Pitch Writing Advice
Putting together a new pitch for a submission, and was just curious - do you guys follow any kind of template or rules (besides the submission guidelines, of course) when putting your pitches together?
Do you like to lead in with a high concept, or elevator pitch? Or do you jump right into a story synopsis?
Let me know some of your experience and best practices when putting together pitches to editors.
Do you like to lead in with a high concept, or elevator pitch? Or do you jump right into a story synopsis?
Let me know some of your experience and best practices when putting together pitches to editors.
Comments
***
NOT WRAPPED TIGHT
story and art by Marvin Mann
I have always preferred to live and I am not a fatalist to walk back into death with eyes open and arms flung wide. If I must kill to live, I put it out of my mind. We must all kill to live and we put it out of our minds.
_ Irisi of the Blue Reed People
Concept: Risen from her tomb after fifty centuries, an Egyptian princess seeks the remains of her husband that he may join her in a new life. To her surprise, he’d prefer to stay dead.
Summary: The story takes place primarily in 1799, after Naploeon’s Army of the Orient has captured Egypt. But it is framed by scenes set in 1925 Paris, and contains flashbacks to the Upper Nile circa 3200 BCE, and a dreamlike state on the River of the Dead. We begin on the Upper Nile, visiting the Red Sea, Alexandria, Malta, Italy and the Alps, and finally Marseille.
Book 1 From her home in 1925 Paris, Irisi tells us her story.
She recalls boating on the River of the Dead with her husband until 1799 when the physician Camille Strauss-Kemp and his fiance Helene Leveque discover a tomb on the Upper Nile containing the mummified remains of the hero Anokhemnebi and his wife Irisi. Driven off by grave robbers, Camille escapes with the body of Anokkhemnebi, but leaves Helene trapped in the tomb with Irisi’s mummy.
Separated from the great love of her life for the first time in 5000 years, Irisi awakens and forces Helene to carry her across the Eastern Desert to the Red Sea where Camille is shipping Anokhemnebi’s mummy to Marseille. But the cost of living again is high. To regain her full youth and vitality, Irisi must from time to time consume the ka, the spirit, of the living. The unfortunate Helene becomes her first victim and the first ghost to haunt Irisi.
Catching up to Camille at a nameless port town on the Red Sea, Irisi seduces and persuades him to take her to her husband. During this period she tells him of her life with her beloved Nebibi and the adventures they had. The first book ends at their arrival in Alexandria, and modern Irisi’s recollection of a lie she told Camille to complete her hold on him.
Book 2 In Paris, Irisi continues her tale.
From Alexandria, they take a French frigate to Malta where Irisi, having captured the attentions of the frigate’s Captain, makes him her second victim. Camille is appalled and abandons her. Irisi then makes her way up the Italian peninsula, where she is waylaid and sidetracked into the Alps where she spends a night in a cave talking to a man frozen in ice.
By the time she arrives in Marseille, she is trailing a string of the ghosts of her victims, and catches up to Camille at the home of his solicitor. Following them to the warehouse where her husband is held, she takes charge of the scene, defies the efforts of her ghosts to stop her, and succeeds in raising her Anokhemnebi from the dead.
For him to fully resurrect, she offers him Camille’s ka. To her shock, he declines and commands her to return with him to their tomb in Egypt, where they will die again. A dutiful wife, Irisi follows him back, and they drink from a poison drought. Anokhemnebi dies, but Irisi has fooled him and spits the drink out.
The story ends in Paris, where Irisi acknowledges her nature to us, and defies the ghosts who still follow her. They are legion.
***
I start with a catchy quote.
Follow with the concept (note I cheerfully give away the ending)
Short summery,
and then the longer summery.
all on one page.
When pitching to editors, have they given you any advice on your pitch submissions? Anything that you probably didn't think about at the time, but upon seeing their comments now seems very obvious or was just good advice?
(And for anybody who intends at some point to read the book, of course, spoilers abound.)
THOUSANDS ARE SAILING
Proposal by Derek McCulloch
FORMAT: OGN, approximately 120-130 pp. Script by Derek McCulloch, art by Colleen
Doran.
