Another PitMad

Every three months

Every three months, I submit my books in what is known as PitMad, hoping to get an agent interested in them. PitMad is a “pitching” event, where authors tweet a blurb on Twitter hoping for agents to “like” it. A like means a request for at least a few chapters.

I don’t have luck with PitMad. I think it’s because of my writing philosophy. I write for geek girls of all ages who want their fantasies romantic and their romances fantastic. Which doesn’t sit as well as I would like to the common market. Still, I persevere, because at heart I am an optimist. Otherwise, why would I do the same thing over and over again, hoping for different results?

Not a lot of trouble with TweetDeck

It’s not a lot of trouble to do PitMad. You don’t even have to manually submit your blurbs once every three hours or so, as long as you have the website Tweetdeck, which allows you to automate tweets. It’s also free! You write them up ahead of time, program them for the right time of day, and the program takes care of tweeting them at the designated time. You can even do them days in advance (I had mine ready a week ago).

Time to sit and wait.

I have three tweets from each of my three novels that I haven’t self-published (oh, I misspoke. I have another novel that I tend to discount when these events come around.) That pretty much involves me all day. Although in reality, all I will be doing is checking every now and then in the middle of my other work.

Wish me luck!

Another #PitMad and a New Way of Seeing

Wish me luck — I’m doing #PitMad today.

#PitMad is a Twitter competition where writers with unpublished novels try to attract the attention of agents with their pitches, or short blurbs about their novels. Agents will then ask for queries, or the typical packet that is sent to an agent (cover letter, bio, synopsis, first 20 or so pages).

So #PitMad is going on right under your noses on Twitter and you won’t know it unless you’ve discovered Writers’ Twitter. (#writingcommunity, #writerscafe)

I haven’t had much luck with #PitMad — in other words not a single nibble from an agent. I still try because there’s always serendipity. There’s always the possibility of someone to see my pitch in a different way than they have before. There’s always the possibility that my topics have come into vogue when I wasn’t looking. There’s always a possibility that I haven’t seen yet.

I feel more comfortable with failure this time than I have other times. I know about the disarray that the traditional publishing industry currently suffers from, and I have given up on a Big 5 (oops, Big 4 with the latest merger) publisher in my life. I’ve self-published, which has stilled the clamorous yearning to be published.

I want to see what becomes of my work rather than search the earth for validation. It’s a good feeling

Not getting picked for a team

Getting no likes at PitMad feels like not being chosen for the kickball teams in grade school. It’s not current trauma, it’s past trauma that complicates the feeling. I tell myself that PitMad doesn’t determine my worth or the worth of my books.

It is a setback, sure, just as it has been with other #PitMads and #SFFPits. But it’s more a testimony on my ability to write pitches, the matter of thousands of pitches flowing across Twitter at the same time, the glut of submissions in fantasy writing.

I need to find a way around this. Maybe improving my pitches will help. Maybe I should work on making my query letters better (which I am doing).

I can just quit or I can beat my head against the wall — or I can improve. And, I guess, pray.

6000 Words

I’m in the difficult position on figuring out where to put 6000 words back into Voyageurs.

This is harder than it sounds. Or, rather, doing it well is harder than it sounds. More dialogue might be a good thing, but it has to be the right dialogue — developing character or plot without sounding like the words were crowbarred into the text.

Adding words, to me, is harder than editing. I’ve edited my professional papers for years — the real challenge in academic writing is editing a synopsis of the paper to fifty words, which reads something like this:

Researchers hypothesized that subjects would be more likely to buy the pre-owned car than the used car. One hundred and twenty-three students in a convenience sample received either a used car or the pre-owned car catalog entry. Subjects viewed both cars with equal likelihood of buying.

There’s so much more I could have said about the research this synopsis came from. This, by the way, is the type of writing one has to do for the summary a book in a query letter. You get one, maybe two paragraphs in a query letter (but more than fifty words) to describe your book. If the author wants to participate in #pitmad on Twitter — a big event where authors pitch their books on Twitter — you get one sentence to sell your novel, a statement called an elevator pitch.

Well, back to adding words. I’m really apprehensive about adding words. I did add some descriptions throughout and one whole chapter, which is why I only need 6000 words. That’s the equivalent of two-three chapters, which is what I cut out by advice of my developmental editor. I can understand why those chapters got cut — they were action-packed chapters in a story that had quite enough action. My dev editor is looking for places where I can add stuff, so I may have to patiently wait to see what she has to say.