A Word in Your Eye

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-48-now-go-write-how-to-pitch--your-work

Key points: How do you, as a writer, talk about your own work in a compelling way? Pitching is a skill, you can train, practice, and get better at it. Be who you are. How does this fill some one's need? Comps and comp titles (like...). Content and presentation. Think about your audience. Conversations, first and foremost. Not distilled plot, but tone, vibe, what you're going to think about. Category, vibe, and why. Comp titles, and Venn diagram overlaps. Back copy: character, conflict, setting, hook. A keyhole peek at your book. 

[Season 20, Episode  48]

[Erin] Hey, everybody. This is Erin, and I've got a question for you. What have you learned from Writing Excuses that you use for your own writing? Now, we talk a lot about tools, not rules. Which means there are things that we're going to say that you're going to be like, yes, that is for me. That's the tool I'm going to use in my next project. And there are others that you're going to be like, uh,  I'm going to leave that to the side. And what we want to know is which of the things that we're saying have really worked for you? What's the acronym you're always repeating? What's the plot structure you keep coming back to? What's a piece of advice that has carried you forward, when you've been stuck in your work? Or that you've been able to pass on to another writer who's needed advice or help? However you've used something that you've learned from us, we want to know about it, and we want to share it with the broader community. Every month, we're going to put one of your tips or tricks or tools in the newsletter, so that the rest of the community can hear how you have actually taken something that we've talked about and made it work for you. And I'm personally just really excited to learn about those, because a lot of times, y'all take the things that we say and use them in such ingenious and interesting ways to do such amazing writing that I'm just like chomping at the bit to get in these tools and tips and share them with everybody else. So if you're interested, please go to our show notes, and fill out the form there, and be part of this project and just share with us what you're doing, what you've learned, and how are you using it so that we can share with everybody else. Really excited, again, to get all this in because, honestly, what we say is made real and important and meaningful by what y'all do with it. With that, you're out of excuses. Now go tell us what works for you.

[unknown] kimi no game system... [Japanese ad for Lenovo]

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode 48]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Now Go Write - how to pitch your work.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[DongWon] And this week, we are continuing our series talking about our upcoming craft book, and this is another one of the business topics that we are getting into. I want to talk about one of my very favorite things to talk about, which is pitching. Which is fundamentally just how do you, as a writer, talk about your own work in a compelling way. Right? I think this idea of pitching can feel very stressful to writers for a number of reasons. I think there's a lot of pressure around it because it's an important skill. Right? When we think of pitching, we think of going to... Trying to find a literary agent, trying to find an editor, and writing up the copy for your book, and having your perfect elevator pitch, and all of those things. Right? These are stressful moments, and I'm not denying that, but also, I want everyone to realize (1) what a career skill pitching will be. That it's not just confined to these little moments, that it is something you will continue to return to over and over again as an important skill as you meet readers and try and convince them to buy your books, and as you talk to your publishing team about future books you want to work on. Those are simply the most obvious examples of when you'll be pitching. Before we started recording, Erin and I were chatting about even just going into a freelance job and having to say, yeah, here's the idea I came up with, here's what I want to work on here. And that is also a form of pitching. Right? Once you start to understand the principles of how to pitch, you'll start seeing it in a number of other places and start being able to apply that. So the first lesson I want to get across here is that pitching, like any other thing, is a skill. And because it's a skill, that means you can train it, you can practice it, and you can get better at it. Right now, you're probably pretty bad at it, because everyone is bad at it. It's really hard to do. Right? And right now, you just haven't done it before. It's not a normal way to talk. Sort of. And I'm going to get more into how you can start thinking of it and integrating it into your daily life. But what you're doing is figuring out some specific strategies and some specific processes to start talking about pitching.

[Howard] Um. I'm going to say a thing, and then I'm going to invite you to hear me unsay it. And that is that the skill set for pitching is 99%, it's like coffee coaster Venn diagram overlap, with the skill set for sales.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] If you are a good salesperson, you already know how to pitch, you just need the right content. If sales terrifies you and makes you feel filthy and you don't want to be in sales, you don't even want to think about sales, then I'm now unsaying it.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And you can pretend that pitching is a completely different skill.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Because what you're pitching is something you made, not something someone else made.

[DongWon] Right.

[Howard] And invited you to sell.

[DongWon] Right. But at the end of the day, if you want to make your money from being a writer, you're selling your work. Right? At the end of the day, you are, to some extent, in sales. Because to get paid for your book, you gotta sell a lot of books. Right? So having that core skill of being able to pitch is sort of as a baseline how you're interacting with the world once you've written your thing. Right? So what is a good pitch is where I kind of want to start with. Well, actually, let's back up a second. For each of you, like, what was the place where you guys started when you were on your journey of, like, learning how to pitch your project? Like, that first query letter, that first talking to a friend about your book, what was the thing that you felt like was the first key where you're like, oh, wait, I'm starting to get how I'm supposed to talk about this?

[Howard] WorldCon Denver, I think it was 2007. We were trying to figure out how to hand sell Schlock Mercenary to science fiction fans. And we came up with epic science fiction, four panels at a time. That was the pitch.

[DongWon] Great.

[Howard] It is an epic, and four panels... What does four panels at a time mean? Well, that evokes thoughts of a newspaper comic, which says comedy without necessarily saying comedy out loud. Because declaring that something is funny is inherently unfunny and is a challenge. You're challenging people to believe you when you say it's funny. But if you say four panels at a time, they tell themselves it's funny. And yes, there's this whole strategy that goes into what you say versus the actual message that comes across. We sold so many books at that convention. We ended up printing slicks that said epic science fiction, four panels at a time on them, so that we could talk less and hand people things. And we moved a lot of books.

