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:

Post Pitmad Post

PitMad was a trip! I wasn’t pitching today, but I wanted to help support the Twitter Writing Community, so I put an offer out there to retweet my followers’ pitches…only I didn’t word my offer tweet very well and it kind of blew up on me! We’ll get to that. But first…

What’s PitMad?

For the uninitiated, PitMad is an event on Twitter where authors tweet out their 280-character “elevator pitch” for their completed novels using the #PitMad hashtag and agents like tweets to request that the author send them a query letter with a more detailed synopsis of the work. It’s a way for agents to find authors and stories they’d be interested in representing and a way for authors to match with agents. That’s the short version, there are rules to follow, and you can read up on all of the details here.

Anyway, in past events, I just scrolled the hashtag and retweeted the pitches I thought were compelling. Once, I asked my followers if any of them were participating so I could retweet their pitches. And that was my original intention for today, to boost the pitch tweets of my writer friends on Twitter and people who I was already following. But, liked I said, I didn’t word my tweet very specifically, as you can see…

I have so many new friends!

The fact that my offer was retweeted 17 times may have had something to do with the fact that I spent HOURS today on Twitter! But, the fact is, it was such a joy to do it. Before I tweeted this out, I’d already challenged myself not just to blindly hit the retweet button, but to also read each pitch and drop the author a note saying something positive or encouraging about their pitch. I’d recently had a really negative experience with a fellow writer on Twitter, and I wanted to combat the nasty taste she’d left in my mouth by modeling how to be the best that the Twitter Writing Community has to offer. Taking time out of my day to retweet pitches, read each one of them, and offer my little nuggets of positivity was how I chose to do this. There were some overwhelmingly positive side effects, and some unexpected challenges.

Challenge #1

The biggest challenge was finding something to connect with in every pitch that was brought to my attention. We all know that not every book is for ever reader, so there were a lot of stories and characters that I didn’t find compelling and a lot of pitches for genres that I don’t read. If I were to see some of these pitched books on a shelf, I might not even pick it up. But the deal was I would offer some positivity on each pitch, so I read each one and tried to find something about the setting or the character that I could connect with, even if it was just wanting to know more about a specific aspect.

And I’ll cop to being a very critical person. My first reaction to seeing a tweet with a grammatical error is to suggest a correction. I had to make sure to keep a lid on that instinct and just look for my favorite thing about the pitch and focus on that.

Challenge #2

An unexpected challenge of reading hundreds of pitches in a day was seeing the dozens of truly excellent pitches that I would read tomorrow if I could…and then comparing my own work with them. I felt wholly inadequate. All authors have those days when they feel like their work will never measure up, so why bother persevering. Honestly, this is my mood today.

Positive Side Effect #1

While hopping over to each person’s account who responded to my offer to retweet, I went ahead and followed everyone. I figured, “Let’s really be friends after this! Let’s not let our only interaction be something so transactional as a boost on PitMad.” And since there are so many of us in the Writing Community who are on Team Followback, I gained quite a few new followers who are authors. I think I followed about 60 authors yesterday and gained about as many followers myself. In no way did I intend my tertiary participation in PitMad to be a way to gain new followers, but it was a happy side effect.

I haven’t done this for my new PitMad friends yet, but I like to periodically spin through my followers list and find an original tweet to drop a reply or a like on. We all know the Twitter feed is algorithm driven which means you will stop seeing tweets from people you rarely interact with, so I like to keep the feed refreshed by interacting in a way that isn’t dependent on the main feed. I’m hoping my feed is a lot more diverse after this PitMad experience.

Positive Side Effect #2

I saw such a diverse group of pitches from so many different genres! This year I’ve been “reading outside my usual genres” just to see what’s out there that I’ve been missing.

And I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about gatekeeping, literary elitism, and how the work of genre writers and women is often diminished, and how complicit I am in these issues. I’ve got the Reading Log blog series rolling out in coming weeks (that you don’t want to miss, so please subscribe to get it delivered right to your inbox) and spending so much time analyzing my media consumption habits has taught me some things about where my own blindspots and biases are. I’m a work in progress. I’m making an effort to diversify, not just to read authors from different backgrounds, traditions, and races, but to read stories from outside of the genres that I usually enjoy. Reading pitches from genres I don’t normally read with an eye for finding something I can connect with in them was an eye-opening experience that I’m very grateful to have had.

Doing good

But the whole goal of Pitmad is to get an agent, so the question remains…did any of my retweets pick up agent likes?

I’m over the moon to say that, YES, two (or possibly three) of my retweets picked up a like by someone who looked like a legit agent. And dozens were retweeted by my followers, and a few of those picked up some agent interest somewhere along the line, so I think it’s safe to say that just the act of adding a signal boost did make a difference.

I retweeted so many authors who had very few followers, and it made me feel good to be able to help their pitch reach the newsfeeds of my larger audience. I’m not followed by any agents, to my knowledge, but I follow quite a few and when I saw a pitch that matched up with an agent’s Manuscript Wishlist, I made sure to let the author know who to query after PitMad.

I think the real difference was in replying with a positive comment. Almost everyone I sent a little encouragement to replied back with an expression of gratitude. I’ll never know how much those few words impacted someone. I hope it made a world of difference. PitMad can be utter pitch madness, as the name implies. It can be overwhelming, unbearably anxious, and ultimately a big let-down if your pitch doesn’t get any nibbles from agents. But if a fellow author tells you something kind and positive about your pitch? Maybe that can make all the difference between stashing that manuscript in a drawer and forgetting about it and powering through the disappointment and carrying on querying.