OVERVIEW: Human drama about Irish emigration to
America, spanning 90 years and exploring the evolving experience of Irish
émigrés in New York City—from a penniless woman struggling to raise a daughter
in 1870 in the slum of Five Points, to a young man carving out a career as a
folk singer in 1960, the year America elected its first Irish-Catholic
President.
AUDIENCE POTENTIAL: For more than a century and a half, America and Ireland have shared a singular
relationship. Immigrants came as cheap
labor for the building of bridges and railways; their children and
grandchildren learned to use the new land’s political structures for their own
benefit and found their way to positions of power. Stories of emigration, of the auld sod and
the new, inevitably became an ingrained part of American popular culture. The tension between the longing for the land
left behind and the hope for a home of one’s own making has informed great
stories in many media through the years—John Ford’s Irish movies, the works of
Frank McCourt, the music of The Pogues, William Kennedy’s Albany novels, Martin
Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, and so on.
The enduring fascination these works hold for audiences all over America attest to the resonant power their
stories still hold, not just for the children of Irish immigrants, but for
anyone with an interest in the story of America.
PLOT SYNOPSIS
(The stories labeled “Ciara’s Story” and “Johnny’s Story” will be
intercut with one another, tying together when we get to the part labeled
“Fintan’s Story.)
Ciara’s Story: In 1870, Ciara O’Dwyer and
her two-year-old daughter Maire arrive in New
York City.
Ciara’s husband, Fintan, is to be following in several months. In the interim, Ciara and Maire will be
staying with cousins who have been living in New York for several years. Expecting to find America a land of milk and honey,
Ciara is instead shocked to learn that her cousins live in a squalid tenement
apartment in Five Points, then a teeming den of drunkenness, prostitution, and
criminality. Making the best of it,
Ciara earns a little money by taking in laundry. She sustains herself with hope for the
future, kept alive by the letters she receives from Fintan; and memories of the
past, evoked in the stories she tells Maire of the land they’ve left behind.
Her hope falters as Fintan’s letters cease and his
predicted arrival date comes and goes.
One day, Ciara meets Tim Shea, an acquaintance from her home
village. Tim tells Ciara that Fintan has
abandoned her, joining the army and shipping off to India. Unable to believe it at first, Ciara
gradually grows despondent as Fintan’s silence continues.
Some
time later, Ciara meets Tim again when he runs through her alley, pursued by
members of Dead Rabbit gang, led by the murderous Francis Corcoran. Ciara hides Tim until the danger has
passed. He emerges from hiding, saying
that the Dead Rabbits must have mistaken him for somebody else. Claiming his only motives are gratitude and a
wish to see her happy, Tim takes Ciara out for a meal. Gradually, a relationship develops between
them. Tim briefly gets Ciara a maid’s
job in the home of Marm Mandelbaum, the pre-eminent fence in 19th century New York. It belatedly dawns on Ciara that Tim is
himself a thief of some notoriety.
Later, Francis Corcoran visits Ciara in her home. Ciara is frightened, thinking that Corcoran
knows her connection to Tim—but he’s only come to engage her services as a
laundress.
For a time, Ciara is swept up by Tim’s glamour, but her
misgivings grow. He’s a romantic,
charming figure, but he’s never on the up-and-up, and he’s nasty when he’s
drunk. Eventually it emerges that he habitually
gambles away all his ill-gotten money and that he personally owes Corcoran a
large amount. As funds get tighter, he
tries to convince Ciara to prostitute herself for him. She refuses and tries to get him out of her
life. In a drunken argument, Tim makes
the great error of threatening Maire, and Ciara hits him in the face with her
hot flatiron. He falls over a rickety
railing and plunges down a stairwell to his death. Horrified, Ciara runs down the stairs after
him. She hunches over his body, sure
she’s bound for jail, until she sees Francis Corcoran standing by the door with
his dirty shirts. “Go back to your
laundry, missus,” he tells her, “there’s nothing here that need concern you.”