[DongWon] Well, to unpack why that works. Right? Is you tell people what the thing is very clearly. It's epic science fiction. Here's the category, here's how I think about it. Then you're giving me the thing that gives it texture and makes it interesting, which is a juxtaposition that's unexpected, which is the four panels at a time. I'm not expecting epic science fiction to be broken up that way. And you've structured the whole thing as a joke. And therefore, what you've communicated to me is that this is humor by the form of the pitch itself. Right? So the density of the information in that one sentence's incredibly high, comprehension, very easy. And I think that's one of the things that makes a great pitch, is getting as much information across as possible very quickly, and you're using all the tools in your kit to do it.

[Howard] And just so we're clear, that was the first pitch that really worked.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] That was where we started to see traction. I don't remember how many other pitches we had, how many other conventions I did where the hand selling was just a chore.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] But it was definitely iterative, and I...[Argh] one of those other things I may want to unsay... You don't want to hear that you're going to have to iterate this and work on it until you figure out that it works. But that's what I had to do.

[DongWon] No,  that's my opinion here, is you keep practicing it, you get better at it. Right? Your first pitch is going to suck, and then you try it on somebody and see how they respond, and then you find a better one.

[Erin] Actually, makes me think about karaoke.

[Chuckles]

[Erin] I don't actually think that I'm great at pitching. I just tend to... I have a hard time doing it in the world. But what I've learned about pitching is that, like, being who you are is helpful. Like, in some ways, like, you have to be able to carry off the pitch that you're giving.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] You give somebody else this pitch and it will feel, like, weird and wrong and off because it's not you. And I think about when you sing a song that you really like at karaoke, sometimes what will happen is, you'll try something in the moment. You'll be like, oh, I'm going to go up for that note instead of down, or, I'm going to try to, like, add this little flourish, and sometimes it lands and people react to it, and you go, ooh, that was good. And that was something I came up with on my own. I should try that again next time. And, like, over time, you build the best version of the song...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] In some ways. You still never know how it will go on the day, but you have a sense of, like, I've tried this and it works for me.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] Because it comes somewhat organically from how I would do this, but I'm still adjusting to match what my audience is reacting to. Because a pitch only works if it lands, to a certain extent.

[DongWon] And it's still an expression of you. Right? When you're doing karaoke, you're making that song yours in some way, finding some way to add you, but you're doing it in a context where people can still easily understand what's happening and what the name is. It's recognizable. I know that this is science fiction. I know that this is fantasy. But also, this is coming from a person who has a perspective, and that's coming across. If you try to use Howard's pitch of epic fantasy, four panels at a time, it would  fall so flat because the cadence would be wrong, the delivery would be wrong, the type of thing you're doing is wrong. You have to find your own voice in it.

[Mary Robinette] For me, it depends on kind of what we're talking about when we talk about pitching, because I started with pitching puppet shows, and pitching them in person. All cold calls. And so there I was always trying to figure out how does this fill someone's need. And when people ask me which of my books they should read, the first question I ask them is what are you reading now? And then I pick a book that I... That seems most closely aligned with what I'm guessing their taste is. But when I'm doing the novels, like, hello, we're going to send them out to the world, I've found that if I can figure out what a tagline is for it before I start writing the book, that it helps me focus the thing. And I figured that out with Shades of Milk and Honey, which I described as Jane Austen with magic. And it... And every time I needed to make a decision, I would go back to it. It's like, oh, I want an evil overlord, but that's not Jane Austen. So it helped me there. Jane Austen writes Oceans 11 was the one that probably made me... That cemented that...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, this is a very helpful thing to have in the world. The books that I have the hardest time selling and describing are the ones... And, honestly, the one that I have... Had the hardest time writing was Martian Contingency. I did not come up with any kind of tagline to it before I started writing. I love the book. But I have a hard time telling you what it is about. It's like, we're on Mars! [garbled]

[laughter]

[DongWon] Well, this is, I think, a real thing about as you get deeper into the series, the pitch is this is more of the series.

[Mary Robinette] Yes.

[DongWon] Right? And I think it makes a lot of sense that, for Martian Contingency, there isn't like a clear  external pitch, because it's not a standalone. Right? It's this is a new book in the series. If you like the series, you're going to like this. The pitch that you have that's really specifically honed is for the series itself. Right?

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. Yeah, and that is... And that has shifted, also.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Because the available comps have shifted.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I was writing it before Apples for All Mankind came out, so I was describing it as Apollo era science fiction with 100% more women and people of color.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And that I... It begins with an asteroid hitting Washington DC in 1952. Which is not a particularly compressed pitch, but it's one of those things that gives people the sense of, oh, it's going to be hard science fiction, and, oh, I like the idea of destroying Washington DC.

[laughter]

[DongWon] And I think that's also an important thing, that a really pithy pitch can be helpful, that one sentence thing. But also, sometimes you're packing so much information into that, that it's hard to parse.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] You know? And so it's okay for it to breathe a little bit. You can have a little bit longer of a pitch, provided it's still engaging. Provided people are still excited and bought in on it. Then you have that space to talk about it a little bit more. And one thing I want to sort of emphasize is, as we're talking about in all of these, it's an iterative process. You're practicing it, you're trying it out, and you're doing all these different things over time to learn how to get better at it. But...I want to talk a little bit more about what that process looks like and how you actually do that. And we'll do that after the break.

