Getting the most out of PitMad

Today was #PitMad on Twitter! Here are my top tips on how to get the most our of PitMad if you’re participating in pitching your novel or even just observing the chaos.

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.

HOW TO GET THE MOST OUT OF PITMAD

This not being my first rodeo, I’ve compile a few tips to help you pitchers get the most out of your Pitch Wars Experience:

PIN YOUR PITCH TWEET
It’s such a huge help to everyone who visits your timeline to see what you’re pitching if your pitch is your pinned tweet.

CHANGE YOUR HANDLE FOR THE DAY
Change your display name to something like “Lacy is Pitching TITLE” for the day. This will let people know to visit your timeline if they are seeing you interacting elsewhere but haven’t seen your pitch tweet yet.

USE ALL THE HASHTAGS
If the only hashtag in your pitch is #PitMad, you’re not taking full advantage of the opportunity to connect with agents who specialize in your genre. Check the full list of hashtags here. The #BVM - Black Voices Matter - tag debuted today to lift up black authors during this time of policing reform protests, so be sure to check the list often, as it evolves over time.

PITMAD AFTERCARE

My favorite time of the PitMad day is after 8pm when the official pitch period is over. Here are some things you can do to follow up on your Pitch Wars Day.

SCOPE WHAT YOUR FAVORITE AGENTS ARE LIKING
When the frenzy dies down, I pull up my Twitter List of agents I want to eventually query and scope what pitches they liked. It's a great way to refine my list of potential agents and learn more about their interests. To see what a specific agent has liked, go to their profile. Under their bio are a few tabs labeled Tweets | Tweets & Replies | Media | Likes. That last one is the one you want. It’ll show you everything that agent has liked recently. (Every tweet a user likes is publicly viewable, if you weren’t aware. And yes, I’ve unfollowed people before because I’ve seen them like a tweet that was reprehensible.)

WHO IS LIKING PITCHES SIMILAR TO YOUR WIP?
Similarly, if I run across a pitch that shares aspects with my WIP, I make sure to bookmark them and check back to see if any agents have dropped a like on the tweet. It’s an excellent way to find more agents who would potentially be interested in the types of stories I write, and if you don’t already have a list of agents who you want to query when your manuscript is completed, PitMad is an ideal day to start one!

SEARCH THE TAGS THAT FIT YOUR WIP
Search the genre tags that apply to your WIP (i.e. “#PitMad #A #LF #MH” for adult literary fiction that deals with mental health issues) and check out which tweets are getting the most likes. You can use these pitches as references for how to craft your own pitch when the time comes, or just scan through the likes to see which agents are actively seeking new work to represent in your genre. Consider querying them through their usual guidelines.

Did you miss out on pitching during this round?
Yeah, I did too, despite my best intentions to complete my manuscript.
But, not to worry, we can all set our sites to the next PitMad day:
September 3, 2020!

The Research Shelf

Here’s a peak at the shelf where I keep the books I’ve acquired for research during the process of writing Penitent Magdalene:

• What Great Paintings Say: 100 Masterpieces in Detail by Rainer & Rose-Marie Hagen 

• Look Again: How to Experience the Old Masters by Ossian Wa

• Color: A Natural History of the Palette by Victoria Finlay

• The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St Clair 

• Painting in Britain: 1530-1790 by Ellis Waterhouse

• Hanging the Head: Portraiture and Social Formation in Eighteenth-Century England by Marcia Pointon

• Placing Faces: The portrait and the English Country House in the Long Eighteenth Century by Gill Perry, Kate Retford, and Jordan Vibert 

• Great Houses of Europe by Sacheverell Sitwell

• The Fate of the English Country House by David Littlejohn, Sheila Littlejohn 

• In Celebration: The Art of the Country House by Karen Hearn, Robert Upstone, and Giles Waterfield 

• Old Master Drawings From Chatsworth by Christie's 

• The Garden at Chatsworth by Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford Cavendish Devonshire 

• Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business, the Scandal by James Beck with Michael Daley

• Conservation at the Art Institute of Chicago by Frank Zuccari and Harriet Stratis 

• A Closer Look: Conservation of Paintings by David Bomford, Jill Dunkerton, and Martin Wyld

• Conservation: MFA Highlights by Richard Newman 

• Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo

• Fakes and Forgeries: Catalogue of an Exhibition by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts

• The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World by Anthony M. Amore

• Sotheby's: Bidding for Class Paperback by Robert Lacey

• Sotheby's: The Inside Story by Peter Watson

• The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby’s-Christie’s Auction House Scandal by Christopher Mason

• Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman, and John Shiffman 

• The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece by Edward Dolnick

• The Lost Painting: The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece Paperback by Jonathan Harr 

• Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane by Andrew Graham-Dixon 

• Caravaggio: The Final Years by Silvia Cassani, and Maria Sapio

• The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World’s Most Expensive Bottle of Wine by Benjamin Wallace

• In Vino Duplicitas: The Rise and Fall of a Wine Forger Extraordinaire by Peter Hellman, abd Charles Constant

If you’re wanting to check out any of these books for yourself, I’ve compiled a list!

Shut Up and Write

The February workshop is done and dusted and we had some great participation and some people who bowed out due to work and life complications leaving them with less time to devote to their creative pursuits than they’d have liked. And no one ended up coming out to our in-person meetups.

One of our academics did meet his goal of getting a few articles ready for submission! Yay!

I didn’t meet my goal of 20k words, but I’ve started a couple of new chapters and am getting close on putting the finishing touches on others and incorporating them into the overall narrative. Slow progress is still progress is what I keep telling myself!

IRL Meetups

I did check out a new group meeting near me called “Shut Up and Write” and it was amazing. It was just four of us, all females. There wasn’t a whole lot of socialization, no critique, no discussion. It’s just sitting down and getting to it. One woman handwrote in a crammed notebook. The rest of us typed on laptops. Pretty much no one spoke, but there was a lot of the clatter of keys or scratching of a pen against paper. I only checked Twitter like three times to check in on ongoing conversations! Mostly, I wrote. For a solid hour. It was super refreshing to just sit and silently commune with others who were lost in their own fictional worlds.

I will definitely be going back and spending that silent hour with other writers again!

At the end of the hour, I chatted briefly with a couple of the others. We didn’t get too deep into what we’re working on, but they were pleasant people who get how hard it can be to carve out dedicated writing time and keep yourself on task.

During that one hour session, I wrote a bit over 500 words. That day overall was a 1,700 word day, which is one of the best writing days I’ve had in months. I made really great progress on a chapter I conceptualized a few months ago and I’m getting so close to finishing it. Since I try not to spend too much mental energy on tracking word counts, I have begun picking out my favorite line from that day’s writing session instead.

She’d just about decided she should burn the lingerie before anyone ever saw her in it again when Charlotte broke the delicate strands of her shame spiral with a question.

I was proud of this line because it was originally a plain language throwaway line, but I needed it to also serve as a transition so I spent some time going through iterations to punch it up. When I landed on “breaking the delicate strands of her shame spiral” that felt like it had a universal quality to it.