The Twitter Pitch : by G. Karl Kumfert

On Wednesday, March 25th I tried pitching my novel on a Twitter event hosted by author Brenda Drake. The hashtag #PitMad trended #1 on Twitter for a while, which is testament to how many people are looking for an agent.

The rules were simple. Writers were asked to limit to 2 tweets per hour with the hashtag #PitMad along with genre-specific hashtag(s) so agents could search easily.  Writers could retweet other writers’ pitches if they liked them, but not favorite them. Favoriting was left for agents.  If an agent favorited your tweet, that meant it was an invitation to query them.

A couple things I learned from the event.

1. Two tweets per hour from 8am to 8pm is 24 tweets per person. That’s a lot of tweeting. Some form of social media service is a must.  I used Hootsuite, though Tweetdeck or others would work just as well.
2. Because everyone else is tweeting too, there is a deluge of tweets.  You want all 24 tweets because they will stream by like a barrel over Niagara Falls.
3. One way to bump up your visibility is to have other writers retweet your tweet.  If you have 50 friends and they each retweet one of your tweets, that’s an additional 2X multiple in your advertising prowess.
4. Pitches that have high retweets from writers are strongly correlated with high favorites from agents.
5. One of the most popular pitches I saw for YA was this: 

   Normal after school jobs are overrated. 17yo Arden hacks into her classmates’ memories and sells them to other students. ‪#‎YA‬ ‪#‎SciFi‬ #PITMAD

6. One other thing that was useful was that I got to try out 24 different kinds of pitches and see if they caught anyone’s attention.  The two that were most successful for me were: 

   a) Not all epic fantasies require travel to a distant land for a magic trinket. Sometimes trouble comes looking for you. #PitMad #YA #fantasy

   b) Ebonie just found the first person who knows where she’s from, an elite mage with a price on his head and one foot in the grave. #PitMad #YA #fantasy

   While (a) was popular with other authors, it didn’t get any recognition from agents.  I think it’s too cute and doesn’t provide cruicial information about the story, the stakes, or the character. With (b) I should have mentioned the protagonist’s age. That’s crucially defines where in the YA market I’m targeting. Also, some people were curious why its so important for Ebonie to know where she’s from.   (Note that the winning SciFi pitch addresses motivation much better than my attempt.)

7. You can “play agent” by going onto Twitter and looking through all the pitches that are listed under the hashtag #PitMad. After a while of that, it is much easier to go back to yours and clearly assess where it truly stands in the market. The agent is going to pick the best, because they’ll turn around and use it to pitch a publisher.

There are no losers in the end. Sure, I didn’t get hordes of agents favoriting my tweets, but not getting a favorite is not the same thing as getting a rejection. All those agents are still looking and will still put unsolicited queries in their slush pile.   Plus I got a dozen new Twitter followers who publish #YA #fantasy.