[DongWon] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

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[unknown] kimi no game system... [Japanese ad for Lenovo]

[DongWon] Okay. So, before the break, we were talking about, like, how people sort of came to learn how to pitch and a little bit about what that is. I want to start getting more into the nuts and bolts of it now, of how do you actually get good at it. And the  thing I really want to emphasize is we are surrounded by pitches all day long. Every commercial you hear, every movie poster, every book jacket, every... The copy on the back of that book... All of that is trying to convince you to engage with media. Right? You are watching video game trailers, your friends are telling you, hey, you should play this thing. You should go watch this thing. Right? And you are also engaged in this. You're trying to tell your friends about media you consume that you like, of, like, I ate at this restaurant, here's what I like about it. I watched this TV show, here's what I liked about it. Right? That's all pitching. You're already doing this every day to the people around you. All I want you to do is start noticing when you're doing that and noticing when you're consuming it, and start getting intentional about it. Right? Getting a little bit more focused about how do I convince my friend to watch this TV show I love.

[Howard] There are two aspects for me to the pitching skill set. And I just break them out as content and presentation. Content, what are the words that I'm going to say? How do I come up with epic science fiction, four panels at a time? How do I come up with... Is there a formula, a magic? No, there isn't a magic. I do have a formula, but it doesn't always work. And on the other side, how do I bring myself to say that thing in a way that's natural and convincing and conversational if I'm in an environment where that's appropriate versus when an agent or an editor has come up to me and said, pitch me your novel? How do I cold start that?

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] I mean, because that's an opportunity that you may get once or twice. And if you're not ready for it, boy, you'll be reliving that moment for your whole life.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] And it's... For me, it has always come down to take whatever content I think works, and practice saying those words until I've memorized them, and then just bank it.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Well, I think one thing Mary Robinette was saying when you were talking about getting good at this in terms of pitching puppet shows, and when talking to a reader about which book should  he read, is thinking about your audience.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right? And remembering that these are conversations first and foremost. Right? So even when an editor is coming to you and is like, pitch me your project, I think it is a conversation that you're trying to get into and making it feel like a personal connection. And what Erin was saying about karaoke, where are you in this, is really, really important for making that really effective as a pitch, and getting them really on board. So, when you're thinking about pitching... That's why I like this model of thinking about, oh, how do you tell your friend about something that you like? And now, you just need to do that for something that you wrote. Which is, I recognize, harder, but still is bringing that same energy to it, that same consideration of who's my audience. Right? What are they excited about? Why would they like this? Am I trying to get them to watch Star Wars? Or watch Andor? Oh, do they like Star Wars? Great, I'm going to go this way. Do they hate Star Wars? Oh, I'm going to be like, oh, you don't need to know a thing about Star Wars to watch Andor. It's about politics and revolution. Right? Like, how you're pitching that thing depends on your audience and knowing that can be really, really helpful to start honing in on how do we put english on that ball.

[Mary Robinette] You just reminded me of something that I was talking to an agent... No, or an editor? I think it was... Anyway, years ago, I didn't have a novel out in the world, and he wanted to know what I was working on, and I was like, oh, you know, this thing, blah blah... And he's like, no, no, no, no. You're telling me the plot.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Mary Robinette] I want to know what it's about.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] And then he said, Andor, it's about politics and revolution. I'm like, yes. That's often the key is that we try to distill down to plot, but it's really about this is the tone, this is the ride you're going to be on, these are the things you're going to think about.

[DongWon] Yeah. The two... The three things I want to know when I hear a pitch are what  category are we in? Is this a science fiction/fantasy? Is this adult [garbled]? Right? That's like the baseline that I need to know. The second thing I need to know is what's the vibe? Like, what kind of tone are we going for? Is it comedic? Is it super serious? Is it really ethnic? I think getting that. And then the third thing is why did you write this? What's the why of the thing? Why are we talking about this? Why am I spending my time listening to you talk about this? And that has nothing to do with  who your protagonist is, and everything to do with who you are and what you brought to it.

[Dan] The thing that really changed the way I pitch stuff is something Mary Robinette already touched on with Jane Austen, is using comp titles. I remember when I first started pitching I Am Not A Serial Killer, first to agents and editors, and then eventually to audiences when it got published. And I have a pitch. It used to be long and kind of twisty and windy. But I've got it honed pretty much more better now. But my agent... I was with her while she was pitching to someone, and all she said was, it's teenage Dexter in an episode of The X-Files.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Dan] And that changed...

[DongWon] Perfect.

[Dan] The way I think about it. These days, just because time has passed, I usually say, teenage Dexter in an episode of Supernatural. Because more people are likely to have...

[yep]

[Dan] Seen it more recently. But that's one of my favorite games to play now, is how can I find the right things that this person is going to be familiar with that will let them know what is the vibe of this story? What... How does it feel to read this book? And comp titles are a really useful tool for that.

[DongWon] Thank you for the perfect segue, because this is the thing that I also want to talk about in this back half, is the importance of comp titles. Especially when you're talking to Industry professionals, and this is... If you're talking to science fiction/fantasy or publishing professionals, editors and agents, we think in comp titles. because when we are taking a project on... When an  editor's acquiring a book, they have to fill out a thing called a p&l, a  profit and loss statement. When they fill that out, they will say, I think this book will sell X copies. The way they make the argument for why that number of copies is they're saying, it's like these other books. So you've un... At the time of acquisition, when you fill out your p&l, you have to say, this book A is like book B and C. B and C both sold at this level, so reasonably, we can expect that book A will sell at the same level. Do not come to me about the logic of this...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] There are many problems.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] And I will say that one of the things about this is that the comp titles that you use in Industry are very...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Different than the ones you can use out of Industry.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] So, for instance, I am working on a new book now, and I would comp it to you as Becky Chambers'  To Be Taught, If Fortunate meets Ray Nayler's Mountain in the Sea.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But to someone outside of Industry, I would be like, it's when the Vulcans first arrive on Earth. It's optimistic science fiction. But the Vulcans are aquatic.

