I spent most of yesterday in a frenzy, trying to write a tweet to send to an agent in the hope that they might notice me and sign me up.
It's called a Twitter Pitch and sounds like a very exciting prospect, and it was happening TODAY. The website said October 27th, and I saw a couple of tweets that confirmed this, that for this particular agency, the last Friday of each month was the big day.
The idea is to write a pitch for your book using less than 140 characters, and include a hashtag (Judith Aaron, am I making you proud?), and then if an agent likes your tweet, it means that they are interested and it could potentially create an inroad.
I put quite a lot of thought into this, and tried to come up with ideas that would make my twitter pitch stand out from the others, and help me to hook an agent.
I came up with a couple of ideas:
The first was
An anagram of the title of my first book, which is "The Magpie" - maybe "page hit me" OR "a pig theme". I just googled anagram generator and hey presto. Or (in anagram form) "ho retypes". "she poetry". "typos here" or "type horse".
I love this game! And probably played it for longer than I should have done, considering I had an agent hooking pitch to write.
And the second idea, a poem
One unsuspecting mother
One unexpected son
One last letter
Leaves her all undone
Her wickedness exposed
but now too old to run
Will she get what she deserves
Beneath the Suffolk sun?
OR
The magpie spies
a shiny jewel.
Murder and lies
her actions cruel .
Who is the father?
The magpie knows.
Deceptions harbour
her wicked blows.
And then I started looking at haikus and tanka poems. And wrote one or two, but they were dreadful so I gave up and thought I might try a more professional approach, and just do a one line pitch, like normal people might do, instead of a gimmick that would make me laugh, but nobody else.
I woke up this morning armed with my one line pitch, and alternative poems, with butterflies in my stomach, feeling very excited.
I looked at Twitter, and searched the hashtag, but there were no recent tweets, only ones from 2017 saying "get ready". I did lots of googling and checked the agency website again, which said that the next twitter pitch was on October 27th. And then I checked my phone and realised that today is 26th. And October 27th 2017 was on a Friday. I had just been looking at old information on a website, and old tweets. And wasted a lot of time, although maybe my newly discovered anagram generator and haiku writing skills will come in handy at some point in the future.
Determined not to waste today as well, I sent off a submission to one of my favoured agents, and did some research on a few others. I so want to find an agent, but I am currently stuck in limbo. I also want to get on with planning my next book, which I am very excited about.
I feel like I am at a bit of a crossroads and don't know what to do. Should I wait to hear back from the agents I have already submitted to before contacting other agents, or should I just go for it and email all of them? I might just write a list of which ones to approach next and aim to email them next week. So many decisions..... But at least at this stage, they are nice decisions, and I still have lots of options open to me. I am not sure it will be so easy once the rejection emails start clogging up my inbox.
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