The elevator pitch discussion died down, but I’ve been thinking about this over the last few weeks. As I noted earlier, I’m not a great pitcher, but perhaps I can get something good enough together that others can then work on.
DVD extras meets user generated content.
I like the idea of starting the pitch with a mashup of something that the pitchee is likely to be familar with (harking back to Donaldson’s thought that all good ideas come from the collision of two separate ideas). In addition, “user generated content” is fairly buzzword-y, which I generally dislike, but is probably appropriate for a pitch. I’m referring only to the best DVD extras, of course, but I think that is implied (also the best of user generated content), and “Book extras” if there was such a thing, as well.
Imagine if you could set the questions on the DVD extras for your favourite TV show or movie – or if you had extras for your favourite book. You get answers about what, how and why things happened both in-universe, and in reality, from people who are intimately familiar with not just that one work, but the entire science fiction and fantasy genres – people that can pull together expert and interesting answers about how this work relates to other genre fiction and to the world. They’ll even explain what stories you should move to next if you loved particular aspects of this one.
This doesn’t include story identification – but the pitch doesn’t need to include every topic, and it doesn’t fit with the “DVD extras” analogy. It hits some marks that I think are particularly important:
- It’s not just about focusing in on one universe – it’s about having knowledge across the entire genre/genres.
- It’s about the in-universe world, but also about how the fiction impacts reality.
- It punches the question words “what”, “how”, and “why” (“who” is probably better answered by IMDB, “where” probably by Wikipedia, and “which” could cover too many things). This emphases (subtlety) that this is a Q&A site (as does “answers” later on), but also what sort of questions are most appropriate: especially “why”.
- DVD extras are generally narrated by experts (cast, crew, authors). The site isn’t necessarily going to have the foremost expert (e.g. the author) for every question, but it is about getting expert opinion.
It does include recommendations (although I try to make it clear that they need to be very specific). My opinion follows the original meta discussion: as long as they are specific enough to invite good (subjective) answers, then they’re ok. Actually, they’re not just ok, but the type of question that users will really love the site for. I’m sure many people will add books to their reading lists by reading interesting, detailed, answers on the site – not just these ones, but certainly including them.
TonyAndrewMeyer 
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