[DongWon] Exactly. You don't need to be using the strict form of comps in the way that we do in house. Right? But I am telling you that part so you understand why, when you talk to a publisher, they're always thinking in comp titles. Because it's literally baked into how we do our jobs. Right? The entire job, every part of it, comes down to a comp. What does the cover look like, what is the copy like, what is the... What are we editing for? All that is driven by the comps. And so, a couple of things I want to get across here. One is you can be way looser than your Becky Chambers and Ray Nayler comp. Right? Great comp, by the way.

[Mary Robinette] Oh. Yeah.

[DongWon] [garbled]

[laughter]

[DongWon] You can... You don't have to be that specific, because that's like inside baseball stuff. You can be looser in terms of... What Dan was saying is a great one, what your broader one was... The Vulcan one was also a great one. Right? One thing I want to get across, and the first mistake I see people make when they talk about comp titles is that they think it's about all of A and all of B.

[Mary Robinette] Right.

[DongWon] And it's not that. It's a Venn diagram, it's the overlap space, is defining what your book is. So what you want to do when you're picking your comps is pick two things that do overlap with each other in a way that's narrowly defined enough that I have a clear idea of what it is. Right? I think there's this idea of, like, oh, I shouldn't have Star Wars or Game of Thrones in a comp, because they're too big and I'll seem like I'm getting ahead of myself, I'm being cocky. It's like, no, no, no. That's not the issue there at all. The issue there is that every person on the planet has seen Star Wars, so if you say that, and then you say plus B, whatever the B is, is a subset of Star Wars. Right? Because we're also thinking about  audiences. So, the audience of A plus the audience of B, that defined overlap, is what we're looking for. So if your A is so big that anything else you say will just be a subset, it doesn't really add information for us in a useful way.

[Dan] Another really helpful tool that I think comp titles bring is, similar to what Mary Robinette said about  getting your pitch ready before you start writing...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] I wrote a cyberpunk series in 2014, and I thought to myself, this is great. I love cyberpunk. There's not much out there right now. So maybe I can get some attention. And if I had taken the time to come up with a pitch beforehand, I would have realized that there is no recognizable comp title for cyberpunk for the majority of my YA audience. What am I possibly going to compare this to? Because the cyberpunk video game hadn't come out yet, all the cyberpunk that I read was 20 something years old. There's a handful of anime titles. But I can't rely on every member of my audience being familiar with Bubblegum Crisis or whatever. And so, that book was insanely hard to pitch to people, especially to a YA audience, because they had zero frame of reference for what cyberpunk was.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Dan] And I think that presages a little bit the fact that that series flopped really hard.

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] It can be really hard to be the only one out there. Right? And there's a big conversation around this about what does that mean for marginalized authors, what does that mean for innovation in genre, and... That's a separate conversation that I would love to have at other points. I'm just flagging... I see all the problems with comps as a system. It's deeply flawed. But this is how it works right now. The other thing I want to get across when you're thinking about comps is going back to kind of what we were saying about your sort of more narrative pitch, is it's more important to get across category, vibe, and why than it is plot. right? Where I see people get stuck on comps, they're like, oh, but it's kind of like this plot twist that happens in this movie. And I'm like, that's not what I think of when I think of that movie. What I think of is an overall energy and tone from that movie, and a genre category from that movie. So, when you're thinking about your comps, really think about, yeah, vibe and category and sort of like the why of the story.

[Howard] I mentioned there is no formula. But I have a formula. My back cover copy formula is character, conflict, setting, hook. And it's wildly flexible. If I have 20 characters in the book, I can't tell you about 20 of them. I mean, [garbled] 20 of them. I need to pick an interesting  character. I need to pick an interesting conflict. And I need to say it in a way that illuminates the setting and that sets me up at the end to deliver a hook. And, as formulas go, that's a little bit like the bear soup recipe. Step one, kill a live grizzly bear with your bare hands.

[DongWon] Yep.

[Howard] Step 2, make soup.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] The first part is really difficult. What is a hook? How do I illuminate the setting in 10 words while talking about the conflict? I don't know. You're a writer.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] You're good at that. You'll figure that out.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] Because once you have this sort of a framework, and you can come up with your own, that sort of a simple framework... You can write half a dozen  pitches...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Howard] For your work that... And you realize, oh, gosh, I've just put a great big flag on this character's character arc and suddenly the book is more interesting to me.

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] I have a formula that I use when I'm doing... When I have to summarize a thing for a query. But that is... That kind of pitching is so completely different than the kind of pitching that we're talking about here...

[DongWon] Yeah. I think query pitching is... I think you have, like, a really good structure there. I tend to invert it in terms of starting with the hook, but again, that's like a whole...

[Howard] Well, Yeah.

[DongWon] Separate conversation. And the thing that I want to get to, though, about what you were saying there is, so often when I'm giving critiques on a copy or on a pitch, what I'm saying is do twice as much and cut 30% of the words. Right? It's hard to overstate how efficient you have to be. And to be efficient, what I encourage you all to do is start thinking about what's the minimum thing I need to talk about here. Right? Don't tell me about your whole book. Don't tell me about all your characters. Think about the one thing you want me to walk away from, that I'm going to be like, damn, I need to know more. Right? And so, don't tell me about all your characters, don't tell me about all your world, all those things. Think of it as looking through a keyhole and letting me see one thing about your book. So when you're pitching, I encourage you, as much as you can, let go of plot, let go of the grand scope of the thing, and focus on what is so cool and compelling about the thing that you did. And with that, I think we're going to end it there. We could be talking about this for many hours. It's one of my favorite topics. But...

