Yesterday was #DVPit day 1, a Twitter pitch event for authors who identify as members of historically marginalized minorities/groups (for more info, visit: http://dvpit.com/rulesguidelines).
Twitter is fun (if used “correctly.” Correctly means many things to me. I will talk about that another day). Twitter pitches can be great, but they are invariably terrifying:
- It’s DIFFICULT to come up with a pitch for our books, let alone one we intend to share for agents and editors to see.
- The stakes are high: we pitch hoping to catch an agent’s attention and get a like (aka a query request). And we low-key hope not to look incompetent/silly while at it.
- When we pitch, we share our concepts/themes in the open. I have an issue with this, because whether good or bad, I try to protect my ideas, and this paranoia (let’s keep it real) prevents me from sharing the key details of my book/plot: I’m afraid of people stealing my ideas. Tell me that’s ridiculous and laugh at me. Whatever, friend: it’s the way I roll, and nothing can change it.
I’ve accumulated humble success in the pitches since last year (I think I have 7 or 8 agent requests so far), and now, finally, I’m ready to start querying within the next two to three months. This time, I pitched without expectations, “just in case,” and yet the agent likes/requests I got felt like a giant win for me. They felt like hope.
The point of this post though was to say that yes, getting likes/requests feels good. I can only imagine the elation experienced by those whose pitches become viral. But a pitch isn’t a book: Successful/catchy pitches do not automatically indicate that a book is great. Many agents openly speak about how most query packages disappoint them, even in cases when the pitch was great.
Ergo, I’ll share the sentence I tell myself whenever doubt sinks in during and after the pitches: “It’s all about the execution. And the slush pile still exists.”