Johnny’s Story: In 1960, as John Kennedy is beginning
his bid for the Presidency, Johnny McCormack travels from Ireland to New York, dreaming of becoming a Broadway
star. He rooms with Brian Fitzgerald, a
school friend from his own town, who is also an aspiring actor. Together they try to storm Broadway, where
Brian is understudying for a role in “The Hostage,” and is trying to cultivate
the play’s author, Brendan Behan, who is boozily touring New York.
Instead, they stumble into a burgeoning folk music scene and discover
they can attract a greater audience with the songs they learned as children
than they can by acting. They also
discover they’re attracting each other.
Brian, the more worldly of the two, is a pansexual rake. Johnny, sheltered and repressed, is forced
for the first time in his life to confront his sexuality.
Johnny forms relationships of another kind with several
women in the folk club world, and with his landlady, Mrs. Lefkowitz. Mrs. Lefkowitz believes Johnny, not Brian,
has the singular talent, and is always trying to get him to speak to her
son-in-law who works in television.
Johnny is indulgently indifferent; he needs connections in the music
business now, not television.
The relationship with Brian is maddening. Johnny believes himself to be falling in
love, but Brian keeps things on a strictly superficial level, coming back to
Johnny whenever other options have failed to pan out. After a drink-fueled fight with fickle Brian,
Johnny spends the night on the shore
of Liberty Island and has
an otherworldly experience. He’s visited
by the ghost of an old Irishman who tells him a garbled story of lost love and
murder. Overcome, Johnny makes a promise
whose meaning he doesn’t even understand:
when the ghost says “Sing her my song,” Johnny says, “I will.”
In the morning, the encounter seems like a delirium,
but Johnny is still moved by the ghost’s story of loss. He resolves to reconcile with Brian—only to
be betrayed even more thoroughly than already.
Brian has quietly recorded a song of Johnny’s composition, claiming it
as his own. Johnny learns about it only
when he hears the song on the radio.
Brian himself is nowhere to be found.
Hung over, Johnny visits Mrs. Lefkowitz and tells
her his troubles. Johnny is surprised to
find how familiar she is with his repertoire of old Irish songs. Lefkowitz is just her married name, she
points out. She’s as Irish as he
is. It’s election night, and as they
watch the returns on television, Johnny and Mrs. Lefkowitz argue about
politics; he’s for Kennedy and she’s for Nixon.
As the news signs off at midnight with a winner undeclared,
Mrs. Lefkowitz observes, shrugging, “It’s an Irishman either way.” She asks Johnny to sing some more. As Johnny begins to sing another song he’s
been working on, he’s astonished when Mrs. Lefkowitz sings along. It’s not a traditional song from his
repertoire—it’s “Ciara’s Song,” which he learned from the ghost on Liberty Island. He
asks Mrs. Lefkowitz how she knows the song and she tells him her mother always
sang it to her when she was little. The
truth dawning on him, Johnny asks, “What was her name?”
Fintan’s
Story (as he revealed it to Johnny): We cut back to the night on Liberty Island and learn that
the ghost was Fintan O’Dwyer who, contrary to Tim Shea’s lie to Ciara, never
joined the army and never went to India. The business that kept Fintan in Ireland
after Ciara and Maire’s departure was the arrest of his brother as a Fenian
rebel. Fintan hoped to discover the
informer who’d betrayed his brother, but wasn’t successful. On the ship to America, Fintan runs into Tim Shea
who, unknown to Fintan, is the informer.
As the ship is nearing New
York harbor, Tim, thinking that Fintan has discovered
him, decides to act first. He stabs
Fintan and, promising suggestively that he’ll look Ciara up in New York, tosses him
overboard.
The Ending: Mrs. Lefkowitz takes Johnny
to a rest home to visit her 92-year-old mother:
Maire O’Connell née O’Dwyer.
Maire is blind but lucid, and Johnny keeps a promise he made to
Fintan. He tells her her father’s story
and sings her Ciara’s Song. As Maire
drifts off to sleep, Johnny is approached by Arnie, Mrs. Lefkowitz’s
son-in-law. He asks if Johnny has ever
recorded the song. Johnny says no, and
Arnie says it’s just the sort of thing his boss would love. That boss, it turns out, is Ed Sullivan, for
whose show Arnie is a booker. We close
with Johnny singing Ciara’s Song on The Ed Sullivan Show, introducing it as “A
song by an Irishman who wanted to come to America.”
