Importance of an Elevator Pitch for Your Non-Fiction Book

Video Transcript

" I’m Bobbi Linkemer on behalf of expertvillage.com, and I’d like to invite you to visit my website at writeanonfictionbook.com. We’re going to talk about your elevator speech about your book. The really big question is can you tell me in one sentence what your book is about. That is much harder than you might think. If you were taking an elevator between the third and the fourth floor and you ran into someone who said, “Hi, how are you doing? What’s going on in your life?” and you said, “Well, I’m writing a book.” And that person said, “That’s great. What’s it about?” Could you tell him before you got to the fourth floor? That’s your elevator speech. You have to be able to explain your book in a sentence, and you have to get everything in that sentence. That’s a lot more difficult than it sounds, and it usually takes people several tries and a lot of brainstorming. Often, that sentence turns out to be your subtitle. For instance, one of my books is called Going Solo: How to Survive and Thrive as a Freelance Writer. If someone said to me what are you writing about, my sentence will be how to survive and thrive as freelance writer. That’s what the book is really about. Going solo is kind of to attract their attention, so very often when you answer that question my book is about and you fill in the blank, you end up with your subtitle. What I discovered with this very clever going solo title was that a lot people thought that it was on divorce. They had no idea that I was talking about being an independent writer. That’s why it’s so important to have a subtitle that makes sense and explains when you pick it up what you’re going to get. "