How to Describe Your Book Idea in 30 Seconds

An elevator pitch is a strategy to help sell your book—learn how to master it

One thing keeps authors from sharing their book idea effectively with a ghostwriter: not knowing how to talk about it. Learn how to pitch your book idea in 30 seconds, and you will sell it.

Most authors talk passionately about their book idea and can describe the main parts of it in a few sentences, but they don't know how to string together the actions that comprise the whole of it, which, if they did, would give the listener a comprehensive picture of the story they want to tell in a short period of time.

Describing your book idea in thirty seconds is especially useful for discussing it with agents, publishers, and ghostwriters. Unpacking the book’s specifics in fine detail is another matter, and it can take many meetings for the ghostwriter to absorb it all.

To deeply understand the mechanics of the story (for a book of any purpose), authors learn to engage their listener by describing it as a cohesive, fluid unit of expression.

Writing it down can help you verbalize it. Rewrite a few paragraphs, then refine them so you have a word-for-word version without extraneous lines.

Developing your pitch will help you elucidate the core action of your story. Talking through the idea puts pressure on your ability to speak about it fluently as a coherent whole. An effective pitch captures this arc: the story opens, one event triggers the next, and each action builds off the last until it reaches a pinnacle moment—the climax—before drawing to a clear resolution. 

Every sentence in this sequence serves an essential function; nothing is superfluous, and every link is required to keep the narrative logical, clear, and captivating.

An elevator pitch helps you discuss your idea with agents and publishers and can make or break the deal. A book idea can gain sponsorship from an agent if they like it, it represents the kind of work the author wants to do, and they have confidence the author can do the work. This kind of book sale is most common with authors who have already published, but a first-time author can still get an agent to represent them.

An elevator pitch helps you discuss your book with agents and publishers, and it can make or break a deal.

An elevator pitch has one aim: hook a person’s interest with the first sentence and deepen it over the next 25 seconds so the listener wants to read the book. It’s even better if you can do all of this in 20 seconds.

Convey the main action.

Omit certain aspects of a book idea from the pitch, namely dialogue, characters' names, spoilers, and anything else that can bog down the flow of disclosure.

People like brevity. Start with a great sentence, carry it through with a strong idea, and know when to stop talking and let the listener respond. That’s the final hook—and it’s very satisfying to get it.