists, got passed up for promotion, and had my heart broken into a million pieces. I have a laundry list of depressing events, proof enough that I have a right to be just as miserable as all of them.

Suddenly I realized: making me miserable only made them powerful.

Why would I want to lose the magic that makes me ME?

You know, sometimes the grass is just greener. But it's greener because some beautiful man with a passion spends all the time he's not scaling cliffs working to make the world a nicer place to live in. He digs and tills and plants and tends, over seasons and years, and eventually that love shines like an immortal beacon from the top of windswept hills. His garden has every right to be greener, and we should all celebrate him for it.

More importantly, he should celebrate himself.

Do what you love, and the Green People will follow. It's high school all over again. But you can't let that stop you. Ever. You are fabulous. Remember that. The curse of the Green People is that they get to be themselves and wear their misery for the rest of their lives.

You and I only have to wear green on St. Patrick's Day.

I was emailing a friend from high school earlier and telling him about my week. His response was: Who are you? And whose life are you leading?

It's still just me, I told him. But this is my life now. My crazy, happy, beautiful, green, magic and miserable life.

It's no secret. I love writing.

There are words for people like that: New York Times Bestselling Author.

Perseverance

I would like to welcome our guest blogger this Friday, debut author Mona Risk.

Perseverance: Is it the key to success or heartaches (and prospective heart attacks)?

It’s a strange question I‘ve been asking myself today while going through a rollercoaster time to say the least.

Last week I received two rejection letters and two requests. The editor requesting revisions for one of my manuscripts quit the publishing company after working with me for a year and promising a quick response.(?!) AND my first book was released yesterday.

Maybe I should rephrase the above paragraph in fewer words. Emotional words: Disappointed. Anxious. Relieved. Depressed. Joyful. Delirious.

If I keep hyperventilating the way I’ve done all last week, I am heading straight toward a heart attack. Can my poor heart accommodate so many emotions crammed in one week? Eventually I hope all my manuscripts will find a happy home. I believe it because I want to believe it, because without faith in myself, in my writing, my muse would hide, sleep would elude me and my heart would hammer, race, slow, and hurt.

So I decided to send the requests and then ignore them for the moment, forget about the departing editor until a new one reminds me of her existence, and celebrate the release of my first book, TO LOVE A HERO.

I am published. Yeah!!!. My first book, the book of my heart, TO LOVE A HERO came out yesterday at Cerridwen Press. I cried with joy last May when I received the Call. I thought it was the culmination of my dreams. Let me tell you about my Call.

It all started ten years ago. In a different life, I was Director of the Analytical Division of an environmental company. I supervised a staff of chemists performing analytical tests, and I worked on various government contracts. A monotonous predictable life that suddenly changed when I won a contract to refurbish a military laboratory in Belarus.

I traveled fifteen times to Minsk, capital of Belarus, and was well received by everyone. I worked with colonels and generals, chemists and engineers. I was invited to their homes and became friends with their wives. During the inauguration of the lab we were featured on their national TV. Needless to say, I fell in love with the country.

Five years later, I wrote my first book, TO LOVE A HERO. Through my novel, a fictional story about an American chemist and a Belarussian officer, I lived again my fantastic trips to Belarus. My story highlights the hospitality and warmth of the gorgeous and gallant Belarussians officers who sing, toast with vodka and make a woman feel like a goddess.

The hero, Major General Sergei Fedorin, has pledged to cleanup his country of the nuclear pollution that killed his wife and threatens his nation with cancer. American aid allows him to start his mission by refurbishing an old military laboratory. The patriotic Sergei is a true hero in his country who protects millions of citizens. He is watched and scrutinized by everyone, admired and revered, but not allowed to breathe, or love, or live a personal life. He accepts it all because of his love for Belarus.

BUT…When the lovely Dr. Lornier stumbles on the escalator of the airport straight into his arms, Sergei has more on his mind than nuclear pollution.

Raised in boarding schools, Cecile learned to fend for herself at an early age. She buried her loneliness under long hours of study and work. Now she’s determined to excel in her first international contract. So many people are watching over her shoulders: her boss at EAL; the government auditor who came with her to Belarus; the chauvinistic Belarussians officers; the treacherous Colonel Roussov who would go to any length to destroy Sergei; and especially Rob, her ex-fiancé, the sleaze ball who snatched her promotion at EAL. Nothing can detract her from her mission

BUT… In Belarus, a Russian country dominated by male chauvinism and intrigues, Cecile finds much more chemistry than she bargains for, and in the arms of General Sergei, she learns that chemicals are not the only things that can generate heat.

Can she betray his trust to save his career? Would her love cost him everything he valued?

I had a lot of fun writing this book and I hope you will discover a new country and interesting culture while reading TO LOVE A HERO.

Writing a book is one thing. Seeing it published is another. During my journey to publication, I often pondered if it wasn’t easier to refurbish the lab in Belarus, struggle with the chauvinism of my foreign clients and pass the thin-comb inspections of government auditors.

I wrote my book in three months and spent four years editing it. I entered my manuscript in numerous contests and edited according to judges’ comments, submitted to innumerable critiques and edited according to CPs suggestions, requested help from wonderful mentors and edited according to pertinent advice, and I edited, and I edited…for months, for years, while trying to save the plot and create my voice.