Possible Framing Sequence: I’m undecided whether or not
this constitutes one layer too many, but I may frame the story Citizen Kane-style, with a smaller sequence
set in the present day. The lead in this
sequence would be Paul Rankin, a Bono-type rock star coming to New York to record an
album of Johnny McCormack covers. The point
would be to further underscore the progression in the ocean crossings: Ciara comes as a peasant, Johnny as a
striver, and Paul as a conquering hero.
The conclusion of this sequence would fold into the ending of Johnny’s
story, as Paul, in concert, introduces Ciara’s Song.
WHO I AM/WHAT THIS BOOK IS TO ME:
My first graphic novel, the critically-acclaimed Stagger Lee, was nominated for Eisner and Eagle awards and won four
Glyph Comics Awards, including Best Writer and Story of the Year. My second graphic novel, Displaced Persons, will be released in June. Colleen and I previously collaborated on “Pretty
Good Year,” a story for the Tori Amos anthology, Comic Book Tattoo.
While I’m neither Irish nor American, stories of the
Irish in America
have held a great fascination for me for as long as I can remember. The first music I remember listening to as a
child was by The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and today as I teach my
daughter the words to “The Irish Rover,” “The Parting Glass,” or “Tim Finnegan’s
Wake,” I have the curious sensation of passing on a birthright that both is and
isn’t mine. This book would be a rare
and deeply personal opportunity to do the same thing on a wider scale—to pass
on to a new generation the stories I grew up with, and the history they
represent.
COLLEEN’S STYLE: Colleen’s intention is to work in the same
style she used for “Pretty Good Year” in Comic
Book Tattoo. The pages from that
story can serve as a sample of what this book could look like. This dreamy painted style is perfectly suited
to a story about dreams for the future and ghosts of the past.
That aside...I think it's best to present stories like these as straight chronology in the pitch, because it's easier to understand in a quick read...in a pitch you need to get the point across, not tell the story artfully.
And it's important to remember, though, that you still need to entertain and seduce your audience. Just in a different way.
And I'll put The Lone and Level Sands, Some New Kind of Slaughter and Inanna's Tears up against any of your books for oddball content
Strictly audience wise: I tend to, for better or worse, focus less on the audience and more on an Amazon-esque "if you liked THIS, then my comic is in a similar vein, but not the exact same vein, because I'm a Unique Authorial Voice".
The hypothetical pro is that I'm saying "look, someone else made the same gamble, more or less, and it paid off". The con is that it could also be taken as "hey, want to hire off-brand so-and-so?". And I'm not sure any publisher wants to do that, especially if they think they can get so-and-so.
(My platonic ideal of pitching is the way Will Eisner described his method in Eisner/Miller: just hand the publisher a finished or mostly finished book and go "Hey. Wanna publish this? Okay, cool." My stories are always meh on paper, but tend to work out okay in the execution due to personality and good artist choices.)
For most comic publishers that I've dealt with, none of that is necessary. But I think it helps to know that stuff. To be honest, I'm at the point where I almost want to ask that of people submitting stuff to Pop! Goes the Icon, because some of these people have no clue and no motivation.
Archaia editor Rebecca Taylor talks about what she looks for in pitch submissions.
Justin
Jordan
JustinJordan@gmail.com
The
Comic:
The
Strange Talent of Luther Strode, a six issue, 22 pages per, full color
miniseries.
The Concept:
On a whim, average geek Luther Strode sends for an exercise
course he saw in the back of an old comic book. The course promises to turn him
into the kind of man that can kick sand right back in the bully’s face, but all
Luther expects is, at best, a corny old book.
What he gets is the instruction manual and prime recruiting
tool of a murder cult as old as mankind, and it does everything that it
promised and much, much more. You can have everything you want, as long as
you’re willing to pay the price, and Luther is about to find out just how high
a price that can be.
