Pitches at Bookends - Movie Comparisons

Jessica Faust at Bookends has completed her fourth round of pitch critiques. As usual, I highly recommend reading her whole post, but I thought I'd quote her comments about solely pitching your book as a certain movie or book meets another movie or book. Frankly, I can never figure out this type of pitch even if I have read the books or watched the movie. Jessica explains why this method doesn't work and how to make it work:

I’ve never read a Bourne book, and since I’m not much of a movie watcher (note to everyone submitting to me) I’ve never seen either of these movies. So basically, this is lost on me. However, even if I had seen these movies I still need more. This is a tagline, but not a pitch. To give you an example of how to pitch by comparing your book, here’s the tagline I wrote for Karen MacInerney’s Howling at the Moon: Tales of an Urban Werewolf: "Charlaine Harris meets Mary Janice Davidson in this series featuring Sophie Garou, a twenty-eight-year-old whose life is just about perfect—except for one minor detail . . . she's also a werewolf." ...this is enough of a tagline to grab the editor’s attention and actually give her some of the book’s details. You now know how it’s like the two books I’m comparing it to.