PitMad Advice | How to Use Your Three Pitches

For those of you participating in PitMad, I want to share some advice about how to use your three pitches. If you don’t know what PitMad is, go here.

Okay, so you’ve crafted three pitches and you’re ready to go. Should you tweet out all three, spread evenly throughout the day?

Yes to the second part. You want to post one in the morning, one around lunchtime, and one later in the day. Imagine that a good chunk of literary agents are in New York, Eastern Standard Time. When will most of them be on Twitter? A lot of offices open at 10am, so they might be scrolling on the commute to work or right when they settle in. After that? Lunchtime might be a good bet. And for the third? Maybe a lot of agents check out pitches at the tail end of the day, on the commute home, or even when they get home.

You’ll have to decide this part for yourself. While there might be certain times of the day when more agents are scrolling through pitches, it’s also true that a LOT of writers have probably figured this out and are tweeting at that time, so competition will be higher.

The truth is that a lot of success with PitMad comes down to luck, which brings me to the point of this post:

You’ve crafted three variations of your pitch, but DO NOT simply tweet out all three of those variations. One of those pitches is better than the other two. One of them is most likely to attract agent likes. You need to start with your best pitch. If it gets a like, KEEP USING IT. Post it again for your second tweet, though make sure to reorder the hashtags because if you tweet out the exact same tweet, Twitter will hide it.

If that first pitch doesn’t get any likes, move on to your next best pitch and go from there.

You’ll hear some people advising that you should use all three variations because they each might appeal in a different way. Ignore this advice. Remember that your pitch is going into a river of THOUSANDS of pitches. It’s quite possible no agent will see your pitch at all. The advice to use all your variations suggests that every agent is going to see every one of your pitches. This is incorrect.

Start with the best. If it works, keep using it. If it doesn’t work, move on to the next.

This, in my humble opinion, is the proper strategy for participating in PitMad.

With love,

Tory

[If you need help refining your submission materials for literary agents, visit my Query Letter Critique Services page.]