Book Review: "Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds"

"Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds:

The Guaranteed Way to Get Your Screenplay or Novel Read"

by Michael Hauge

Whoo! I feel winded and I only typed that title, rather than said it all aloud, which you won't get me to do. I'll cheat and only say the first six words. But what alliteration, try saying those six words three times fast!

But enough about that gargantuan title. The author, Michael Hauge, for those who don't know, is on the Board of Directors of the American Screenwriting Association and on the Advisory Board for ScriptWriter Magazine in London. And he has a wonderful sense of humor that permeates every bit of his work.

While not about the process of screenwriting (that was his last book, "Writing Screenplays That Sell" - which I will read as soon as I can get it), this book is about what the author calls Step 2. It goes thusly:

"Step 1: Write a great story.

"'Step 2: Get lots and lots of people to read it."

This book tells how to do just that. It also makes quite clear that the art of pitching a script (or story - as this book is also meant to help novice novelists as well) perfectly is almost more important than having a completed script for which to pitch! (However, it points out that it's very important to have a complete manuscript if you are pitching.)

The perfect pitch should take 60 seconds or less, and tell the entire contents of your script but have it sound interesting without telling everything so the person you're pitching to wants to know more. It must take 60 seconds or less so the person listening to the pitch will have time to ask questions about the story you're trying to sell and have read. It's complicated stuff and this book delivers the information in an understandable and concise way. It has sections on "The 8 R's of Pitching", "The 10 Key Components of a Commercial Story", "Targeting Your Buyers", and it even has pitching templates for every genre of story.

The reason this book has 4.5 stars instead of 5 stars is because while I enjoyed myself thoroughly when I read it, I know I'm going to have to read this book two or three more times to fully grasp everything, and that's more of my own failing than the book's. This is totally worth getting, specifically if you have a script so polished up that God himself needs sunglasses to read its sublime passages, then yes, you must needs get this book to properly pitch your script to people.

By the by, I should probably mention that some of you might think that this book is useless for you, because "you won't need to pitch when you have an agent to do that for you". But first, you need to pitch your story to the agent. And that agent, though he might take you on, probably has better-paying and easier to sell and pitch for clientele than somebody who hasn't been signed or sold yet. So unless you can convince people that you're the golden goose that they have been looking for (which is kind of what pitching is) you might want to learn how to pitch properly.