Hi everyone! So happy to find this forum, especially so close to #pitdark. I would really appreciate some feedback on these pitches... brutal honesty preferred!
Thanks so much!
#1! When Galaxy kills her royal father, the experience feels bittersweet. On one hand, her lifelong torturer is dead. On the other, she doesn’t get to kill him again. Unsatisfied, she settles for killing his legacy instead.
The Milky Way is under new management. #PitDark #A #SF
#2! With help from her sociopathic girlfriend and probably the worst father figure ever, Galaxy starts an intergalactic war as revenge for her miserable life. Her goal? Anarchy, baby. But when she burns it all down, she may find nothing but regrets in the ashes. #PitDark #A #SF
#3! Galaxy incites intergalactic war as revenge for her miserable life. As the Milky Way burns, however, she discovers new friends and old consumed by the blaze. To save them, she must find a way to undo her mistakes—or at the very least, throw herself onto the fire. #PitDark #A #SF
I'm unpublished and unagented, so take my comments with a pound of salt.
Is this novel a dark comedy? If so, then these two revised pitches are really capturing that, and I like it. Although "legacy" in pitch #1 is a little vague, whereas pitch #2 tells me exactly what Galaxy is trying to do.
These are great! A tip for the future: I find that writing If/then statements to sum up stakes is a helpful tool to point me in the right direction to get me on a good path to writing a good "traditional" stakes line.... (If the MC does/doesn't do this, then disastrous personal consequence happens.) It's easy to rephrase for extra punch, or even just leave if it's got enough mojo as is.
I like both of those
What do you think about these revised pitches? I think I'll keep 3 the same... only because I have no idea how to fix it lol
#1! For Galaxy, killing her father feels bittersweet. On one hand, her torturer is dead. On the other, she can't kill him again. Unsatisfied, she settles for killing his legacy instead.
Alive, he ruled a galactic empire.
Now, the Milky Way is under new management. #PitDark #A #SF
#2! With help from her sociopathic girlfriend and the worst father figure ever, Galaxy starts an intergalactic war to dismantle her family's empire. Her hatred for them consumes everything, until she finds something it can't devour: a redhead with a pretty smile. #PitDark #A #SF
Thanks for your feedback guys :) how can I make my character+plot+stakes/tension more obvious? I actually tried to be formulaic in my last pitch, but it looks like the core story didn't shine through
In #1, there's a lot of emotion. Don't lose that. But if you rewrite the opening line to: "For Galaxy, killing her royal father is bittersweet." then you will gain back a few more characters to give us more info about what she faces now, #2 Needs more detail. "nothing but regrets in the ashes" doesn't tell me anything specific about your book. What makes this regret? #3 is a good pitch, and I say that having absolutely no idea what the book is about. That's usually a bad thing, but for whatever reason, it works here. With 3 pitches, I might go traditional with at least one of them...as Angela lays out in her advice above.
Generally when I comment, I have to remind people about tension and stakes. I would put that to you if you decide to do rewrites on these. Good, sturdy pitches tend to come in the character+plot+stakes/tension format... However, you've broken my rules of thumb and created some very interesting pitches that I have no problems with minus some super nit-picky things that are barely worth mentioning... ("Feels" is filtering in #1, find a way to rephrase the rhetorical question in #2... however since you answer it in a voicey way, it technically is okay, cut "however" and "very" in lieu of some more voicey contextual wordage or brevity.) See... Barely worth it... LOL! These are great! Good luck with them!