It is safe to say that every person reading this post has ridden on an elevator built by the Otis Elevator Company. The company is based in the U.S. and employs over 70,000 people, with annual revenue exceeding $14 billion.
The founder, Elisha Otis, who, by the way, was a Christian man, would give short demonstrations of his invention’s features as early as the mid-1850s, explaining how things worked to a few riders as they rode up and down on the new-fangled contraption. Eventually, the term elevator pitch came into vogue in the 20th century, as screenwriters would corner Hollywood film producers in elevators and be given 20 seconds to make or break their careers.
Few people can easily explain their book in one short paragraph or tell who they are with an economy of words, but it is something to work on. Personally, my editor’s name is “delete.” If you need contact info, look in the upper-right or left corners of your keyboard.
Here’s an explanation of book publishing and why elevator pitches are important:
Readers: You need to convince them to spend twenty dollars on your book based on the title, subtitle, and about thirty words of explanation. If they read beyond these three things, it is a gift. Book descriptions are like books themselves as you pull readers from page to page. Don’t expect a reader to plow through five hundred words of description and a vague author bio before deciding to buy your book.
Agents/Publishers: Grouped because they review book proposals similarly. You need to convince them to spend their time (agents) and money (publishers) on a new book. Again, a book proposal is like a book itself: You pull readers through from section to section. They want to know about you, your concept, your platform, and how you think. In some cases, when I send a client proposal to a publisher, I lead with information about the author and their platform, since everything that follows is tied to those things.
Booksellers: Online booksellers that dominate the publishing landscape are influenced by historical sales data, product metadata, and mysterious algorithms that highlight one book over another. But for the remaining physical book retailers, their decisions to stock and sell the relatively small percentage of the hundreds of thousands of new books each year are made using the same short bursts of information that influence agents, publishers, and readers.
Learn how to communicate in short bursts to explain your book. If this is not comfortable or natural for you, take the time to learn how to do it. Don’t bother looking for exceptions or ways to get around this. There are no shortcuts to any of the above, because as long as there are elevators, there are elevator pitches.
Or you can try to convince someone to trudge up forty flights of stairs with you while you explain your book and who you are. But they will likely be out of breath and in a bad mood when you get to the top, just so you know.
