In November 2022, I stuck my toe into a Twitter pitch party for the very first time. Or was that, stubbed my toe? Having talented help get a design together for the mood board, and schedule the posts, gave me the courage to give it a try. Here’s what we put up:
Several. Lessons. Learned. (You got it — I didn’t get a single ‘like’ from an agent, and only two re-tweets).
I paid attention to which pitches got multiple likes and here’s what I’ll do differently the next time:
- Don’t leave the final copy for the night before! Once you discover that certain hashtags are best, or needed within the post, that cuts down on how many characters you have to capture the essence of your story. As you can see, my second sentence is clunky, and I’ve since learned that using the ‘iceberg’, ‘bigwigs’, and ‘million reasons’ is too ambiguous. I’ve adjusted that portion on my query as well.
- Run your 280-character copy before people who’ve done this. In my case, I’m a member of Sisters in Crime, a great national organization with many generous and helpful members. I’ll be certain to get some feedback well in advance the next time.
- A unique, creative ‘design’ for the post seems to be a common thread for those posts receiving multiple likes. Rather than linear sentence construction, I’ll try to go outside the box the next time. And, I’ll take a look at the successful posts from the prior pitch party to refresh my memory. Here’s an example with 6 retweets and 10 likes.
- Try to have other author/writer friends following along the day of the party. You can ask them to re-tweet your post, so it has more of a chance to be seen. 16 retweets on this one.
Okay, now I’m inspired! I’ll be looking into #IWSGpit on Jan 25 and Savvy Authors Pitchfest (not a Twitter event) scheduled for Feb 15-17.
