Writers Magazine

It is a brave person who stands up in front of an audience of writers and creative people to tell them how to communicate. Writers tend to believe it is one thing that they are good at! But that that is exactly what Jesse Ponce did at the Matera Women's Fiction Festival 2010 when he talked about making a pitch.

Like all good communicators he had one message that he wanted to convey in the time allotted for this presentation. His message was ‘make sure you define your objective’.

Jesse said that you might expect writers to be good at putting a gloss on a marketing message, as they have imagination and creativity. But the message they have to convey is a micro-story - a book provides thousands of words to express complex ideas. Most messages have to be reduced to one nice bite-size piece if they are to hit the target. He then pointed out that it was vital to give a great deal of thought to defining this condensed message to ensure that you are not wasting an opportunity and simply selling one book.

Jesse made it clear that pitching is not something that one does without practice and a little coaching. This master coach explained how ‘the story’ is the key to all presentations. The aim is to generate an image in the mind of the listener but that mental picture would be different in each context.

The 3As provide the planning acronym

1. Agenda
2. Audience
3. Action

The agenda defines what you hope to achieve and everything must flow from this. The detailed agenda will be dictated by who you are pitching at and the context. But you must know what you plan to achieve. A short encounter at a trade show, or an opportunity to meet an agent or publisher, will each call for a unique agenda. But only if you ‘know where you are heading’ can you sort out what you want to say or do.

If your agenda was to tell your whole story, you are bound to fail. But if you set an agenda which says ‘I want them to phone me back’ or ‘I want them to put me in contact with somebody’ you have a target and clear objective. Perhaps it is enough that they just accept your carefully designed business card as good manners dictate that you will obtain one of theirs which could be followed up on.

The next item to consider is the audience. Here it is vital to realise that your audience is also working to an agenda. If their agenda is to get through a meeting as quickly as possible, you will need to be extremely brief. If they are looking for some particular skill or material, you need to be alert to this. If your agenda does not match theirs, you're going to fail, so you might want to go back to thinking about your agenda and adjust it to see if it can fit their possible agendas. A bit of brainstorming with your buddy will help here.

Short steps work. If your agenda is to walk away with a signed and sealed contract you might miss achieving this, but your audience might indicate what they are looking for and give you a telephone number to call to discuss a publishing deal.

Because there are so many different people who you might encounter in a setting, a ‘hub agenda’ might need to be defined with several spokes to it. What is the core message you want to convey and how would you approach if for fellow writers, journalists, agents and publishers?

Action is the way you plan to engage the audience. Here Jesse suggested that relevant anecdotes were one of the very best ways to engage with the audience, since these speak more to the heart. A story will engage the audience and thereby help you to achieve what you want. Anybody who visits trade shows will already have been asked a thousand times ‘Are you enjoying the show?’ which is how modern sales representatives hope to engage you in a conversation. As a creative writer you can do better than that but an approach that allows the audience to reveal what is on their mind lets you tune into their agenda before you make your pitch.

So don't say something direct like ‘Can I help you’, because that is not engaging the heart. Any direct question goes to the head and also invites a direct answer. A human is more vulnerable when you engage them at a human level.

It is always vital to recognise that the time you have is very limited. There are some cultural differences, but in general you are dealing with professionals and they generally welcome a person who comes quickly to the point of the meeting.

Jesse also produced ‘the rule of three’ which like so many good rules is blatantly obvious only once someone who understands the subject has explained it to you.