In order to interest an agent in representing your novel or an editor in publishing it, you need to prepare a pitch. A perfect pitch contains between one and three sentences that encapsulates the essence of your novel in such a compelling way that the listener (or reader) will ask to hear more and can hardly wait to read the manuscript.

Crafting Your Pitch

Agents and editors have notoriously short attention spans, so the perfect pitch for a novel can be delivered in less time than it takes to ride an elevator from the first floor to the sixth.

A well-crafted pitch communicates the essence of your novel. Just as the agent who listens to your pitch can judge whether or not he is interested in reading a manuscript, you use your pitch to separate the agents who resonate to the kind of novel you've written from the ones who don't. Finding the right agent, the one who loves your work and the kinds of books you write, is critical to your long-term career.

A pitch is not a retelling of your story. "You see, there's this woman, she's very lonely, and she lives in the desert with her pet iguana, and one day a man shows up and wants to sell her something and she knows something is up and... and... and...." Keep going like that and you'll put your listener to sleep.

A pitch is supposed to interest and intrigue, not tell the whole story of your novel. It's okay to start with the event that gets your story started, but after that stick to the high points.

A pitch has to be a grabber, a short description in just a few sentences that intrigues and engages. It should be brief, punchy, specific, and you should have more to say when you hook your listener and he says, "Boy, that sure sounds interesting. Tell me more."

Are you thinking: "But I couldn't possibly do my novel justice in a few sentences?" That may be, but if you want a top agent or editor to be interested in reading your manuscript, you need to make your best effort.

Elements of a Pitch

Beyond all the artistry in your pitch, it should also contain these basic elements:

1. The title of your novel.

2. The genre (literary novel, romance, woman's fiction, etc.)

3. The name of the main character and the character's problem, desire, or goal.

4. The bad guy, obstacle, or situation that stands in the way of your main character getting what she wants.

Examples of Pitches

A pitch should be short, specific, and intriguing. Take this, for example: "Going for the Jugular is an adventure novel that tells the story of Vincent Pride, a recently divorced man who searches for adventure and finds love." This pitch is plenty short, but it's too generic. It could fit any hundreds of books published this year, last year, and the year before.

An improved version might begin: "Going for the Jugular is an adventure novel that tells the story of Vincent Pride, a recently divorced linguist who travels to India seeking enlightenment and instead finds the woman of his dreams." Specifics help; be sure to include those special things that make your book unique—in this case, linguistics and travel to India.

Here are examples of pitches for some familiar novels:

• The Wizard of Oz is a young adult fantasy novel in which a cyclone transports Dorothy Gale, a Kansas farm girl, to the magical land of Oz where she sets out on a dangerous journey to find a wizard with the power to send her home.

• In the thriller The Da Vinci Code, symbologist Robert Langdon travels across France and England in a race to decode a secret, zealously guarded by a clandestine society since the days of Christ.

• What if dinosaurs could be cloned? In Jurassic Park, a sci-fi adventure novel, renowned paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant journeys to a new theme park whose creators have claimed to have done just that, and gets stranded there among raptors that turn out to be as intelligent and dangerous as his theories predicted.

Tips for Writing the Perfect Pitch

Here are some tips for making your pitch as strong as it can be:

• Keep it short but specific: Remember, a six-floor ride in an imaginary elevator is all the time you have, but in that short time be as specific and as intriguing as you can.

• Highlight the elements that make your novel unique: Exotic setting? A main character with an intriguing hobby or special talent? A twist on a classic theme? Include the elements that make your novel stand out from the pack.

• Leave out most of the details: Concentrate on the main character and your main story and include only those details that make your story intriguing or unique.

• Don't try to tell the whole story: Keep your eye on the goal of getting someone interested enough in your story to ask to read the entire manuscript.

• Hold the superlatives and immodest comparisons: Avoid promising the next New York Times bestseller or the next Harry Potter.

Be Prepared to Go On

If your pitch goes well, the agent will want to know more. So be prepared to answer questions like these:

• Have you finished writing and revising the novel?

• What happens at the end?

• Fans of what current books or authors will like your novel?

• Have you workshopped this manuscript—given it to a critique group or a professional editor?