[Mary Robinette] Fortunately, people can pick up the book and read it in depth.

[DongWon] Exactly.

[DongWon] Okay. So I have a little bit of homework for you. Here's what I want you to do. I want you to write three pitches. two, three sentence things, just real quick elevator pitches for your book. I want you to write three of them that take wildly different approaches. Focus on different aspects, Focus one on sort of the world building, focus one on a character, focus one on a plot hook, whatever it is. Just riff in three different approaches. Don't let them overlap. And then practice them on another willing subject. Find a friend, find a partner, find somebody who's... A writing buddy. And just practice it. Say it out loud for them, and watch them as they hear it. Where do they get interested? Where do they get bored? Where do their eyes slide off? And where are they like, ooh, that seems interesting and exciting? Practice and observation are the things that are going to help you get better at this.

[Mary Robinette] This is a reminder that if you want a copy of Now Go Write, a fast-paced introduction to writing that is like Writing Excuses on paper, you can sign up for our newsletter at writingexcuses.com.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses. Now go write.

Writing Excuses 20.47: Now Go Write - All the Eggs in All the Baskets 

From https://writingexcuses.com/20-47-now-go-write-all-the-eggs-in-all-the-baskets

Key points: A tale of hubris. Branch out, diversify your income stream. Try new markets and genres. RPGs, video games, TV, tie-ins, what are the options? Turn down gigs you don't want to do. Don't let a single revenue stream dominate your income. Redefine yourself as a writer in general, not just an author or novelist. Be flexible, roll with the hits! Don't forget why you wanted to be a writer in the first place.

[Season 20, Episode  47]

[DongWon] For more than a decade, we've hosted Writing Excuses at sea, an annual workshop and retreat in a cruise ship. You're invited to our final cruise in 2026. It's a chance to learn, connect, and grow, all while sailing along the stunning Alaskan and Canadian coast. Join us, the hosts of Writing Excuses, and spend dedicated time leveling up your writing craft. Attend classes, join small group breakout sessions, learn from instructors one on one at office hours, and meet with all the writers from around the world. During the week-long retreat, we'll also dock at 3 Alaskan ports, Juneau, Sitka, and Skagway, as well as Victoria, British Columbia. Use this time to write on the ship or choose excursions that allow you to get up close and personal with glaciers, go whale watching, and learn more about the rich history of the region and more. Next year will be our grand finale after over 10 years of successful retreats at sea. Whether you're a long time alumni or a newcomer, we would love to see you on board. Early bird pricing is currently available, and we also offer scholarships. You can learn more at writingexcuses.com/retreats.

[Mary Robinette] This episode of Writing Excuses has been brought to you by our listeners, patrons, and friends. If you would like to learn how to support this podcast, visit www.patreon.com/writingexcuses.

[Season 20, Episode 47]

[Mary Robinette] This is Writing Excuses.

[DongWon] Now Go Write - All the Eggs in All the Baskets.

[Mary Robinette] I'm Mary Robinette.

[DongWon] I'm DongWon.

[Dan] I'm Dan.

[Erin] I'm Erin.

[Howard] And I'm Howard.

[Dan] And this is my episode for our book, Now Go Write. All the Eggs in All the Baskets is a presentation that I do, and now it's a chapter in a book, and now it's an episode. And what this is basically about is the tale of my own hubris. So in 2014, I was on top of the world. I was very successful. I had two successful series, I had a New York Times bestseller. One of my books was being made into a movie. I foolishly assumed that I had made it, and that I would never have to struggle again.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] And it turns out that that's not how it works. So, my next series was a flop, my next standalone was a flop. One of my publishers stopped promoting me entirely. The movie was made and it was very good, but nobody saw it because it got released in like four theaters nationwide. And so the career that I thought was secure had kind of fallen apart overnight. And yet my kids still wanted to eat three times a day, and I still had a mortgage to pay. So I realized that I had kind of foolishly assumed that the level of success I had attained was permanent and that everything would be easy from here on out. And to go back to the episode title, I had put all of my eggs in that one basket of novel writing, and then novel writing kind of dried up for me very quickly. And I had to branch out, and I had to do other things. And so this is the... uh... This is the episode where we tell you about all the other ways to get paid for writing words.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] This is... I'm glad that we're doing this, and that it's in the book, because that's one of the things that I've found as a freelancer that I expect. I'm always diversifying my income stream. But I see people who have a day job who think that they will be able to leave the day job and go write as the only thing that they do, but it's not... It's... It's... They're unprepared, even the ones who are having success are unprepared for the dips and valleys of income streams. And so, yeah, all of the eggs in all of the baskets.

[Dan] Yeah. So my first step in this was to try to figure out what else I could do in the novel writing space. And more or less what that came down to is I had a couple manuscripts, my regular publishers didn't want them, and I decided if I couldn't sell to the markets I was already in that I was going to branch out and try some new markets. And so I took two genres that I'd always wanted to write in before, which were historical and middle grade, and... I guess middle grade isn't a genre so much as a market, but... I figured I would try those. And I wrote one of each. And I said whichever one takes off, we'll take off. The middle grade was a huge, like top three best seller on Audible, and the historical has been read by maybe 15 people.

[laughter]

[Mary Robinette] I was one of the 15 and I really love it.

