advice from an award-winning author on how to pitch your NOVEL to agents.
- ramonablakebooks
- Feb 10
- 2 min read
We recently held our first retreat day for writers at the atmospheric Guy’s Cliffe House with award-winning author Liam Brown as our guest. Liam Brown is the novelist of six novels, his latest ‘Evergreens’ won the Romantic Novelists Association Award for best romantic fiction in 2024.
During our one hour talk with him our writers got to learn about what makes readers and agents interested in a story and how to approach literary agents for representation as a novelist. Some of our writers even got to try out live pitching their book ideas.
Here are three takeaways (there were plenty more!) from the day based specifically on the advice Liam gave to our writers to improve their book pitches.
Whilst writing is a creative activity for us, publishing is very much a business. You need to be able to pitch your book quickly and easily. You should be able to pitch your idea in a single sentence. Test doing this with friends and family when they ask the dreaded question ‘so what exactly is this book you are writing?’
There is lots of advice giving formulas on how to structure your one sentence pitch. One of the easiest ways is to formulate it as a question. (E.g. A pitch for Romeo and Juliet might be: What if two teenagers meet and fall in love, but they belong to rival gangs?)
Another important part of pitching your novel is being able to make comparisons to other novels that are similar to yours. Read lots of books that are current in the same genre so that you can make accurate comparisons. This is important because it's an easy way to sell the ‘flavour’ or ‘tone’ of a book.
If you want to hear more writing advice from Liam, then do check our Prose and Pastries podcast episode on Spotify and Youtube.
You can buy Liam's books here.
Want to join us in person? Check out our Prose and Pastries coffee morning in Leamington Spa and our March romantasy and fantasy retreat at Warwick castle.
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