Friday, September 12, 2014

Guest Post from Brenda Drake

We are pleased to offer this guest post. Good luck to all brave participants.


#PitMad



#PitMad is a pitch party on Twitter where writers tweet a 140 character pitch for their completed manuscripts. Have several variations of your Twitter pitch available. Twitter may not let you tweet the same pitch over within the same hour. The pitch must include the hashtag #PitMad and the category (#YA, #MG, #A, #NA, #PB and #NF) in the tweet. The “#” is important to include. It will sort the categories to make it easier for the agents/publishers.
For more information about Twitter Pitching visit this post by agent Carly Watters here.
#YA = Young Adult
#MG = Middle Grade
#A = Adult
#NA = New Adult
#PB = Picture Book
#CB = Chapter Book
#NF = Non-fiction
#WF = Woman’s Fiction
#SFF = Science Fiction and Fantasy
#R = Romance
RULES:
The rules are simple. Everyone is welcome to pitch. All genres/categories are welcomed. Must be completed and polished manuscripts. You can pitch more than one manuscript. Throughout the day tweet your pitch. Try not to do it too much (rule of thumb is twice per hour per manuscript). When you see an industry professional on the feed, tweet it once. Make sure to include the hashtag #PitMad and your genre/category (if you can fit it).
The agents/publishers will tweet their submission preferences and favorite your tweet if they want to see more. If you get a favorite from an agent or publisher, follow their submission preference and send them their request as soon as you can. They should have tweeted what they want you to send, so check their twitter feed for that information. If they haven’t listed it, follow their submission guidelines on their websites. Make sure to put “PitMad Request: TITLE” in the subject line of your email when sending your request.
Don’t tweet agents and publishers directly unless they tweet you first.
Don’t favorite friends tweets. The agents will be requesting by favoriting tweets. so let’s keep that for requests. You can RT your friends to show your support.
Please keep in mind, we never know what agents or publishers will be on the hashtag, so make sure you research each requesting agent or publisher. You do not have to send requests to those requesting if you don’t want to work with them.
If you can’t be there, you can always schedule your tweets by using Tweetdeck or some other application that schedules tweets.
And finally, be nice and courteous to each other, and especially to the industry professionals. We’ve had some success stories come out of our previous #PitMads and we’d hate to have it canceled due to abuse. If you do see abuse, please report it to Twitter or notify one of the hosts of the event. Thank you!

Here’s the dates for our upcoming quarterly #PitMad events:
September 9, 2014
December 4, 2014
March 11, 2015
June 4, 2015
September 10, 2015
December 4, 2015
#PitMad starts at 8AM and ends at 8PM (EST or EDT, which is New York time).



About Me

I write young adult and middle grade novels. I'm represented by Peter Knapp at Park Literary. Look for my debut young adult novel, LIBRARY JUMPE

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Well, I guess it's worth a try. It would be sweet to get published from a simple tweet.