[Dan] Well, thank you very much. I love it too. But it was clear that I was not finding much success there, so I started writing a lot more middle grade. And that was the first step in kind of clawing my way back up the ladder again. out of that valley of success. And then other than that, a lot of it was just about figuring out, like you said, diversifying income streams. What are some of the ways that I could get paid for words? I started writing for RPG companies, I started writing for video games, I started writing for a TV company... Writing for a TV show. All these different things. Started taking on tie-in work which I had never really done before. So there's a lot of other options. And so rather than just me talk the whole time, what are some other spaces, what are some non-novel places that you all sell words to?

[Mary Robinette] I sometimes sell... I have been fortunate enough... This is not an option that's available to everyone. but, I have been... Sold, like, essays. New York Times, Washington Post. I've been lucky in that regard.

[Dan] That's one I hadn't considered.

[Mary Robinette] Oh, yeah. Yeah. And then the other thing that I do is my Patreon, which again, I'm at a point in my career where I can do that. But even when I was starting out and the Patreon was very small, the... When your income stream is, like, measured in a lot of money coming randomly from different places, if you're getting 50 bucks, $200, 250... That's money you can use.

[Howard] If you can get pizza money three times a month, you've now paid the grocery bill.

[Mary Robinette] But the trick that I have found is to... My thing has always been that I want to be able to turn down the gigs that I don't want to do. And so when I'm setting myself up for something like a Patreon, making sure that it is geared so that it is stuff that I want to do that does not get in... Or does not get in the way of things that I want to do. So, like, my... I have... I enjoy teaching. So teaching one class a month that's... A lot of it is stuff we've talked about on Writing Excuses. But it's something I enjoy doing, it's not a big time commitment. And it's very scalable. And one of the things  I made a mistake early on was doing things that just weren't scalable. Or they got in the way of the creative work I wanted to be doing.

[DongWon] Yeah. I mean, non-fiction can be a great place to start with that. Right? And so whether that's a Patreon, whether that's a newsletter, and then trying to get things placed... I mean, one thing that's generally true, although this has changed a little bit as the Internet continues to evolve, unfortunately. But outside of genre spaces, the pay per word is usually much higher than what we're used to seeing in terms of, like, what people pay for short fiction in the science fiction/fantasy space. So short fiction writing, essays, long form nonfiction, all those can be really useful. Podcasts is a great option, depending on the kind of thing that you're doing.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] My friend Richard had a... Gosh, $300,000 a year job with a Fortune whatever hundred company, and lost it through mergers and acquisitions and whatever else. And found himself at loose ends, and... But he knew somebody at Forbes. And he started writing basically blog posts for  Forbes, and the amount of money they were willing to pay for someone who knows how to write and knows a couple of things about these businesses and happens to have friends all over that he can call... He was suddenly making a living writing five or 600 words a day.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I forgot about that, that I was... There was a point where we were living in New York. We had moved there thinking that Rob would... My husband was an audio engineer and wine maker because those two jobs make sense together. But we thought he would go into doing film and television when we got to New York. And that was when there was a writer's strike, so there was no production work happening at all. So I was supporting us on my puppetry and writing income in Manhattan.

[Chuckles]

[Mary Robinette] Which was a thing that I forgot that one of my income streams was essentially blog posts, I was writing for AMC and they were paying me moneys... Money to do, like, top five fantasy films with dragons. Like, the most granular lists you could possibly develop.

[DongWon] One thing I do want to flag as we're having this conversation is we are also in a moment... Pulling back the curtain a little bit in a necessary way, that we are recording this in summer 2025...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[DongWon] Right now. The Internet over the last year and media business in general have been in a period of enormous flux and change. Right? Over the past few years, we've really seen the collapse of the online ad model, which has impacted most every content website across the internet, and we're seeing major websites going down, being acquired, losing audience, and having trouble making ends meet. So we're seeing opportunities to publish those kind of blog posts, those kind of news articles going away. At the same time, what we've seen is an incredible growth in sort of indie options in terms of journalist-led newsletters, subscriber-led podcasts. Right? We're moving away from the big, like, here's io9 where you get all of your science fiction/fantasy news to follow this creator or this small collective of creators, what are that Defector or Chloroform Media or something like that. People that you subscribe to and support directly, and that's where you're getting your content. Right? So we've seen a little bit of the shift away from you can use these big media platforms to build your audience and get paid for that to starting to need to build your own brands online and getting direct access that way. Right? So we're seeing this shift in that marketplace happening right now.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. I have a question I want to ask you, Dan, but I'm going to ask it after our break.

[Dan] Okay.

[Mary Robinette] So before the...

[Mary Robinette] Besides recording Writing Excuses, I am kind of always trying to level up my game. So I went on Master Class, and I took this class by David Sedaris about storytelling and humor. It was really thought provoking. Like, Howard and I talk about humor all the time on the podcast, but the way David approaches it is so different and also has so many overlaps. He talks about finding your way into the story, how to end with a weight, which was a really interesting thing to think about. Anyway, at Master Class, they have thousands of bite-sized lessons across 13 categories that can fit into even the busiest of schedules. So if you're a Writing Excuses listener, and you like the 15 minutes long situation, Master Class has that. They have plans starting at $10 a month billed annually, and you get unlimited access to over 200 classes taught by the world's best business leaders, writers... hello, friends... chefs, and like a ton of other things. So with Master Class, you can learn from the best to become your best. That sounds hokey, but honestly, I really enjoy taking classes through there. It is one of those places where you get access, and it has this very intimate quality to it. With the David Sedaris class, in particular, I was trying to figure out  how to work some humor into a short story that was...  around some stuff with my mom, honestly. And listening to him talk about that through that class was just very helpful at getting some new angles to think about it. New ways to be a little more honest with my writing. Right now, our listeners get an additional 15% off any annual membership at masterclass.com/excuses. That's 15% off at masterclass.com/excuses. I'm going to say it one more time. Masterclass.com/excuses.

