As I mentioned in an earlier thread, I am going to be pitching my novel to an agent at the Northern Colorado Writer's Conference this Saturday. I've never done anything like this before, so of course I'm doing a ton of research. I know not to be self-demeaning or apolgetic, to not go over the time limit, to be confident, etc. Some of the tips I've accumulated come from the agent in question's own blog (isn't the internet a wondrous thing?)

These workshops are based off his book "Writing The Breakout Novel". In part of the book, he talks about pitching and the mistakes authors make. One that he points out is going into too much detail and losing the suspense and tension of the story with boring or repetitive details. His advice is to make your pitch short and sweet, enticing the listener with the highlights of the story and the core conflicts, not the stuff like how great the fictional world is. He says all you really need is to put across the general sense of the world, and that what really sells is what's between the pages that will excite the reader.

I say this because of experience. A friend of mine was going to a theatre audition , and he was running late. A car cut him off and he got angry and flipped the other driver off. Imagine his surprise when he walked into the audition and... You all know what happened.

Just be your nice cheery self, and give them a reason to want you to succeed.

A ten-minute pitch to an agent is a cold pitch, not unlike an oral thesis examination, except the agent hasn't read the manuscript. Cold is how the agent approaches the manuscript. Warm it up by being passionate without being immodest. Humility has a sympathetic appeal. An ice-breaker opening might be handy, a very brief reading from the manuscript's most concise and self-contained dramatic moment, for example.

I pitched to an editor once, and was told that my novel proposal sounded too derivative. What I'd done was use the "high concept" type of pitch they use for movie pitches, and that was totally wrong for books (for your information, I told him it was a kind of "Brigadoon in Space" story).

And uh, yeah, the exact wording of my pitch is still in revision. My writer's group is going to help me with it tomorrow; I've been struggling with it for a few days now (and believe me, I will practice it obsessively in the next days and on my way to the writer's conference). And I'll go post it in the novels feedback section in a few minutes here.

And here is a question I have not been able to find the answer to yet: how long should my 'official' novel/plot descrption be? About the same length (written) as your general query letter, aka a minute or so long?

1-2 minutes for courteous pleasantries
5-6 minutes for the formal pitch
3-4 minutes for agent questions and answers, wrap up, exchange of papers and contact information, closing pleasantries

Err on the lean side if possible.

An oral pitch ideally would include the dramatic premise or logline or elevator speech--whatever preference for calling it whatever--a brief reading of a salient passage, the overall salient features of the story and plot, salient features of the protagonist, milieu, and theme. Ideally, dramatically reading a brief one minute section from one of the three major crises of the story, the inciting crisis, the climax crisis, or the resolution crisis should be more than enough. The reading itself might be left out, but if asked, being prepared with a potent passage is a good idea.