Online Communities – Suddenly they all died. The end.

. . .but not for me. The emails are out, and I didn’t get one, which means I’m not moving on to the second round of Pitch Madness. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed, but I’d also be lying if I said I’d been holding my breath. My pitch needs work. Maybe I should have gone with my gut and used the short pitch I’ve got up on authonomy. But the competition was pretty stiff; 300 or so people were culled from the competition, so I’m hardly alone in my disappointment. Besides – I’ve made a bunch of new friends, and that is quite obviously the best part of these competitions. 🙂

So for me, it’s back to querying the old-fashioned way – research and submit, research and submit. Oh, and pray. Cuz, you know, you gotta pray. A lot. The competition out there is stiff, and marketing is not my strong suit (I’m working on that). Meanwhile, there’s always the #PitMad contest on Twitter next week… 😀

Congratulations to all those moving on, and good luck in the upcoming rounds. I’ll be cheering you on from the sidelines and doing my best to keep thinking positive while I hunt for agents to add to my query list.

Pitch madness! (suddenlytheyalldied.com)
Other Blogs I Recommend (ephixbooks.wordpress.com)

If you follow me on Twitter, then chances are you’ll have seen me tweeting like mad today about Vegin, Anná, and the goings-on in Lokana. If you follow me here, then chances are you know that brevity is not my strong suit, which means that a pitch session on Twitter is guaranteed to make my brain explode. I have two reasonably decent short pitches that fit within Twitter limits and still leave room for hashtags. Coming up with others, though, has given me one heck of a headache.

Agents a-plenty lurked about the hashtag #PitMad today, scoping out all the pitches you could handle. Tweets were flying fast and furious and without TweetDeck, I’m afraid I’d have been lost. Heck, even with it, I was afraid I’d be lost! TweetDeck’s lovely columns feature kept me scrolling along in real time, so there was slightly less confusion. I’ll take any reduction in confusion I can get these days. Anyway, so with agents lurking, authors were pitching their books in 140 characters or less and boy, was it crazy! Here are some of the different ways I came up with to pitch The Lokana Chronicles:

One man longs to transform his kingdom…