An author is always pitching. Early on an author pitch may be to agents, editors and publishers. As we go on to market our work the pitches will be to reviewers, book stores, libraries and/or festivals where we can reach a larger audience and tell them about our book.

What if you had an “assistant” who could help you with how you should best pitch each contact, even if you haven’t met them yet?

That’s what CrystalKnows.com says it can do for your communications. Crystal can clue you in on the best way to communicate with a prospective contact based on their unique personality. The platform creates unique personality profiles for every person with an online presence, preparing you to speak or write in someone else’s natural communication style.

“Crystal is a new technology built upon an age-old principle: communicate with empathy.”

Their first product is a Gmail tool that helps you send more effective emails, delivering a well-crafted message that is tailored to the individual’s personality, but you don’t need a Gmail account to test and view profiles.

Crystal creates a unique profile for anyone with a LinkedIn account, explaining how to speak, email, work with or sell to them most effectively. It tells you words, phrases, style and tone you should use to reach the recipient in the way that they like to communicate, rather than your own.

It builds this profile from what it can glean about your potential contact online: their public Facebook or blog posts, their tweets and other communication we conduct on the internet. This seems both useful, and a bit spooky.

Crystal offers a free, unlimited practice account, and paid upgrades begin at $19 a month. When you find a profile, you can choose the “screenshot” option to save an image of the person’s profile (as I’ve done for my part of my own below).

So tell us writers, cool or creepy? Useful for an author pitch to agents or book stores, or even for developing characters? Hmm…