Is Your Pitch Working?

Is Your Pitch Working? Before we get started this week, I want to remind you that Pitch Festivus. our annual pitch party and holiday event is coming up. It’s FREE! Thursday, December 8, Online, from 7-10 pm Eastern/ 4-7 pm Pacific. The entire JKS faculty is going to be there. We’re going to teach you about pitching, we’re going to teach you how to handle pitch meetings, we’re going to talk everything pitch. And you’ll even get a chance to throw your name in the hat for a chance to pitch your script! The winning pitch is going to get a pitch consultation with me worth 1500 bucks. It’s a pretty amazing experience and a wonderful community. You can RSVP here for free. With that in mind, in this podcast, I want to talk a little bit about pitching. I want to help you get a little bit more comfortable with the idea of pitching.  During Pitch Festivus, we’re going to talk a lot about how to deal with the insecurities we feel around pitching the fears we feel around pitching. But today I’m just going to talk about how to pitch your script, and what a pitch actually needs to do.  The first myth I want to bust about pitching your screenplay is this: the purpose of your pitch is not to sell your script. I’m going to say that again. The purpose of your pitch is not to sell your script.  If you are thinking of your pitch as something that is designed to sell your script, you’re going to be so stressed out. And you are going to be behaving in a way that’s going to make it a lot harder for you to reach your goals.  Nobody likes the feeling of being sold.  Have you ever been to the store to buy some jeans, and some particularly “helpful” salesperson comes over and starts talking to you, and you can feel their intention is to sell you jeans? You want jeans. That’s why you came into the store. But at the moment you feel the pressure to buy, all you want is to get out of that store! You want to choose to buy. You don’t want to be sold.  Nobody likes the feeling of someone coming at them with an agenda.  (Now, if you happen to have a career in sales, and you’re great at sales, if you’re one of those people who can sell anything to anybody, please disregard this advice).  But if you’re a normal human being, most of us are very uncomfortable selling, and even more uncomfortable selling ourselves.  If you’re one of those people who is uncomfortable selling, which is most writers, I’m going to urge you not to sell.   Think of your pitch not as something designed to sell your script, but instead as something designed to open the door to a relationship.  It is not 1983 anymore. Unless you are a famous writer, you are not going to sell your script off of a pitch.  The only purpose of a pitch is to open the door: to get somebody to say, “yeah, maybe I want to read that.” Or, “yeah, maybe I want to help you get to the right person.” Or, “I just believe in you as a writer, maybe I’m interested, maybe there’s a connection here.” The only purpose of a pitch is to open the door. So how do you open the door?  It’s important to understand that pitching is just like any other human interaction. Though you might be very uncomfortable with the idea of having to sell something, you’re probably very comfortable with the idea of talking about something that matters to you.  You probably already talk about your script with friends, family, and people who you feel comfortable with (and if you don’t, start doing so!).   While you might not be comfortable trying to sell your screenplay with a pitch, you’re probably relatively comfortable with talking with people about things that you happen ...