A tweet replying to that last post: “you may wish you were better at socializing but I am in envy of your concise pitching skills.”
Let me try to pass on some of those skills…
My pitches for my stuff are tight little nuggets of words. They start with a few hours sitting alone, contemplating the work at hand. I have one question in mind for a story: what's the emotional hook? When I find that, the next question is, how can I make it a surprise?
The naive way to pitch a story is to just start telling it. Let's say I was trying to pitch “Back To The Future”: “So there's this kid Marty, who likes to play guitars, and he has this crazy friend who's like a mad scientist, his name's Doc, and he makes all these wild inventions that are all totally useless until one day he takes a Delorean and turns it into a time machine, and…” By the time you get to what actually matters about the story the person you're telling it to has probably walked away. Or you've told the whole thing, spoilers and all, and why do they need to actually read it now? You gave it all away, right down to the uncomfortable moment where a suburban white kid co-opts the invention of rock and roll.
So we want to be more succinct. BTTF's central plot is that when Marty goes back to the 50s, his mother falls in love with him instead of his dorky father, and the resulting paradox begins to slowly erase his existence. He's got to play matchmaker, and then get back to his home time of the 80s. That's shorter but it's still a hell of a lot of words.
Someone standing on the other side of your table at a con is overwhelmed with information. The less you make them process, the better. Does it matter what the hero's name is? Nope. Take out the details that don't matter: “It's about a kid who goes back in time and falls in love with his mother. He's got to make her love his father instead before paradox wipes him out of existence.”
One short sentence with the simplest words possible that will reach out and grab your audience by the feels. Ideally there's a bit of a twist; “falls in love with his mother” isn't something that you would normally expect after “goes back in time”. That surprises the listener. You've got their attention; you've posed a problem, now you complicate it with the second sentence: he's got to play matchmaker, with the universe providing a harsh time limit.
So when I pitch Rita, I don't tell people about the details. I just say “It's about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend.” They laugh. Almost everyone has had That One Ex who drags then into their own special world of craziness, or knows someone who has; it's a situation they can sympathize with. And then the second sentence complicates her problem, and raises the stakes: “She's got to pull herself together across four parallel worlds before a hive-mind can take over the planet.” A bunch of complicated concepts that I really don't think people would be interested in without the emotional hook, but the first sentence has them already rooting for Rita, and starting to be willing to follow her through her particular odyssey.
It's kind of like reducing the entire story to a haiku. Meter is important; it has to flow off the tongue in an easy rhythm. And you need a surprising twist. This pitch was originally a little longer, but repeating it a few hundred times at every con for the past three years has smoothed all the sharp corners off and turned it into something that just falls out of my mouth automatically.
(I also have a shorter, snarkier version that I mostly use when I don't need to sell it to someone and want to express my delight that I'm making a living with something this absurd: “it's about a lesbian robot with PKD problems”. Which actually sold a book this weekend to someone who reflexively unpacks “PKD” into “Philip K Dick”. It's risky to do this IMHO, as it limits the appeal to people who do that. Same with saying “it's Mage, The Hero Discovered meets Rozencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead” or whatever two existing works it can be defined in terms of – that's an accurate description of my long-gestating next comic, but utter gibberish to anyone who's not familiar with both stories.)
I don't unload the whole pitch at once. Someone stops at my table and starts looking at my stuff, they get told “I have prints, a Tarot deck, and a comic about a robot lady dragged out of reality by her ex-boyfriend.” If they gravitate to the deck, they start getting its pitch (which is a very different beast, as it's not a STORY I'm selling there). If they laugh at the ex-boyfriend line – especially if they say something like “oh I've had that happen!” then they get the second sentence of the Rita pitch, and an encouragement to flip through the book. If they pick it up, I tell them it's book 1 of 3, the last one will be on the Kickstarters around summer, and let them read. Eventually they either buy the book, move to the deck, or say “thanks” and walk away; the last gets told “take a flyer, you can read it all for free online.”
The deck's pitch is different. There's no emotion there, all I've found is a list of facts: “this is my Tarot deck, 99 cards, based on the Thoth and Golden Dawn decks, hidden images that appear when the light hits some cards just right. Comes with a full-color book, and is fully prepared to give you the finger.” I'll leave the bit about its heritage out sometimes based on how likely I think the viewer is to know what that means; if they stick around and dig through it I'll tell them that eventually. If they go “Ooh! A Tarot deck!” and make a beeline from across the aisle, and I see some occult signifiers (jewelry, tattoos, etc) then they definitely get it.
Some people don't show a reaction to any of my pitches. That's fine. I don't hector them; I say something like “thanks for stopping by, have an awesome con!” and let them move on. My work is not for everyone and never will be, and I'm fine with that. I also don't try to drag in everyone who comes within shouting distance of my table; I try to draw in people whose gaze lingers on my work, and if they slow to a stop they get the beginning of the pitches. I've seen people do well with more aggressive huckstering but I'm really not comfortable with it; it tends to push away the people who aren't interested, and away from your neighbor as well. I'm never happy when I'm next to one of those folks.
Nobody standing on the other side of your table for the first time cares what the name of your main character is. Or how long the book is, or what genre it can be pigeonholed into. Telling them this is just more random trivia to bounce around in a brain already full of all the other sights and sounds of the con.
You've got about fifteen seconds to engage a random con-goer's emotional mirroring circuitry. Make them count. Once you've got that, then you can tell them a little about your crazy dystopia where everyone is given a color-coded jumpsuit at the age of 25 and sent out into an uncaring world of elves and orcs, or whatever particular sf/f bullshit you thought would be cool to write a story about.
