Pitching Advice

A pitch is a sales tool. You are the first in a long line of people who will need to sell your book. A good pitch will get readers invested in your story idea all the way down the line, from agent to editor to acquisitions team to bookseller to reader.

What Is A Logline?

A logline boils the core ideas of your story down to their clearest and simplest form.
It’s a sentence or two that identifies your character, summarizes your story, and highlights what makes your story unique.
Readers should be able to start imagining the movie of your story after hearing your logline. Their imaginations should start conjuring up potential scenes based on that simple sentence or two.
Loglines are not only for high-concept, commercial stories. You can and should be able to give a quick and compelling summary of your more literary story as well.

What A Logline Is Not:

It’s not a query. You won’t be able to get into the level of detail that you would with a query.

What We Can Learn From Our Screenwriter Friends:

Imagine the movie poster or trailer for your book. What would the focus be? Which elements would be featured in the poster image or in the trailer’s teasers?
Consider this logline for Back to the Future: “A young man is transported to the past, where he must reunite his parents before he and his future cease to exist.”

** A good logline contains these 4 elements (Taken from the Masterclass.com article linked below):

A specific and vivid protagonist. You don’t need to name them, but you do need to give the reader an instant and vivid picture of this person. Think about their personality and/or character type. For example, you might describe your protagonist as a “reluctant cheerleader.”
Clear idea of the inciting incident. What is the thing that blows your character’s life (or afterlife) apart? To keep going with the above example, “when a reluctant cheerleader wakes up as a zombie…”
Protagonist’s goal. What does your protagonist want most? What is their primary motivation? Again, following the above example, “she must find a way to reverse the zombie outbreak to save everyone she loves from sharing her fate—even if this means she’ll never see them again.”
A Compelling Central Conflict. Select the conflict with the highest stakes. Using the above example a final time, the central conflict might be described as “she races against time as her rapidly declining mind sinks into full zombification.”

How Do You Do It?

There’s no one right way. Below are some ideas and examples to help you get started.
Two key questions you’ll want to start thinking about while constructing a logline are: 1) why did you decide to write this story? And 2) what excites you about it?
Start with a big and emotionally resonant premise. One way to do this is to give your premise the “so what” or “why” test. Bounce your ideas off a friend to get their reaction. For more on this idea, see Chapter 3 of Mary Kole’s book, Writing Irresistible Kidlit. You can also check out the resources below. Another way to approach an emotionally resonant premise is to brainstorm a strong “what if” question.
A recipe to consider: multidimensional characters + tension + stakes. In other words, why should the reader care about the things that are happening to your protagonist?
Another recipe you could try: A [quick character description] wants [goal], but [obstacle creates conflict] that causes [something bad to happen/stakes]
Think about ways you can surprise the reader. Are there secrets, twists, betrayals, romances, hidden or mistaken identities, or other larger-than-life elements you can highlight in your logline without giving too much away?
What do you love about your favorite stories? Try writing a logline for one of your favorite books that includes the elements you love most about it. Use that as a model to do the same for your book.
Aim for tension, suspense, and high stakes.

Real Life Examples:

Logline for The Inheritance Games by Jennifer Lynn Barnes: A seemingly ordinary teen inherits a vast fortune from a billionaire she never met, but to claim it, she must unravel a series of cryptic puzzles and navigate the suspicious Hawthorne family who believe she's not who she says she is, all while living in their sprawling mansion filled with secrets.

Logline for I Feed Her To The Beast And The Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea: Despite being constantly overlooked in the elite and cutthroat world of the Parisian ballet, a perfectionist with an axe to grind will do anything to prove that a Black girl can take center stage. To level the playing field, she ventures into the depths of the Catacombs and strikes a deal with a pulsating river of blood.

Logline for Hello, Universe, by Erin Entrada Kelly: A shy Filipino-American boy, seeking guidance from a self-proclaimed psychic, gets entangled with a neighborhood bully and a deaf girl, leading to a chaotic day where unexpected friendships blossom and a trapped guinea pig forces them to confront their deepest fears and insecurities.

Logline for The Day The Crayons Quit written by Drew Daywalt and illustrated by Oliver Jeffers: When a young boy opens his crayon box to color, he finds a series of letters from his crayons, each one complaining about being used too much, too little, or not for the "right" things, forcing him to confront the feelings of his neglected art supplies and find a way to make them happy again.

Sources:

Writing Irresistible Kidlit by Mary Kole

Masterclass.com article on how to write a logline: https://www.masterclass.com/articles/screenwriting-tips-how-to-write-a-logline

Jenni Chappelle Editorial loglines post:

https://www.jenichappelleeditorial.com/post/essentials-for-writers-loglines/

Logline advice from Becca Puglisi:

https://writershelpingwriters.net/2016/01/how-and-why-to-write-a-log-line-for-your-story/

Additional Resources:

Jane Friedman:

https://janefriedman.com/pitch-formula/

Nathan Bransford:

https://nathanbransford.com/blog/2010/05/one-sentence-one-paragraph-and-two

Dabblewriter.com:

https://www.dabblewriter.com/articles/how-to-write-a-book-pitch