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Every now and then, some wonderful person – usually a writer or agent – hosts a twitter pitch party. “What is that?” you may ask… Well, they assign a hashtag to it, and then aspiring authors have less than 140 characters to summarize their book (as if a 1-page synopsis isn’t hard enough!). It usually runs for 12 hours, and etiquette recommends no more than 2-3 tweets per hour. Then, any number of agents and publishing houses can use the hashtag to search for participants. Fellow writers and friends are encouraged to retweet, but favoriting is really supposed to be saved for the agents and publishers. It’s how they let the writer know they’re interested.
 
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Not everyone follows that rule (or maybe they just don’t know). As someone who has participated before, let me tell you … there is nothing more disheartening to think that an agent is interested, only to find out that it’s just someone trying to be supportive.
 
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I’ve attended twitter pitch parties in the past, maybe two or three times, and never had anything to show for it other than a few RTs (retweets), and those were mostly from people who know me. Because of this, I had no intention of participating in the one on June 18th. Except … well, it was specifically for sci-fi and fantasy writers. So the day before I decided to play along again, but I wasn’t going to use the pitches from before. They’d obviously not worked. I didn’t even open the document, instead starting fresh. And with the help of a fellow writer friend, created nine new pitches to be rotated through the twelve hour pitch party.
  
It started at 8am (EST), so thank goodness for tweetdeck! I scheduled all my tweets in advance, and let ’em out into the world every 30 minutes. By the time I got up that morning, and dealt with the potty training Double Trouble, #SFFpit had been going on for almost four hours. And I had a handful of RTs and a couple new followers.
 
As the day went on, I amassed dozens of RTs – almost all of them from people I DON’T EVEN KNOW! And I got three favorites from small presses!! One favorited almost every one of my tweets. By the time 8pm (EST) rolled around, I had more than 30 new followers. I know, I know, that’s not so many, but considering I only had about 130 to start with, adding another 30 is a big jump.Many thanks to all the new followers, and for anyone who gave me an RT! It’s all really appreciated. The #SFFpit community is really supportive.

Me, on twitter!

Me, on twitter!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Now … what to do with the favorites because I’ve already started querying my novel to agents. “Why does this matter?” you ask. Well, the preferred method by most in the publishing industry is to follow either the small press route OR the agent route, not both simultaneously. For now, I’ll tuck those three names in my back pocket and see where this agent thing goes, but it’s nice to know that I have a couple other options should this pan out for me in a few months.

All in all, it was a good day!
 
Happy reading and writing.
Jill
 
twitter: @JillCorddry
FB: facebook.com/jillcorddryauthor
Blog: blog.jillcorddry.com/