This is number 124 in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
“IT’S AN INTELLECTUAL THRILLER with high stakes and fast action, but a low body count.”
If you look at this and have your interest piqued, it’s a successful logline. It means you are one step closer to reading the story. If you just keep scrolling, it was not successful. The purpose of the logline in today’s world—it changes over time—is to stop the reader from scrolling. If we are being unkind, we can also call it click-bait.
A lot of the time, it is all a reader will see as they are scrolling through titles. You have literally an eyeblink to capture their attention.
Consider what happens when you look through an onscreen directory of movies to find something that matches your mood at the moment. Here is all you see:
A CIA decoder hunts for his wife’s killers, his intelligence serving as his ultimate weapon.
Did it make you stop scrolling long enough to watch a preview or read a longer description?
A pretty, popular teenager can’t go out on a date until her ill-tempered older sister does.
Hmm. I think that’s a modern adaptation of a Shakespeare play. I’d check it out.
Amid cosmic clashes and interplanetary politics, an heir must harness mystical powers and lead a rebellion against an oppressive regime.
I think I’ve seen at least half of those movies, so I’ll probably look to see if I’m interested in this one, too. If you are upset that I’m not telling you what movie any of these loglines are for, then they were obviously effective. They made you stop and want to check out the movie a little more.
Last week, I mentioned the Nathan Everett (Wayzgoose) novel
For Blood or Money in the context of finding the right title. This title was far and away better than
Security and Exchange. But it still left a lot of work to be done regarding selling the book. People might slow down for the title, but it needed something to stop them.
Computer forensics detectives Dag Hamar and Deb Riley discover hidden files and computer code can be as dangerous as dark alleys and flying bullets as they enter the high-stakes game of Seattle’s business world to trace a missing friend and the billion-dollar fortune that disappeared with him.
That was the first try, but it is a better elevator pitch than logline. When scrolling, the reader isn’t going to get through a whole paragraph, even if it is only one sentence. So, edit it down to essentials—the exciting part.
Two Computer forensics detectives discover hidden files and computer code can be as dangerous as dark alleys and flying bullets.
What? How can it be so dangerous?
Now we have something that contains excitement and mystery in one easily-digested capsule. It is an eye-stopper. Pause here.
For Blood or Money and the collection of
Seattle Noir novels featuring Dag Hamar and Deb Riley are available as eBooks on ZBookStore. Available from online vendors in paperback.
There’s a second reason you want a logline as an author. It reminds you what you are working on and gives you an easy response to the question “What are you writing?”
It’s mid-September and I’m getting the question posed to me. “What are you writing in November this year?” Even though NaNoWriMo no longer exists as such, I still make it a practice to write a novel in November, sharing progress and updates with other writers in my area. So, what am I writing in November?
Everything interesting in my life happened in 1979; it was the one year I truly lived.
That has overtones of both the excitement of cramming a lifetime of experience into a single year, and possible sadness as one is left wondering what life has been like since then. It is obvious that it is a first-person narrative. We don’t know what was so interesting (I’m still working on that) or how it all got crammed into a single year. But it gives us pause. If I may use the analogy again, we stop scrolling and click to see the full description.
At this stage of considering my options, that’s the best I can hope for.
What’s next? This was most appropriate when I was pitching to agents and editors or teaching potential authors how to pitch to me. The publishing world is a busy and noisy place. You are competing with every person with a manuscript or story idea for the attention of a person who has specific needs and interests and is inundated by proposals every day. We call it ‘the elevator pitch.’
As its name implies, this is what you can say to a disinterested person in an elevator between floors. You have to assume one of you is getting off the elevator at the next floor. You need to have that person either stay on the elevator to get your info, or ask you to miss your date on the third floor as you continue to describe your book up to the 26th floor. We’ll get to what you say next later.
Let’s go back to my proposed project for November.
In 1979, I experienced every possible thing I could in a lifetime. This was the year that took me from villainy to heroism and left me with absolutely nothing to show for it. For fifty years since then, I’ve just been remembering, and now I’ve written it down.
What you have in three sentences and less than fifty words (259 characters) is a pitch designed to inspire questions. All you want at that moment is the question, “Do you have a card?” (and you’d better) or to be handed a card with the statement, “Send me a synopsis and ten pages.”
That’s it. At that point the door of opportunity has closed. Did you get through it or not?
This isn’t just for agents and editors. It’s good for any conversation in which you are introduced as a writer. “Oh? What do you write?”
Get that elevator pitch out of your back pocket with your business card and sell your story!
In all of the examples I’ve shown above, there are two key elements beyond the basic of summarizing what you are working on. The first is that if you are marketing your work in English, your logline and pitch need to be in perfectly clear and well-written English.
I know that not everyone writes in English, so make it so for your native language as well. In twenty to fifty words, I should know that I won’t be stumbling through a poorly written book. If you can’t write these two simple items in clear English (or other native language), then my belief is that you can’t write your novel clearly. I don’t want to constantly be stopping to correct your spelling, syntax, or capitalization, nor to need a pause to work out what you meant.
Harsh reality, but there it is.
Second, commit both of these to memory. Completely and accurately. Be letter perfect. When you are asked the question, you don’t have time to pull out an index card to read the response. “Let the words fall trippingly from the tongue,” as Hamlet instructs the player. If you can’t get it out in a single breath, it is too long!
I’m loving this topic string. Next week we’ll continue with the concept of writing a blurb. Even if you’ve skipped the previous two steps, the blurb is possibly the most important piece you will write to promote your novel.