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.