How to Win at #PitMad: Tips and Tricks

It's that time again...for #PitMad!! #PitMad, or Pitch Madness, is an event created by author Brenda Drake, where authors pitch their books in a single Tweet. Agents and editors then comb through the hashtag and favorite Tweets with pitches for manuscripts that they want submitted to them. Authors then decide which agents and editors to submit to and submit their manuscripts to them. Sometimes, this can lead to an offer of representation! It's a fun way to get your story out there, and honestly, going through #PitMad Tweets as an intern for Entangled Teen and submitting my fave Tweets to my supervisor was one of my favorite things to do.

After going through a few rounds of pitches on #PitMad over the years, I feel like I've definitely learned some things about what makes an effective pitch, and I thought this would be a good time to share them with you, since there are still a couple of days to get those pitches polished!

1. Read the rules. The new webpage for #PitMad has a lot of tips for pitchers, plus rules about who can like and retweet, and it's super important to follow them!

2. Pitch in a SINGLE TWEET. It might seem ridiculous, but I have actually seen lots of people try to cheat and do 1/2 2/2 tweets instead of pitching in a single tweet, which is the point. The point of the contest is to pitch your story in a concise way, and, even though there are many more characters on Twitter now, you still want to use as few as possible to make it easier for editors and agents going through pitches. Nobody wants to read your paragraph-long tweet.

3. Don't waste characters with useless info. If you use the proper hashtags, as listed on the webpage, you don't need to list the age of your characters or start your Tweet out like, "seventeen-year-old Azriel..." Save your characters for the meat of the story, and use the hashtags to give the other information. People will figure out your audience from that.

4. Know what your age audience is. If people see you post about an MG novel about a 15-year-old character, they're going to be confused. Know who your audience is!

5. Don't be offensive. For instance, if you're a soccer mom writing about a soccer mom, don't say your story is #ownvoices. That's not what that means, and I have seen people do this. Also, the "A" in LGBTQIA doesn't stand for "ally."

6. Get to the conflict of the story. Know your story's main hook. Don't tweet about a quirky subplot or something that happens in the last quarter of the book. The agents and editors are reading to know what the heart of your story is.

7. Don't just tweet quotes from your writing. Sure, you might think that 280-character sentence is the best sentence in history, but quotes without context don't tell an agent or editor anything. Publishers aren't going to want to read more of your story if they don't even know what it's about, so again, stick to giving the conflict of the story.

8. Do your research. Just because an editor or agent favorites your pitch, it doesn't mean you have to submit to them. Doing your research on who favorites your pitches will help you decide who would be the best fit to work with your story, and also weed out possible scammers, because you never know who's browsing the hashtag. Plus, you have to know what their submission guidelines are and follow them before submitting.

If you want some help putting together Twitter pitches, I do offer services for editing Twitter pitches for $5 per round on my editing site. Turnaround time for Twitter pitches is less than 24 hours, so if you need some help, please don't hesitate to reach out!!