Gay romance fiction

Blurbs & Pitches

mortar & pestlea promo workshop for genre authors

  • Format: available in lengths from one to six hours.
  • Technical requirements: projector/screen if available.

 

Class Blurb:

Selling Your Story with Damon Suede

Does your marketing copy earn its keep? This one/two hour session tackles the wild, woolly world of pitches and explore the way a high concept premise can anchor a project before and during the writing process. We’ll drill down into the challenges of summarizing your story’s strongest selling point. We'll unpack the knack of crafting a clear hook, a free prize, and boiling a project into a logline that closes the sale, before and after publication.

 

Class Description:

Selling Your Story hits loglines and blurbs head-on with a hard look at the language of hooks and high concept. You'll learn to summarize any project with words that pack a punch and close the sale, before and after publication. Every attendee with leave with dynamic language that sells their stories via

  • basic promo copy tools
  • the utility fo a Pixar pitch to encapsulate action
  • a customized logline kit
  • blurb templates

Many authors loathe the process of pitching their projects, but with a few simple tools anyone can convey the heart of their story as a marketable package. Join screenwriter and novelist Damon Suede for an hands-on laboratory to cook up the promo copy that will close the sale and find the right readers.

success graphTakeaways:

  • marketing copy tricks, tips, and guidelines
  • a Pixar pitch
  • a pitch-and-query-friendly logline
  • a customized blurb that conveys the emotions and hook of a project
  • a value prop for your project(s)

Presentations:

  • "Selling Your Story" workshop for Free Expressions in Tampa, FL (February 2025)
  • "Blurb-a-lympics" at the PNWA Conference in Seattle, WA (September 2024)
  • "Blurb-a-lympics" at the PNWA Conference in Seattle, WA (September 2023)
  • "Pitch Perfect" for the Crazy Scribes in Nashville, TN (March 2023)
  • "Selling Your Story" at the PNWA Conference in Seattle, WA (September 2020)
  • "Selling Your Story" at the Bristol Writing Workshop 2019 in Bristol, UK (November 2019)
  • "Selling Your Story" master class for COFW-RWA, (November 2019)
  • "Selling Your Story" for Calgary RWA (May 2019)
  • "Selling Your Story" for SpaceCoast RWA (January 2019)
  • "Blurb-gasmic" at Novelists Inc Conference/NINC in Tampa, FL (September 2018)
  • "Selling Your Story" at Music City RWA in Nashville, TN (September 2018)
  • "Selling Your Story" at Valley Forge Romance Writers in Bluebell, PA (September 2018)
  • "Selling Your Story" for Long Island RWA in South Huntingdon, NY (September 2017)
  • "Powerful Pitches" for Wisconsin RWA in Milwaukee, WI (April 2015)
  • "Blurbs, Pitches, Hooks" for RT Boot Camp (May, 2012-2018)

 "For an endless moment, Runt imagined the crooked corporation had folded and they’d been forgotten, laughing and living together under these perfect suns, waiting for wives that would never come, happily hunting fresh meat at the sharp edge of the galaxy." (Grown Men - D. Suede)

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magnetRecommended reading:

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"No one deserves to be punished for loving with an open heart." (Hot Head - D. Suede)

If you'd like to book Damon to come present a workshop for your group or chapter, just give a holler.