BPA Pitch Prize: How to Catch an Agent’s Eye

Last Wednesday, our Pitch Prize judges Kat Aitken and Seren Adams of Lexington Literary joined us at Bàrd Books for the second evening in our Write Human series. We asked them what every writer wants to know: how do you stand out?

Their answer was, in a sense, very simple. Be honest, be yourself. AI cannot produce your particular way of seeing things or generate your unique voice.

What a pitch is for

Kat and Seren explained that one of the most important and unchanging parts of an agent’s job is being able to articulate what a book is about.

“If we cannot explain, in the simplest terms, what a book is about, then we cannot expect an editor to understand what we are asking them to read. Our aim is to pique their interest from the moment they receive our email about a submission, before they’ve even read a word of the novel itself. We want them to want to read the submission immediately.”

A good pitch is succinct and goes to the heart of the story. Focus on what’s specific – the action, the situation, what actually happens – rather than your themes. A strong story idea reveals its themes without spelling them out.

A good exercise to try is to describe your novel as a haiku. Five syllables, then seven, then five. This will help force you to decide what your book is truly about. If you can’t do it, that’s useful information too.

Writing the synopsis

A pitch or synopsis has very little time to work. It has to catch a busy agent scanning an inbox, or an editor deciding what to take home, in the same way a blurb has to catch a browsing customer in a bookshop.

If you’re stuck on the synopsis, try writing your main plot points as bullets first, then build them into sentences. Leave out subplots and thematic digressions and stay with your characters and what happens to them.

Kat and Seren said they personally prefer a synopsis that reads more like a blurb, with a hook or a mystery left unanswered. However, most agents want the ending revealed – so do check each agency’s submission guidelines. For the BPA Pitch Prize this year, we’re happy with either approach.

The opening pages

We asked whether they could tell from the first 500 words whether they’d request more. The answer was an immediate yes. So don’t tell us the story really gets going in chapter two. It has to get going on page one.

That doesn’t mean opening with love affairs and unexploded bombs. It means raising enough intrigue about your character’s situation from the start, and giving us a live scene, something happening that we can see, rather than beginning inside a character’s head. As always, show don’t tell. There are always exceptions to this but generally action makes for a better opening than introspection.

One last exercise

Spend some time in bookshops reading blurbs and opening pages. Ask yourself what catches your attention and what makes you keep reading (or put it aside). Then consider how your book would look and feel alongside them. This is essentially what the BPA Pitch Prize asks you to do: put into the judges’ hands what a browsing reader would see before deciding whether to buy your book. Give it your best shot and send us your entries by midnight on 1^st November. We can’t wait to read your material!