Pitching a story is a delicate balance between self-promotion and trend identification. Promote yourself at the expense of a telling a broader story and your pitch will seem overly motivated by self-interest. But get carried away with telling the broader story and you risk burying your role and seeming unimportant.
Put another way, a reporter will treat a narrowly self-promotional pitch as a request to give free advertising, which they will trash. And they will see a pitch that spends too much time telling a story as perhaps a good idea they can use later, without seeing why you should be included in it.
They key is to place yourself into the narrative, making clear your role as a participant and influencer within your environment. Tell your story as a novelist writes a first person narrative, explaining your surroundings, their influence on you, how you’re responding, and the influence you’re having.
To give an example, if it were 1920, you wouldn’t pitch Henry Ford by rehashing his biography from birth through schooling. That would overwhelm and bore casual readers with irrelevant details. Nor would you serve his story well by simply explaining the sudden ubiquity of automobiles, as that would ignore his role in making them ubiquitous.
The most effective way to convey his story would be to show that by using innovative production techniques, Henry Ford made a groundbreaking product – the automobile – accessible to mainstream America, radically transforming transportation. In this telling, Henry Ford is the lens through which the automobile is seen, highlighting his role while still placing him within the larger story.
Think first about the story you are a part of, whether you are creating and defining a new trend, or acting in opposition to one. This story needs to be present in your pitch to give context to your actions and generate interest from the reporter. Place yourself in that story – boast but don’t brag – and you’ll be well on your way to getting catching a reporter’s attention.