[Howard] The holidays are almost here, and if you still have names on your list, don't panic. Uncommon Goods makes holiday shopping stress-free and joyful, with thousands of exclusive, one of a kind gifts that tell the recipient you really were thinking of them. Uncommon Goods looks for high-quality products that are unique and often handmade or made in the United States. Many are crafted by independent artists and small businesses. I love the shop by feature. I tried shop by interests, selected gardening, and immediately found dozens of perfect gifts, including a cute, slightly spooky, self-watering system that looks like a little IV bag for your potted plant. So don't wait. Make this holiday the year you give something truly unforgettable. To get 15% off your next gift, go to uncommongoods.com/writingexcuses. That's uncommongoods.com/writingexcuses for 15% off. Don't miss out on this limited time offer. Uncommon Goods, we're all out of the ordinary.

[unknown] kimi no game system... [Japanese ad for Lenovo]

[Mary Robinette] Break, DongWon was talking about how the market has shifted a lot. I am curious. Do you think, if you had to make those decisions now about trying Ghost... It was Ghost Station?

[Dan] Ghost Station.

[Mary Robinette] Ghost Station...

[Dan] And Zero G.

[Mary Robinette] Or Zero G. When you were trying to do that, do you think that you would do the same strategy or do you think that you would do some indie publishing?

[Dan] Were I to do it today... Honestly, I would probably not do either one. Because the next thing I was going to talk about that we... Is I became a professional game master. Which is not writing, but it is still storytelling. And I supported my family pretty much solely on that for 2 years. And I gave that up basically when I started working with Brandon's company. But were I back in the situation where I was looking for work again, I would absolutely go back to doing that.

[Mary Robinette] Okay.

[Dan] I have become more amenable to publishing my own stuff over the years. I self-pubbed Ghost Station in print, and Zero G in print. So, I don't think I'm very good at marketing myself as an indie author, is what I have discovered.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] And when you are indie, that's like 60% of your job is self-promotion. And that's not a skill I have developed yet. Although, clearly one I would work on developing if I didn't have a real job now.

[Chuckles]

[Howard] Clear back in... Clear back in 2006, I was at Emerald City Comic Con and there was a panel of webcartoonists including the penny arcade guy and Robert Khoo, who two years previously had basically come up to them and said, "You're not monetizing yourselves well. I can do it. I'm worth $90,000 a year, but I'll work for you for free for a year, and at the end of that year, if you can't pay my salary, it's because I've failed and you won't need to and I'll quit." Penny Arcade went on to launch the Penny Arcade Expo. Which is one of the biggest entertainment Expos...

[Dan] Right now, I think it's two or three of the biggest entertainment Expos.

[Howard] In the world. Exactly. Yeah. It's huge. And this was all Robert Khoo. And even just two years into his run with them, we were hanging on his every word in that panel. And one of the things that he said was never let  any single revenue channel account for more than 40% of what you make. And I hate advice that begins with never, and so turning it on its head, what I would offer is, strive to ensure that you have enough revenue streams that if you lose one of them, you're not losing half of your money.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] And I thought in the early days... Early days. Through 2012, 2014, with Schlock Mercenary, I thought I had accomplished that, because we had ad revenue and we had another kind of ad revenue and another kind of ad revenue, and we had books, and we had merchandise. And all of it was pinned to Schlock Mercenary.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Howard] Well, Schlock Mercenary has now finished its 20-year run, and we're still making money on it. In fact, making most of our money on it. But I'm in a situation very similar to yours, in which, gee,  I thought I had my eggs in a bunch of different baskets. But all of the baskets were in the back of the same truck.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Chuckles]

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] But what are the other things that... The other lessons that you're kind of wanting us to know that you put into the...

[Dan] Yes. So, the first main lesson is what Howard just articulated. Make sure that you have lots of different revenue streams, that you don't have a majority of it all tied up in one thing. The other one is, I think, more psychological. You have to change the way you think about yourself and the way you think about your career. And this was difficult for me, because I had always, since second grade when I told my parents I was going to write books, I had always thought of myself as an author, I'd always thought of myself as a novelist. And it felt like selling out in a way to start doing other things that were not that. And I really had to redefine myself not as an author exclusively, but as a writer in general. Someone who can write these essays or these nonfiction things or go to RPG companies and video game companies and write for them. Writing tie-in fiction was a very selfish hurdle to get over, because I wanted to write my ideas, I don't want to write your ideas. But if you are going to make a living in this industry, that's a lot of what most professional authors, I think, need to do, to branch out and write words for other people in addition to writing for themselves.

[Erin] Yeah. I think this is something that I struggle with a lot, as somebody who also writes a lot for a lot of different types of people, is that there's  sometimes, I think, a perspective in the industry that, like, certain types of writing don't count as writing. Like, somehow that's not really writing. I remember being on a panel with some folks talking about, like, making money as a writer, and they were all novelists. And so it was basically, like, making money as a novelist was the true... So I was like I'm... All I do is write or teach writing. Like, that is my entire career is writing. But I felt like people were like, well, yeah, but like none of that's from novel writing. And I'm like, that is true. I don't write any novels. But in some ways, I'm like, that's cool. It means I've managed to, while avoiding novel... If I wrote a novel, too, I'd just be rich. No.

