Participating in Twitter Pitch Parties

I have been hearing about Twitter pitch parties from a long time. As I was not on Twitter, I never paid attention to it. Then, I joined Twitter on September 16, 2014. But I still didn't enter because of the time difference.

Last year I had a sudden urge to take part. I succumbed to that urge. Pitmad, in December, was the first pitch party I took part in. On the designated day, between 8 A.M EST to 8 P.M, writers can tweet the pitch/pitches for their completed manuscripts, including the two hashtags #Pitmad #MG or #YA, within 140 characters, every one hour. I thoroughly enjoyed myself (I scheduled the pitches on Tweetdeck) so that even when I was sleeping it would tweet on my behalf.

Though I went to sleep fast, the first thing I did the next morning was to check my phone for twitter notifications. Sadly I did not get any likes from agents for my pitches. To be fair my pitches were very mediocre. If I was an agent I wouldn’t have favourited my pitches either. And I also heard that the feed is brutal, it moves too fast.

I wrote more pitches and took part in SFFPit a few days later. I had an agent like for a pitch. I sent the agent my query, synopsis and chapters.

Then this year I took part in another pitch party, and another agent favourited my pitch for my second book. I promptly sent her my submission.

On Tuesday 19th April there was another pitch party #DVPit (Diverse pitches). Though I just tweeted a few pitches, I saw several pitches receive an overwhelming response from agents. Two pitches in particular stood out. One had around 48 likes from big agents and another around 20.

Before sleeping I saw that one of the writers had around 7 likes from agents, the next morning the writer tells me that two agents she submitted to already rejected her MS. I felt that it was a bit too fast (within a few hours). Yesterday she tweeted she has two more rejections. That got me thinking whether these pitch parties actually help us get agents. I mean a writer can write a fabulous pitch, give awesome comp titles, but the MS may not match what the agent expects or is looking for. Or the writer’s pitch and MS may not exactly match. It’s one thing to write a solid pitch and another thing to write solid 50,000 to 75,000 words (the length of MG to YA manuscripts).

Have you ever taken part in twitter pitch parties? What do you think about them? What has your experience about Twitter pitch parties been?