How I Celebrate My Fellow Authors on PitMad Day

It’s become my tradition to post to Twitter early in the day on PitMad day asking for those who are pitching their novels to agents to send me a reply so I know who’s participating and can retweet their pitches.

I’ve been doing this for several PitMad events, and I’ve learned a lot about how to get the most out of the event. You can read my tips for participants and observers here, but this will be my space to speak about how I celebrate the day and why, and to talk about what I’ve learned along the way.

First thing’s first, NEVER use the PitMad hashtag on a tweet that isn’t a pitch! The official account will scold you! So, if you’re wishing people good luck, or doing like I do and asking who would like your support via a retweet, don’t use the hashtag!

I also learned the hard way that GIFs in the reply thread cause significant delays. When Twitter is trying to load hundreds of replies, GIFs will cause a lot of lag. This time around, I made sure to ask participants to please refrain from putting GIFs in the reply thread and to just drop me a text comment. There was much less lag, and a side benefit was that I had a few nice conversations in between retweeting pitches!

One things I’ve noticed in the past is that people who follow me have gotten frustrated with me spamming the timeline with retweeted pitches on PitMad day and have unfollowed me. So this time around, I posted a high volume warning tweet ahead of time to ask people to mute me if they didn’t want to see hundreds of retweeted pitches.

The other important thing I’ve learned is that it’s a good idea to use Twitter’s new features to limit those who can reply to people I already follow. The volume of responses I get means I basically have to clear my calendar for the day so I have time to retweet all of the requests. It takes a considerable investment of time just to do the retweets alone, but I also take an extra step of adding a comment under each pitch I’ve retweeted. (More on that later.)

During past events I have received over 250 comments and spent over 4 hours retweeting and commenting. I didn’t get a chance to retweet each pitch before the event was over, so I’ll try to give myself more time in future.

Why Does It Take So Long?

So, let’s talk about why it takes me all day to get through a simple retweet requests thread.

I don’t curate what I retweet. I’m not reading through and only retweeting the pitches that I think sound like something I’d like to read. I retweet everything indiscriminately (with only one exception…apparently, I draw the line at Nazi love interests).

But don’t get the wrong idea. I wouldn’t characterize what I do as blindly retweeting. That would take hardly any time at all.

My favorite thing to do during PitMad is to read each pitch I come across and comment with something that I like about each one. That’s the thing that takes so much time. It’s wholly unnecessary, strictly speaking, but it makes me feel good. Every author has put a ton of hard work and so much time into their manuscript. I’ve never finished an entire manuscript, myself, and I have so much admiration for those who’ve accomplished writing an entire novel. I feel like the least I can do is to pick out something I like about their pitch.

It’s just my little way of making sure that every pitch I cross paths with receive a little bit of love from someone who cares, so that even if their pitch doesn’t get a nibble from an agent, they have something they can look back on that will make them smile.

And it’s all really worth it when a tweet I’ve shown some love to gets a nibble, like this one: