Pitch Perfect: Perfecting Your Elevator Pitch: Eddie Gamarra

Eddie Gamarra is a native New Yorker who’s been in the entertainment industry since the days of VHS (minus a brief career interlude into psychoanalysis and professordom). At Gotham Group he repped not only authors and artists, but publishers of all sizes, selling books on their behalf to the Hollywood market. In another role at Gotham he also sold books TO publishers as well as did a bit of bookpackaging. Today Eddie is VP, literary affairs, for Paramount Global’s Kids & Family Studio bookscouting for Nickelodeon and Awesomeness, so Eddie’s pitch advice today to writers and artists will cover a lot of ground awesomenessly.

Pitching has become more a part of children’s book publishing in the last decade or so, a culture change that’s led to new types of stories being sold as well as the increasing visibility social media allows to elevate new author and artist voices in online pitching events.

When we think about a log line, the quick sentence summary of your work that should start a pitch, accuracy is one thing—but just being accurate can be very misleading if you don’t craft one with care—here are some accurate log lines of well known stories: 

• Transported to a surreal landscape a young girl kills the first person she meets then teams up with three strangers to kill again.
• A moody teen encouraging her boyfriend to kill her.
• A boy left to fend off robbers after his parents abandon him.

Are all accurate, but misleading! To see accurate examples of a logline, consider looking at the copyright summaries found in published books. Within those copyright summaries you’ll see there are sets of details in all of them that follow a bit of a structure:

• A when and a where
• Information about the protagonist with some fundamental descriptors
• Their goal is mentioned 
• As well as the conflict to achieving that goal

You’ll also want to state in clear and simple terms the genre, tone, and demographic your story is aimed at. A good elevator pitch will share enough of a story's essential information in a logline for a potential buyer to understand why they should care about the main character’s core conflict (but keep it short! No more than 75 words).

Eddie goes on to define high and low concept ideas, watch the Zoom replay of his session especially for that golden nugget! Eddie also critiques attendees’ loglines submitted over the Zoom chat and to hear his live editing was fascinating and helpful.

A final reminder from Eddie: An elevator pitch DOES NOT MEAN pitch to someone in an elevator, in a restroom, in the dentist’s chair. You’ve only got one shot to make a first impression, learn to read the room: Editors and agents do want to hear pitches but at appropriate times and places.

Beth Phelan - Pitching on Social Media: Finding the Right Pitch Party for Your Story, Plus Strategies for Perfecting Your Pitch

Beth Phelan

Beth Phelan has been an agent at Gallt & Zacker Literary since 2017. She represents authors of middle grade and young adult books and gravitates toward stories and characters that inspire, and anything with a touch of humor and the bittersweet. Beth is also the creator of #DVpit, a Twitter pitch event for marginalized creators, which she launched in April 2016.

Beth Phelan once tweeted that her brand is "transparent anxiety," and while there's a solid nugget of truth at the core of that joke, her brand is also "barrier-crashing agent of positive change." It's no accident that Publisher's Weekly named her a 2019 Star Watch Honoree.

#DVpit (which stands for Diverse Voices Pitch) is exclusively for writers and illustrators of historically marginalized backgrounds, and it's been a roaring success at placing querying writers with agents and publishers It's thoroughly validated Beth's suspicion that flipping the existing agent-querying paradigm on its head would be an effective way to get a more diverse range of voices into the world of kidlit.

There's a pretty big range of online pitch events today, and they're generally modeled as contests, with volunteer mentors working with the winning mentees to polish a manuscript and create a short pitch. Agents and editors are then invited to make requests on those pitches, often with a short period of exclusivity granted to those requesters.

Follow Beth Phelan and #DVpit on Twitter, and get more info at the #DVpit website.