by G. Robert Frazier

Picture this: You’re a writer attending the Killer Nashville International Writers’ Conference in the luxurious Omni Hotel in Downtown Nashville, taking part in hour after hour of educational seminars on the craft and opportunities to network with fellow writers.

Suddenly, as you make your way to the fourth floor for another session, you see Sheree Bykofsky, one of the many literary agents on the bill and your instructor from an early afternoon session, rushing to catch the elevator. You hold the door open until she gets in.

The door whooshes shut.

You’ve got her right where you want her. You make your move – and start pitching your novel.

But what do you say? How do you make an intelligent, succinct pitch without making a dreadful, embarrassing mistake? Or moose calls, as she refers to them.

You’ve only got seconds. Maybe a minute at best before the elevator arrives at its destination. How do you gush out 90,000 words of action, emotional twists and turns and characters who you have lived with and breathed life into over the past year or more in such a short time?

Answer: You don’t.

Not exactly. Not plot point by plot point, certainly. That’s not what agents want or anything you can do justice to in such a brief period of time.

Instead, you hit the highlights. You give your book’s title and genre. The premise of your story. What makes it unique. What makes you the best person to have written the story. What makes you the person that can take that story and promote it to an eager audience.

You make your sales pitch, short and simple, in seven or eight well-thought out–preferably well-rehearsed–sentences. Your elevator pitch.

Bykofsky, who is the lead agent with Sheree Bykofsky Associates Inc., shared tips on just how to make an elevator pitch with writers attending the opening event of this year’s Killer Nashville conference Thursday. By attending the session, Bykofsky says the writers immediately have a leg up on late-comers to the conference who may not know what to say when their moment in the elevator comes.

Bykofsky also shared invaluable advice on how to craft a written query letter by analyzing samples submitted by class participants. All needed a little work, but with Bykofsky’s expert input and a little savvy revision on the part of the writers, their query letters will be nearly perfect by the time they are sent into the real world.

But don’t fret. If you didn’t get to attend the session and hear her tips, or for any of those who did and want more on the subject of obtaining literary representation, Bykofsky has shared her wisdom in writing. She’s the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Getting Published, Fifth Edition.

Read it. Study it. Rehearse your pitch. And, for the love of God, don’t make any moose calls.

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More reading about agents:

• How to Market Yourself Before You Have a Book to Sell – Chuck Sambuchino
• What These Debut Authors Did Right – Chuck Sambuchino
• Crafting Your Novel’s Pitch – Chuck Sambuchino
• Evaluating agents – by KM Weiland
• 12 Literary Agents Seeking Horror Authors – Chuck Sambuchino
• Why Agents Can Seriously Harm Writers – Kristine Katherine Rusch

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Killer Nashville 2015 ran from Oct. 29-Nov. 1 at the Omni Hotel in Nashville.

G. Robert Frazier is an author and screenwriter living in Middle Tennessee. He is a reader for the Nashville Film Festival and Austin Film Festival’s annual screenwriting competitions and a member of the Nashville Writers Meetup and Tennessee Screenwriters Association. Follow him on Twitter @grfrazier23.