Last year at the FRW conference in Miami, Raelene Gorlinsky was sitting at a table waiting for the next writer to come and pitch her story. I stood at the door of the room admiring her adorable hat. No one showed up. A writer asked who was the lady with the hat. I said. "She's Ellora's Cave's publisher." Behind me the coordinator answered, "And Cerridwen Press's. But her last one didn’t show up. Do you want to go?" That made me jump. I hadn't planned to talk to Raelene and I didn't have a pitch, but a minute later I sat in front of Ms. Gorlinsky trying to summarize the book of my heart. Raelene smiled, asked questions, and I relaxed.

A week later I sent my requested material to Cerridwen Press and a month later came the first e-mail from Helen Woodall requesting the whole manuscript. By then my mother had been rushed to the hospital with congestive heart failure. I copied my manuscript on my laptop and stayed at the hospital all day, helping my mother drink and eat, and in between, reading, editing and revising. I sent my manuscript to Helen after two weeks.

It was 7:30 am on May 15. Still half asleep from a late night, I saw Helen's e-mail address on my e-mails and the heading, TO LOVE A HERO. I froze unable to open it and called my husband. He clicked on the e-mail and hugged me before I could even read it. Cerridwen Press would like to offer you a contract. Oh my God. I cried and I laughed. We bought a box of chocolate and took it to the hospital instead of champagne.

I was a published author. Finally. I wrote an acceptance letter to Helen, a delirious letter, that was far from professional.

Check www.cerridwenpress.com to order for TO LOVE A HERO, a sizzling love story in an exotic setting.

Did I reach my goal? Hu…I guess….I’m not sure. Now I have to promote my first book, blog about it, send it to reviewers, bite my nails while waiting for their comments, sell it, sell as many copies as I can. And then write another one.

The road to publication is a long one, sprinkled with emotions, with tears of frustration and shrieks of joy. The end of this bumpy road is too far away to even glimpse. Put your hand on you heart, take a deep breath and keep going my friend. As a writer you have too much passion to stop.

Find out more about Mona Risk and her books.

Buy Mona's book To Love A Hero.

Anna Campbell is in da house!

One of the most awesome things about being a writer is making lots of friends in fellow writers. While your family and non-writing friends might be supportive of you and your career, your writer friends are the ones who really "get" you and what you do. I'm fortunate in that I have lots of fantastic writer friends around the world, one of whom is the super chick from the Land Down Under, the fabulous Anna Campbell. Anna is our first guest blogger here at Title Magic, so please put your hands together...uh, your fingers to the keyboard and make her feel welcome.
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Hi there, Title Magicians!

Huge congratulations on finaling in this most grueling of contests. I’m in awe of all of you! Huge good luck to the girls still battling it out in the competition. Can’t wait to see who wins!

Thanks so much for asking me to be your first guest blogger. I’m enormously touched and flattered that you picked me. Mind you, I’m a newbie myself so perhaps my experiences will resonate with what at least one of you (and hopefully more) will go through VERY soon. Whoo-hooo!

When Trish Milburn, my Bandita Buddy, and I were talking about topics, she suggested contests. This seems like a great idea except I’m sure you girls know much more about contests than I do!

So I thought I’d give you a personal history of my experiences with contests.

As many of you know, I took forever to sell and people often ask what kept me going through all that rejection and disappointment. Well, partly it was love of writing itself – I gave up once because I decided it was a childish dream to want to be a writer, but I couldn’t bear it after about 18 months and I went back to my stories. But something else that really kept me soldiering on was writing contests.

And this was before I discovered the amazing and glorious world of ROMANCE writing contests run through the American chapters.

If I saw a short story contest through a magazine, I’d enter it. Thankfully, I achieved just enough success to encourage me that I wasn’t completely hopeless at this. My favorite contest was a romance one run by Woman’s Day, a very popular magazine over here, and Harlequin Mills & Boon. I came in third one year and won my first computer. Not only that, we had a gala reception in Sydney which meant a flight, a limousine ride, a night in a very swish inner city hotel then a party where the three prize winners were made to feel like princesses for a day. I still have a photo of me in my very embarrassing ’80s navy and white-spotted drop-waisted dress (ouch!), clutching a huge bunch of flowers. The dress may not be so pretty, but the flowers and the big smile on my face tell it all!

Then a competition changed my life.

After I came back to writing, I joined Romance Writers of Australia. I was fiddling with a couple of manuscripts that were fun but completely unpublishable. One was set in 18th century Austria and Hungary. Yes, I know, a hugely commercial setting! But it had this great first kiss with a major plot turning point. So with complete trepidation, I entered it in the 2001 RWAustralia First Kiss competition. To my utter shock, I ended up placing and the comments indicated I was writing publishable material even if the subject matter wasn’t!

This was enormous validation to someone who had worked on her own for so long. And from people who wrote romance for a living which was even more important. So I sat down and had a long hard talk to myself (no wonder the neighbors think I’m slightly cracked!). Perhaps I should try and write something more overtly commercial and have a genuine go at getting published.

I’d always loved books set in the Regency, and I knew quite a lot about the period for various reasons. Perhaps I should write a Regency. My next manuscript was The Magnificent Marriage which finaled in the 2006 Golden Heart, the first and only year I entered. The book I wrote after that was No Ordinary Duchess, also a 2006 GH finalist. That book went to auction and eventually was released by Avon as CLAIMING THE COURTESAN.

So I’ll always be enormously grateful to writing competitions!

And speaking of competitions, my favorite comment today wins a signed copy of UNTOUCHED, my latest Avon historical romance, and the Anna Campbell desk calendar. Tell me your history with writing contests or ANY contests, really! Good luck!