Going Up?

This is Part 2 of a weeklong series on marketing your novel. Today we will discuss the elevator speech.

In the business world the elevator speech is a universal concept.

Picture yourself trying to get an agent’s attention. He has sent you a few encouraging emails in reference to your query and you have traded messages on your answering machines, but communication has fallen off. A month later you attend a writer’s conference and he is introduced as a VIP during the opening address. Every time you try to approach him, though, some less-talented writer has him by the lapel.

You despair.

Then, on your way to breakfast the last morning, he gets on the elevator with you on the way down to the lobby. It is you and the agent. You have thirty seconds. It had better be good.

This is the time for your elevator speech. Have it memorized and ready to go. Here is my elevator speech for Rules for Giving:

A happily married, middle-aged fellow, with plenty of problems of his own, is approached by the daughter of a long-ago love interest. She is trying to solve the mystery of her mother’s demons and she knows our hero holds the key. He agrees to help her, and within thirty-six hours his marriage, his business and his life hang in the balance.

In the event you are at a gathering where you are mingling and running into new people as well as those you have already met, you should have three or four slightly different versions so you do not sound like a broken record. Remember, you have thirty seconds.

Tear yourself away from writing your next novel (because you should always be writing something), and spend a few hours working on three or four elevator speeches. Hone them, perfect them, and commit them to memory.

 By the way, the above-described scenario in the elevator will never happen to me. I am sleeping in the cheapo Econo Lodge down the street from the conference hotel. It doesn’t have an elevator. I am a writer. I do not have any money.

See ya’ later.

Tomorrow we will discuss blogging.

WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Photo by Pug50 (Flickr: Hyatt Elevators) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.

Comments

[WattsLK]

Hi Tim,

Love the elevator concept, what a great thought!