Twitter Pitching

I participated in #PitMatch on Twitter this week.  It’s the first time I’ve been ready to pitch Chaos Wolf while one of these events were happening so I decided to toss my hat in the ring.  It was an interesting experience trying to distill almost 100,000 words into one-hundred forty characters.

First I had to figure out what hashtags I needed to use.  I was required to use #PitMatch, of course.  There’s ten characters, including a trailing space  Then I had to designate my novel’s market of New Adult, so that added another four characters for #NA and space.  Then I added the Urban Fantasy tag, so another three characters for the genre tag #UF.  That’s a total of seventeen characters, leaving me with one-hundred twenty-three available to play with.

Now for the hard work.

Jordan’s a typical college drop out, if typical is bitten by a werewolf, rescued by a vampire, under a deadline to learn to shapeshift or die. 

It’s way too long at one-hundred forty-four characters.  The gist of the story is there, but it wouldn’t fit into a Tweet, even without the hashtags.  It needs to be refined.

Jordan’s a typical college drop out, was bitten by a werewolf, rescued by a vampire, under a deadline to learn to shapeshift or die

One-hundred thirty-three characters.  Better, but still too long.  Plus it doesn’t indicate Jordan’s gender.

She’s a typical college drop out, if typical is bitten by a werewolf, rescued by a vampire, and must learn to shift or die.

One-hundred twenty-five characters.  Much better, but too long by two characters.  I asked for an opinion from a friend.

Jordan, typical college drop out, bitten by a werewolf, rescued by a vampire, has a deadline to learn to shift or die.

One-hundred twenty characters.  It’s finally under the limit when I add in the hashtags.  It’s close, but not quite what I want.

She’s a typical college drop out – bitten by a werewolf, rescued by a vampire and must learn to shapeshift or die.

One-hundred sixteen characters.  One hundred thirty-two total. It has the feel I’m looking for.  Since I have to be at my day job during the event, I loaded it into TweetDeck and crossed my fingers.

To my excitement, I did get one heart from an acquiring editor, indicating she was interested in the pitch and that I should submit.  A quick check of the publisher’s submission requirements tempered my excitement. Their guidelines indicate they want romance stories. While Chaos Wolf does have romantic elements, it would not be considered a traditional paranormal romance.  Also, my story is 20,000 words longer than their upper limit for manuscripts.  Because of these reasons, I reached out to the person who liked the story for further guidance and received a go-ahead to submit.

Will I do another Twitter based pitch event?  Most likely.  If nothing else, it helped me refine my elevator pitch down to one sentence.  Will I depend on this as my only way to find an agent?  No. Will it be one of the tools I will use. Perhaps, depending on when the next one is.