The years of pitches on Twitter, as it were named, maybe over, but pitch contests themselves are pivoting. #DVpit, most notably, is on Discord, and I bet we’ll see Bluesky contests once it becomes tenable. It’s also a good marketing tool to find your audience.

So learning to write a compelling pitch is still a good skill. How, then, do you do it? There’s no real wrong way to write a pitch, only a lot of right ways. Your mileage may vary, so try out the kind that works for you!

All the pitches in this newsletter were donated by my lovely submission friends, aka all agented authors, some of whom now have book deals. That means they’ve been tested and liked by at least one agency professional, in several cases the agent they ended up signing with.

What’s a pitch?

Before we look at styles, let’s talk basic. What’s a pitch? It’s a short, pithy description of your novel. In some fashion, it should tell us the set-up, the main character, the inciting event, the conflict, and the stakes.

You also generally want comps. Your comps can be anything in a pitch competition. The same ones you use for your query are fine, but you can also use flashy ones like I did below. Because this is about catching the eye and creating an image.

How do you do that? Let’s look.

The straightforward pitch

I’m a huge fan of these. They’re easy to write, they give a clear sense of the components outlined above, and I’ve had good success with them in the past.

I couldn’t find the original on Twitter because Twitter is basically unsearchable now, but here’s the pitch that got me my agent.

Take a look.

• Comps: Midsommar x The Night Circus

• Set-up and MC: Daga lives in a perfect village

• Inciting event: Until her best friend vanishes.

• Conflict: Did a sinister carnival take her? Or do the cracks in her village run deep? She’ll have to partner with her nemesis to find out

• Stakes: before her friend is gone forever

It’s not my most exciting pitch. It’s not the one that got the most community engagement. But it caught Maria’s eye, and that’s what matters.

Another great straightforward pitch. This one also has a hook: “Fang it!”

• MC: 12yo Palki

• Set-up: friendly demon in disguise

• Inciting event: is a prime murder suspect.

• Conflict: She must track suspects, crack codes, flirt?!, hold onto her 1 friend, & dodge her suspicious Ma

• Stakes: or she and her family will be targeted next

So you see, straightforward pitches aren’t the most frilly but they can work. I recommend using at least one of these if you get multiples, because it actually tells your agent what your query will expound on.

Gimmick Pitch

If you’re clever, gimmicky pitches can work wonders, especially for community engagement. But even agents can be drawn in by these creative takes.

The thing is, they don’t necessarily contain all the ingredients we talked about, but they touch on enough of them to create and keep interest. They also tend to follow a set formula. Maybe they’re an AITA post. Maybe they’re a dating profile. Get creative but use something familiar to the reader—and even better, something related to your book.

I love this one by Sabina because her book is about chronic pain and she riffs on support group rules to outline the basic plot and stakes of her book.

Just vibes

Sometimes, you can throw away the baby with the bathwater and write a pitch that doesn’t have many elements of a pitch at all. Instead, it highlights key features about your book that would be selling points for a potential reader: or agent.

Vibes tweets can be a tough sell. They get great community engagement, but they can turn into a laundry list—unless, like the examples above, you use your list carefully, in a certain order, and have comps that frame your genre.

For example, in Steph’s example, she uses her comps to set up that this is a romance, and so the tropes almost slot themselves into place as you read them. Leilani sneaks some plot into her vibes so you get the best of both worlds. Instead of reading like random items, they make sense.

Make sure that, with your list, there’s a flow, and you’ll write a great vibes pitch.

In the end

What you decide to do is up to you. You may come up with a format that you love that has nothing to do with anything I’ve just discussed. Great! Trial and error is the trick, and running your pitches past multiple people before you post them.

I’m always happy to read pitches for mutuals, and I’ll also critique three for $5 for anyone else. Email me at [email protected] if you need help! Good luck!