The Elevator Pitch

As for requests: Elevator pitches, are there different varieties? (Because I’ve heard them described as both one-sentence set-up only, and as three-sentence complete but extremely abridged plot summaries.)        –Deep Lurker

My first reaction is that you’re over-thinking this.

An elevator pitch doesn’t have rules or even a precise definition. What it has is a description, which goes like this: “You are at a convention, waiting for an elevator. An editor stops beside you, strikes up a conversation, and asks what you’re working on. You have eleven seconds (or fifteen, or thirty, or an unspecified “until the elevator arrives” amount of time, depending on who is repeating the description) to give the editor a summary of your book that will convince him/her to ask to see the manuscript.”

If you take that literally, how long the elevator pitch should be depends on how many floors the building has, and which floor the elevator is at when you start talking. The difference between “It should be a one-sentence log line” and “It should be a three-sentence plot summary” is really the difference between how long the recommender thinks it is going to be before the elevator gets there.

These days, the elevator pitch has spread from writers to corporate networking events, and is variously described as “a short and easy-to-grasp explanation of your company and its products,” “a short, memorable description of what you do and/or what you sell,” “a way to share your expertise and credentials quickly and effectively with people who don’t know you,” “a brief, persuasive speech that you use to spark interest in what your organization does,” “a short promotional speech or written blurb presented to a particular target audience to communicate the value of a product or service and get them to take action,” etc. The only real common denominator in the different definitions is that they all say it’s supposed to be short.

In other words, an elevator pitch is a marketing technique that is currently in fashion. This is often overlooked, because at first glance a one-on-one elevator pitch doesn’t sound like marketing, but that’s what it is. And marketing is an area in which fashions change constantly.

This means that everybody has their own idea of exactly how to craft an effective elevator pitch, and nobody can actually contradict them. People have made lists of what “needs” to go into an elevator pitch, depending on whether you are trying to get someone to invest in your business, to get a job, to get a massive order for your brand-new product, or to talk a particularly desirable person or group into joining your company. In some industries, an “elevator pitch” is described as “a short five-minute summary…” (presumably the elevator got stuck between floors?); in others, people are cautioned never, ever to go over a one-minute (or thirty-second) time limit.

The earnest recommendations of what should go into an elevator pitch intended for an editor sound remarkably like the advice on writing a good query letter that people have been giving for decades: Keep it short, stick to the key story points, talk about what makes the story cool/interesting/different, don’t talk about how much your friends and family love it, don’t start with negotiating points. The main difference is that an elevator pitch is even shorter than a one-page query letter. Eleven to thirty seconds, or as long as it takes the elevator to arrive. It’s more of a query-Tweet than a query-letter.

The author can’t ramble on about the worldbuilding, or the cool backstory that isn’t actually the plot of the novel, or the way the characters change and grow that also isn’t the main point, or the way the story is secretly a cool allegory that no one will understand until the last page (and given the chance, we do this kind of thing a lot. I once critiqued a three paragraph query letter that didn’t mention anything that was actually in the manuscript except the main character’s name, and that was in the last sentence. “It’s about John Smith” is not effective, whether as a query or as an elevator pitch.)

The other thing you need to remember about an elevator pitch (besides “It is short. Really short.”) is that the point is not to sell the manuscript. The point is to get the editor interested enough to look at the manuscript, or at least at a query letter.

In real life, when this sort of thing happens, it goes one of three ways. Most of the time, the editor says something noncommittal and catches the elevator and you never hear from them again. Once in a while, the editor says, “That sounds interesting; send me a query/proposal/manuscript and I’ll look at it” and catches the elevator, and things proceed from there as they normally do (i.e., the writer looks up what the editor’s company wants in the way of “a proposal” and sends them that as fast as humanly possible, with a cover letter that starts “Dear Editor: At XYZ convention, you expressed an interest in my query/proposal/manuscript.”).

And once in a blue moon, the editor says, “That sounds really cool! Is it finished? Tell me more.” At this point, you need more than a carefully crafted eleven-to-thirty second elevator pitch. You need a finished story that you can talk about intelligently and interestingly for as long as the editor wants…and you still will have to send a query/proposal/manuscript before you get an offer.

In all cases, if the manuscript doesn’t live up to the elevator pitch, the editor will almost certainly lose interest.

Most writers, in my experience, are excited enough about whatever they have just finished that they can burble enthusiastically for thirty seconds. And it is far, far better to have a manuscript that surpasses the elevator pitch than the other way around.