In a post the other day, a writer new to getting published asked what “pitching” was. I joked in my response that pitching is when the person across the table from you holds all the good cards. But that’s not really true. You hold the best hand there is if your belief in what you are pitching never wavers. So what if the other person walks away from the table? This is especially so today, with so many options for getting your work out there and promoting it. The challenge, as I have discovered across different businesses, is that only a very few, very lucky folks experience the phenomenon, “if you build it, they will come.” Building it only seems like the marathon. Compared to getting them to come, it’s more likely to feel like the sprint.

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I’m always struck by similarities among endeavors, like how getting your novel published is so much like raising venture capital (VC) as a tech start up. I spent several years working with clients to raise VC, and I’ve spent many years writing fiction (although only now beginning to pitch a novel).

In fact, I found the similarities so striking that, with partners, I launched a publishing company four years ago originally based on the VC model. It was a classic good news-bad news outcome – the good news was that the business model worked. We published and cultivated an author who then landed a big deal agent (one of the biggest of all, in fact) who then “sold” said author to a big deal publishing house, an imprint of a very large publishing enterprise. The bad news was that we grossly over-estimated the number of zeroes after the digit that we could get for doing this. No worries, the company continues as an indie publisher specializing in regional authors.

First, tech startups pitch for money. They pitch at confabs identical to confabs where literary agents show up to hear pitches from novelists. You have to get your company’s or your novel’s reason for existing and taking up the precious time of the agent or investor down to a few minutes or less.

Second similarity is that VC investors and publishers rely on the big kill rule. You invest in ten start-ups in the hopes that one makes it really big and covers the losses of the others. Most publishing houses, especially of literary fiction, rely on only a few titles to cover the significant losses of the others. To an extent, all businesses operate this way. 80% of the revenue comes from 20% of the activity, or some variant thereof.

More importantly, in the very tech world, at least the world I was involved in, most, if not all, investors never really fundamentally understand, at the molecular level, how the technology works. They just understand the business model. In the literary world, reader and buyer tastes are so subjective and fickle, and the background culture is changing all the time, too, that agents/publishers don’t really know what will sell next. Agents/publishers and investors aren’t all-knowing taste-makers.

But they do know two things. They know what worked well in the past. And while every investor and agent/publisher knows the old adage, past performance is no guarantee of future results, they still mostly on past performance to gauge what’s next. Let’s face it. That’s why so much entertainment is cookie-cutter. That’s why so many tech start-ups fail.

They both also know what I used to call in my VC raising days their “comfort window.” The first time my brother tried to raise money thirty years ago, he was told his degree would “sell” (his was from an Ivy league school and a top graduate engineering school) but his partner’s would not (his was from a state university in the deep south). The comfort window is determined by trusted advisors, credentials from ranked sources (formally or informally), degrees, professional network, etc. Everyone in the literary world senses the magic conferred by the four letters I-o-w-a. Everyone in the tech world senses the wizardry conferred by the three letters M-I-T.

When you fundamentally don’t have the capacity to understand chemistry or physics or engineering, or when you fundamentally can’t objectively evaluate how well a novel will sell (regardless of how beautifully written), you rely on your comfort window. Hell, we all do this all the time. We rely on the opinions, sometimes informed, often not, of family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues to make buying decisions. But the more subjective the sales situation, or the less the buyer understands about what he/she is buying, the more critical the comfort window becomes.

Business is about managing risk, regardless of the business. People who stake their money to a business strive to make it less like gambling and more deterministic, more science than art, more deliberate than random.

The most universal element of all successful business, though, is unwavering faith in what you have discovered, then adapting to the realities of the marketplace as you develop and scale the technology. Likewise, the one thing that can’t be subjective about your novel is your faith in what you have created. I’ve witnessed entrepreneurs with faith in their ideas miss multiple waves of opportunity. In the world of my professional work, those waves might only come every five years. Most wanna-be novelists have heard the stories of successful authors being rejected hundreds of times before getting their shot. It isn’t just about the numbers; it’s about believing in what you’ve created.

In a post the other day, a writer new to getting published asked what “pitching” was. I joked in my response that pitching is when the person across the table from you holds all the good cards. But that’s not really true. You hold the best hand there is if your belief in what you are pitching never wavers. So what if the other person walks away from the table? This is especially so today, what with so many options for getting your work out there and promoting it. The challenge, as I have discovered across different businesses, is that only a very few, very lucky folks experience the phenomenon, “if you build it, they will come.” Building it only seems like the marathon. Compared to getting them to come, it’s more likely to be the sprint.