The Crew:
Writing:
Justin Jordan’s work has appeared in more than a dozen comic book anthologies,
along with being a three time competitor in DC’s Zuda competition. He lives in
the wilds of Pennsylvania
where he’s occasionally mistaken for a sasquatch. He’s not especially confident
in his cover letter ability.
Art: Tradd
Moore was born in Snellville,
Georgia where
he was raised solely on the teachings of X-Men, Final
Fantasy, and The Matrix. Somewhere along the
way he took up drawing and never looked back. He graduated from the
Savannah College of Art and Design in 2010 and has been locked in a room
drawing comic books ever since.
Colors and Letters:
Felipe Sobreiro is the artist behind
THE NEW ADVENTURES OF SIGMUND FREUD and a handful of other short comics. He has
published his work on Heavy Metal magazine, Image Comics’ POPGUN anthology and
a couple of BOOM! Studios titles. He can be found at: http://www.sobreiro.com/
Synopsis
Issue One
Broadly speaking, things are going pretty well for Luther
Strode; his mother and him have escaped from Luther’s abusive father, he’s a
got a good friend and there’s a girl at school who, at the very least, is aware
that he exists.
On the downside, Luther is scrawny, uncoordinated and
hopelessly geeky, something he tries to change by ordering The Hercules Method,
a bodybuilding course from an old comic book.
The course works much better than expected, and Luther ends
up nearly killing one of the high school jocks with his newfound strength.
Meanwhile, the man who sent him the book, The Librarian, is making his way
towards his new pupil.
Issue Two
Suspended from school for putting the bully in the hospital,
Luther spends his days figuring out his newfound abilities and getting to know Petra, his new girlfriend.
When Luther and his best friend Pete are caught up in a
convenience store robbery, Luther is able to stop the criminals and escape
unseen. To Pete, this is a clear indication that Luther has only one option: to
become a superhero.
Meanwhile, The Librarian kills the bullies, the first step
in tearing Luther’s life apart so that he can become the perfect monster that
Librarian is grooming him to be, by framing him as a killer.
Issue Three
Luther is becoming increasingly worried about Petra, who believes is
being abused by her father. He tries to
push this into his tentative attempts to become a superhero, but he finds that
fighting crime, even with superpowers, is harder than he expected.
It takes an especially difficult turn when the Librarian
shows up and tells him the secret of his new abilities: Luther is the newest
recruit into a murder cult that dates back to Cane, and his abilities will
eventually make him a killer.
Issue Four
Worried by what he learned from the Librarian, Luther gives
up the Hercules Method and tries to become normal again. When Petra
disappears, he goes to confront her father, and nearly kills him in the
process, learning that her father has sold her to a group of criminals. As
Luther confronts the criminals, things go horribly wrong.
Luther’s action continue to have repercussions that echo
through his life as the Librarian kidnaps Pete, trying to get a better grasp of
Luther’s mind. While Luther tears the criminals holding Petra apart, Pete is being tortured by the
Librarian.
Issue Five
After killing the criminals, Luther is confronted by the
Librarian, who tells him that it’s time to go with him. Luther refuses, and
discovers that the Librarian has brought the police with him and that Luther is
surrounded.
While Petra
goes out to try and distract the police, Luther tries to escape, having to
fight past a SWAT team. Arriving home, Luther finds his mother missing and a
dying Pete passing on a message from the Librarian, telling Luther to head
home.
Issue Six
At his old home, the Librarian offers Luther a deal; if
Luther kills his father, his mother can go free. Luther finally gives into the
bloodlust and kills his father, and the Librarian congratulates him by snapping
Luther’s mother’s neck.
Luther attacks, and the fight ends up wrecking the house,
the combatants and most of the neighborhood. As the police arrive, Petra in two, Luther
kills the Librarian. As he looks at the cops, Luther realizes that he can only
see them as victims, meat for the slaughter and that his bloodlust will never
stop.
He attacks them, attempting to kill himself to keep from
becoming a real monster, and is brought down by hundreds of bullets while Petra screams. Killing
himself to keep the only thing he has left to love alive. As the coroner drives
away, Luther’s heart starts beating again.
These were two seperate docs, cover letter and synopsis, and we included a cover and six lettered pages.