• Has this book been pitched to publishers or other agents? How did they respond?

Practice Makes Perfect

Before you go out into the world and pitch your novel, practice, and then practice some more until delivering it is as easy and automatic for you as punching the home button on your iPhone and being brought back to the main screen. Commit the ideas to memory, but you want the words to feel natural, not rote.

A pitch shouldn't feel like a sprint. We all talk too fast when we get nervous. So practice consciously slowing down. When the time comes, you'll be able to fight the urge to race to the finish line.

Practice in front of a mirror. Practice for friends. If you belong to a writing group, practice for your fellow writers and ask them to critique your performance. Pay attention to things like:

• Eye contact. If you find yourself staring off into space, or into your lap, or closing your eyes while you deliver your spiel, you're doing it wrong.

• Enthusiasm. Try to convey your own enthusiasm for your work but don't gush. A soft sell works best.

• Relax. Or try to. Practicing until the pitch comes out automatically will help.

From Pitch to Query

I touched upon query letters briefly in the last part, but what is it exactly? It's the traditional way that authors approach agents and editors in writing. A query letter begins with a pitch that continues for two or so additional paragraphs of summary and follows up with additional detail. Each query should be personal, addressed to a specific agent. It should include the reason why you have chosen to send this particular manuscript to this particular agent.

A standard agent query is a short written submission that pitched your novel and asks if a particular agent would like to see more. It should provide a short, compelling description of the novel and why you think this agent is the right one to represent the work.

Parts of a Query Letter

Many writing books provide sound advice for structuring a query letter. The advice given below is fairly standard. For more detail and sample query letters, check out these books: The Writer's Digest Guide to Query Letters, Jeff Herman's Guide to Book Publishers, Editors, and Literary Agents, or The Everything Guide to Writing a Book Proposal.

Here are some paragraph-by-paragraph guidelines for structuring your query letter:

1. Open with the pitch discussed earlier in this part.

2. Continue with two or three paragraphs of synopsis that hit the high points of your plot.

3. Tell how you think this book is unique, and what you see as the potential market.

4. Insert tailored content that personalizes the query, explaining why you are pitching this manuscript to this particular agent.

5. Include, at the end, a mini-biography of yourself, highlighting the aspects that are relevant to the novel you are pitching (i.e., "Like my protagonist, I was once a cheerleader and now coach the sport nationally"); keep it short.

6. Be sure to include your full name and how to contact you.

When you're done, spell check and grammar check. Then print it out (single-spaced) and read it through to be sure it flows and makes sense, and presents your work in the best possible light. The entire query letter should fit on one printed page.

Preparing a Summary

If you do a good job presenting your pitch or query, an interested editor or agent will probably ask you to send along a summary or synopsis. They don't mean the kind of thirty-page synopsis you may have written when you started working on the book. They mean a short (two to three pages) summary.

Writers often find this short document excruciatingly difficult to write. But you probably will get asked for one, so why not prepare it in advance so you can send it right out when you're asked? You're already halfway there if you've published a summary of your book on Wattpad.

A summary should not be long. If you can do it in a page, single-spaced, that's great. Most people need two or three pages. The purpose of it is to give someone an overview of the book that is so compelling that they will want to read the whole thing. It should reveal to an agent whether this is the kind of book he likes to represent; it should show an editor whether this is the kind of book the publishing house is interested in publishing.

Your summary should tell the story of your novel, all of it, fast forward, from the beginning, hitting all the major plot points and characters, and, yes, telling how it ends. (Don't tell how it ends in your Wattpad summary, however.) Use the typical jacket copy on novels as your model, only this will be much longer and tell all of the plot, not just tease.

A good summary does just what you've been trying not to do when you wrote the book—tell instead of show.

You might, for instance, focus on describing how the book opens, three or four major turning points, the exciting finish, and how the story is tied up at the end. Be sure to talk about the main character, his goal, and the obstacles that stand in his way.

If your summary is running too long, weed out the details that aren't essential. Subplots and minor characters don't need to be explained. If you've spent any time talking about the author, you can remove that, too. You're trying to reveal your novel's backbone, its essential essence, not write the Reader's Digest condensed version.

Are you ready to write your pitch and query an agent or editor? Please vote if you learned something new!