Hey, guys, Kat Clay here and today I want
to talk to you about something that's coming up pretty soon, which is Pit Mad.
Now, PitMad is a Twitter pitching competition for unpublished manuscripts.
I had some success with this when I was
pitching my first novel, shopping around looking for an agent.
So I actually recommend that authors who
have a polished, finished manuscript and are ready to go and looking for an editor
or publisher or an agent should hit this competition up.
So what is PitMad PitMad is with a pitching competition for finished
manuscripts, so you can't just pitch an idea.
You have to have your book finished and
you pitch it using the two hundred and eighty character limit on Twitter.
Now, if that sounds challenging, it certainly is.
And it forces you to get the subject of
your book down into a concise little tweet.
You can tweet three times during the period that is open for and I'll have some
tips for how to make the perfect tweet for PitMad.
Agents and editors like the things that
they want to see more of and your friends can add to your posts.
But if you're trying to support your friends
who are doing PitMad, don't heart the post, retweet it.
Liking a post is reserved for agents and editors in this pitching competition.
PitMad uses a series of hashtags to
identify the kind of work that people would like to see.
And you're not allowed to put links.
You can't just do a cheeky thing by putting a pitch and then a link to where
you can read more about this pitch over here.
So what are my top tips for entering PitMad, so it's best to prepare for
PitMad in the week or so before PitMad, don't just get to the day and
go I'm just going to send out a few tweets about my book.
Now, you want to come up with three really good tweets about your manuscript, but to
get to those tweets, I suggest you write more. To prepare for PitMad write five to
10 pitches in the two hundred and eighty character word limit.
And you can test that out by opening up Twitter, typing it in or writing them all
in Word documents and copying them in and just not posting them.
So you just want to check that the word limit is correct.
Make sure you add the hashtags that are
relevant to your genre and of course the hashtag PitMad.
There's a full list of these genre hashtags on the PitMad website at
pitchwars.org/pitmad. All of these tweets should reflect the
spine of the story and they want to be engaging and intriguing.
You don't have to tell the entire story in
one tweet, but you want to grab an agent's attention.
And for that there needs to be conflict.
Interesting characters and the promise of a story that's going to come.
Here's an example of the tweets that I
wrote for PitMad when I was going to pitch my novel.
All of these got responses from agents and editors.
I like to think of writing these tweets very similar to writing the first
paragraph of the marketing copy on the back of a novel.
And if you're looking for inspiration,
look at the back of your novels and have a look at that first paragraph.
What does it say?
What does it sell after you've written those five to 10 tweets?
It's time to pitch those to your family
and friends, see which ones they respond to, which ones get a rise or emotional
reaction out of them, get their feedback to help you pick the best ones.
Once you've got those three tweets, it's time to schedule them.
You can schedule these tweets through the
day in the best time period for the agents and editors you're trying to attract.
So if that's the UK, use UK time zones.
If that's the US, make sure the US time zones, you don't need to stay up to
midnight to pitch out your PitMad pitches, which sounds like a tongue twister.
Let me tell you.
You can do this all through Twitter itself.
Twitter has a scheduling function that you
can type in your PitMad pitch, press schedule and voila, away you go.
At the end of PitMad if you do have some
likes there, make sure you check those agents and editors profiles to see if
they've posted guidelines for how they would like their submissions.
If they don't have any guidelines, they go to their websites and check out the
generic submission guidelines and pitch them according to these rules.
This is really important because you want to make sure that you present the work in
the way that the agent would like to receive it.
The other thing you should know is that if
there's an agent or editor you don't particularly want to work with or you
don't think is a good match, you don't need to send them your work.
You need to make a business decision here.
And if they're not appropriate for you, then don't worry about it.
You're not obliged to send them your work.
My final tip for doing PitMad is not to
worry if you don't get any love on the day.
It's a really tough thing to do to actually put your work out there.
But there are always other opportunities
and other ways to get noticed by an agent or an editor.
So there are my top tips for doing Pitmad.
If you've got any more comments, hints,
tips, success stories hit me up in the comments below.
I'd love to hear them.
If you enjoyed this video and would like
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And as always, thank you so much for watching.