How I got put on Twitter's 'naughty' list.
One guy retweeted my pitch simply because I was holding a sword in my profile picture.
This week there was a SciFi-Fantasy pitch event on Twitter. Now, I hate Twitter with the firey passion of ten thousand suns, however, I know people who have managed to get submission invites through these events, so I decided to try it.
First of all, it was a lot of work during a week where I was already busy. Pitch events that I’d heard about before allowed three or four tweets. This one allowed ten. One per hour of the event. That means condensing your novel down into the space of a tweet—with room for the hashtags!—ten different ways. All of this would be pointless if you didn’t get any exposure. So you have to throw up a tweet letting the Twitterverse know that you’re participating and that you’d be happy to exchange support for support. Then you have to create a Twitter list—I learned how to do that this week—of these people and hope that they reciprocate.
I’d never participated in one of these before. I was concerned about people getting pissed if I didn’t boost them while I was busy working and numbers dropping off. I was overly concerned about the thing. Here’s some lists about my experience:
Cons:
I had to be on Twitter several times throughout the entire day.
There was a period of time there where the entire exercise felt pointless. I was reminded that I’m a pebble in an ocean of writers and standing out is often about luck just as much as anything. And is there even a point to anything that I do?
Several people don’t read the directions and this is just frustrating.
Quote Retweets were highly encouraged instead of just retweets and I fretted about the additional mental labor and time on the platform.
I did get told by Twitter that I was ‘violating their rules’ and that they would be limited how many people I followed, liked, and retweeted.
Pros:
Forcing yourself to condense your work down into the space of a tweet and rearrange it ten different ways shines a light on the core structure of your book. It also is a nice reminder about cutting unnecessary words.
I gained about 200 more Twitter followers just doing something that I was going to do anyway.
It was actually kind of fun. The quote retweets decreased as the day went on and I ended up having one or two ‘friends’ that I was continually trading quotes with. I felt like I knew them better by the end of the day.
I got to learn which parts of my pitches were especially appealing to people by the amount of people that commented on certain aspects.
Takeaways:
Although I didn’t get the agent exposure that I was hoping for, I feel like these things are kind of like the lottery, if you don’t play, you can’t win. I think it might be best to go into this with the goal of getting an agent/publisher like, but more with the goal of perfecting your pitch and doing crowd research on what about it draws people.
Everyone was on fire in the morning, but it faded out as the day went on, so it became much less exhausting to keep track of. (I still think ten pitches was a lot. And obviously Twitter thought so too.)
Every new thing I try, stretches me a little bit. I always learn something. And it’s almost never what I think it’s going to be.
I’m still looking forward to only checking Twitter like once a week. Although it is a lot more fun with all my new friends.