Madness, I tell you

Today’s “On the Shelf” post has been postponed til next week in honor of something entirely different I’m doing today.

There are two similarly-named speed-dating contests that try to hook up agents with writers. The big one is called “Pitch Madness” – the concept is that you write a blog post summarizing your story’s pitch, and agents will actually read the posts.

Following “Pitch Madness,” after everyone has seen all of the blogs and the lucky 60 (out of 500+ entries) get their query requests, there’s another round.  If Pitch Madness is a blind date set up by friends, #PitMad is a full on speed-dating session with a timer, and a buzzer and little cards you fill out as you go.

#PitMad is the hashtag for an all-day Twitter chat wherein people use the very tiny character space allowed on Twitter to pitch their novels to agents. It’s open to anyone who wants to tweet and has a finished manuscript.  If an agent “stars” or @-replies to your pitch-tweet, you are being requested a query. It’s informal, crazy, overwhelming and very, very hard to think about anything else.

So, today is #PitMad. And I’m entering it. My tweets are carefully crafted and saved in drafts. I’m probably not going to get anything else done today….

Wish me luck!

Related articles

• Are Pitch Contests Worth It? – Behind the Scenes of Pitch Madness (subitclub.wordpress.com)
• How I Got My Agent: The Hutchings Way (deadlyeverafter.com)