Tag Archives: #PitMad

#PitMad

Today is #PitMad. For the non-novelists reading this, #PitMad is a Twitter event to pitch unpublished novels to agents.

I’m pitching my unpublished paranormal romance The Last Summer Queen. I’ll also be looking for a mentor via PitchWars to give me assist. I finished the novel last December, significantly edited and revised in June, a process I wrote about in Twelve Thousand Words. I’ve queried about thirty agents and had one agent ask for a full read. Exciting, but I haven’t heard back.

So keeping-on, Pitch Wars may give me insight into how to better market my novel. Especially since I’m halfway–HALFWAY YAY–through the second in this three (okay, maybe four) novel series.

#PitMad gives you a chance to pitch three times during the day. I plan to pitch at 8 am, 11 am, and 3 pm. Here are my three pitches:

#1: Dance and sing and lie in wait. Summer’s sting is Winter’s fate. “The Last Summer Queen” #paranormalromance #pitmad

#2: Will Macy embrace her role as Summer Queen and convince Ethan to be her Winter King? Will Ethan’s unwillingness to be a father keep him trapped in Holiday forever? Or will they learn that love really is the greatest magic of all? #paranormalromance #pitmad

#3: Macy is eager to get pregnant, the price to practice magic. Ethan agrees to father her child so he can go home. But first they must confront sideways magic, lost powers, and a deadly curse. And whatever happens, they must not fall in love.  #paranormalromance #pitmad

See a way to improve any of it? Please comment!

If you’re on Twitter and want to help out, please go to my profile, which you can fine @sykreps. The #pitmad tweets will be pinned under my profile at 8 am, 11 am, and 3 pm. Please RETWEET but please do not LIKE. Likes are reserved for agents.

Clearly, the more times a tweet is retweeted, the more likely it is to be seen by the right agent. One of the things I’ve learned in #Learning2bLucky, is to take advantage of every opportunity to meet my goal. #PitMad is one of those opportunities.

Thanks for reading.

#PitMad

What is #PitMad? That’s the question I asked Anna Yeatts last March when she encouraged me to “do it.”

#PitMad is a quarterly event (March, June, September, December) during which writers pitch their completed novels on Twitter, using no more than 280 characters including–at minimum–the PitMad hashtag.

The goal is to attract agents who might want to represent your novel to publishers.

So no problem. After learning about it, I decided it would be a snap to condense my 87,000 word paranormal romance into 280 characters. And, since writers can tweet up to three times during a 12-hour, I needed three different tweets would be swell. That took some time to figure out, and quite a bit of brainstorming and revising to get it close to right.

Last March, I had fewer than 20 followers and didn’t understand the power of retweeting. Multiple RTs make a tweet to more likely come to the attention of everybody, including agents. My third tweet in March got 12 RTs.

Today, June 6, is the second #PitMad I’ve participated in. This time around, thanks to the amazingly supportive #WritingCommunity, and a large number of new followers, I had 92 RTs and 8 likes, although sadly, none of the likes came from agents.

Never mind. I met a lot of new people and RT’d a gazillion pitches for novels I definitely will want to read someday.

My tweet for The Last Summer Queen read: At 19, Macy wants her magic but first, has to get pregnant. Not easy in a female-only town. Summer Queen magic fails. Macy casts a forbidden spell and triggers an old curse. She loses her powers only to learn that love is the strongest magic.

I’m still waiting to hear from the agent who asked to read the entire manuscript and other agents I’ve queried. Based on everything I’ve learned, this is a process that can take a while. Like gardening, patience is key.

Meanwhile, I’m in Chapter 10 of my new work in progress. Let me know if I have any beta readers out there–I should be done with the first draft sometime in early September.