[laughter]

[Erin] Not true. But, like, I think it is... There's so much like what is the self... Like, what is the image of what it means to be a writer? And I think, like, divorcing yourself from that is always helpful. Because there are a lot of things that we think of that are being a writer that are not great. That are... That can be harmful. I remember a friend once saying... This is a very weird pivot... That she drank more because she thought that, like, writers would, like, end every day with, like... I don't know, like a cup of whiskey and writing. And then she was like, why am I drinking so much? It's because I came up with this idea...

[DongWon] Yeah.

[Erin] When I was 10, and now I have to, like, bury that idea because, like, my liver would appreciate it. And so I think that kind of thing, like, stepping away from that, because at the end of the day, like, you're the only one you have to live with. You know what I mean? Like, you have to pay your bills and the people who may or may not think X about your career are not going to be there with your landlord, like, or your mortgage company.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] Yeah. And the big kind of click over for me was when I stopped thinking of all of these other  writing projects and all of this freelance work as slumming...

[Mary Robinette] Yeah.

[Dan] As something I was forced to do and started thinking of it as something that was great, something that was expanding my horizons and my abilities. Today I work as the vice president of Dragon Steel with Brandon Sanderson, who's one of the biggest fantasy authors in the world. People all the time ask how you can get that job. And it's because of this. It's because he came to me, not because I've known him for a long time, but because I had a ton of experience in a ton of different areas that he doesn't have. And he's like, well, we eventually want to do TV shows of the Cosmere stuff. Well, I've worked in TV. We want to make role playing games. I've worked in role-playing games. Every aspect of writing and the writing industry, I have dipped my toe into, which made me a really appealing candidate for this huge entertainment company.

[Howard] You've written ad copy.

[Dan] Yeah.

[Mary Robinette] Yeah. When I did the collaboration with him, he came to me because I had audiobook experience and he did not. There's a thing that Jim Henson says, or said, which is the secret to his success was to hire people who are better than him and let them do their job.

[DongWon] I think one thing that's... I think as we're talking through all of this, when I think about a  writer's career, I think one thing that's really, really important is the writers who make it long-term have a certain kind of flexibility, a certain willingness to roll with the hits. I don't care who you are, your career's not going to go as smoothly as you thought it was going to be. Right? And I don't care how much success you've achieved, you're still going to be hitting roadblocks, you're still going to be running into things that are challenges or frustrating. One book's not going to work as well, or TV deals are going to fall through or whatever it is. Right? Nice problems to have, but those are still problems. Right? So whatever it is, I think a writer's ability to succeed as a published author in the publishing industry, as a professional writer in the world, often comes from your ability to roll with the hits. Right? And then to keep going. The good news is no one gets to take writing away from you as a job. That is a thing that you can always be doing. What that comes down to. though, is how flexible can you be about how you see that job and what opportunities are you willing to pursue to keep furthering that? Right? And so, all of that said, though, I do want to put one note in here about don't forget also why you wanted to be a writer in the first place. Right? And even as you're pursuing these other projects, defend the time that you need to work on the projects that are near and dear to your heart, that are important to how you see yourself as a writer. Right? And so, yes, don't be drinking whiskey every night...

[Chuckles]

[DongWon] Let go of, like... Shed the parts of, like, this dream of being a writer that don't serve you, but also don't forget the core of it, of, like, why you're pursuing this art in the first place. And then figure out, okay, I need this amount of time to do that, I can spend this other time writing, pursuing these other things. Doing comics, doing games, writing for TV, whatever it is.

[Erin] I just want to say one quick thing, which is that I think part of what that does is open you up to Kismet. Because I think that...

[DongWon] Yes.

[Erin] Sometimes you forget some of the things that you used to write or some of the things you used to do. Like, I've taken work doing script writing, and when I was in college, I wanted to write for soap operas. Like, because I love them as an art form. And so, like, I wanted to be a script writer, but I forgot. Like, sometimes you get really focused on one particular type of writing because it's the type you're doing. And you forget that, like, each project to me is. like, what can I learn from this? If I don't think I can take something interesting away from it... And sometimes it's like I'm interested in still feeding myself. But a lot of times, it's what can I take that's inter... Like, that's interesting that I can learn, and I will sometimes be surprised like you were saying, Dan, that, like, later somebody will look at you having done something, like this is really valuable experience in a way that you could never have anticipated when you did it. But the thing that you learned still stays with you and then you can end up using it in the world once you're out there doing other projects.

[Dan] Yeah. I know we're going kind of long. I want to make one final point before the homework. As Howard mentioned, I've written a lot of ad copy. Before I broke in as an author, I spent 8 years in advertising and marketing. And so I freelanced as a website writer. It can still take a long time to break in. Like, some of what we're talking about sounds very pie in the sky, like, I didn't have a career, so I started writing for TV. Like, that's... It's not that easy. You have to put in the work, and a lot of your early writing might be really boring stuff that you don't love. But stick with it. If this is what you really want to do, doing these kinds of add jobs and marketing jobs and website jobs can be a good way to get your foot in the door.

[Dan] Anyway. Here's our homework. I want you to try writing in a genre or a format that you've never tried before. If you have always been writing novels or short stories, kind of classic prose fiction, branch out and try something else. Write something in a script format. Write an episode of a TV show that you love. Write a role-playing game adventure. pick a... Try doing tie-in work. Pick a book series or a video game series that you love and write a short story using those characters and set in that universe. Do something that you've never done before, and see how it feels.

[Mary Robinette] This has been Writing Excuses. You're out of excuses, now go write.