How NOT to Write a Twitter Pitch

One of the things I love most about Twitter is that there are certain days where you can pitch your book to certain people with just a tweet. Today, Authoress is hosting a pitch contest in which writers can tweet their MS with the hashtag #BLOGPITCH. (For more information on Authoress and her contest, click here.) I’m going to participate, but in order to do that, I have to write a pitch.

And I’m terrible at writing pitches.

If you read the beginning of my last post, you know I said I’ve never been good at writing short stories because I tend to be wordy. So, if short stories are hard, just image a tweet. Because a tweet for this contest can only be 140 characters, minus the hashtag, which puts it at 129 characters (because of the space between the hashtag and the rest of the tweet).

So, with 129 characters, I’ll have to catch Authoress’s attention. Which is pretty funny for wordy me.

Not that I was going to let a mere 129 characters stop me. I knew that a pitch must include three things: the main characters, the conflict, and the stakes. So I turned on my MS playlist and gave it a shot:

For seventeen-year-old Emma, finding out why Alex is a ghost & fixing the problem would be so much easier if she didn’t have a huge crush on him…& if he was actually dead. #BLOGPITCH

For starters, the thing was 42 characters too long. Let me emphasize that: 42 CHARACTERS TOO LONG. Feel free to laugh, because I did. For another, it didn’t exactly include the stakes. Yeah, okay, NOT GOOD. But I gave it another shot:

Emma’s sure it’d be a lot easier to find out why Alex is a ghost if she didn’t have a huge crush on him…and if he was actually dead. #BLOGPITCH

Well, that pitch was only 3 characters too long, but still didn’t include the stakes. So I dug deep, gave it a few more attempts, and finally came up with this:

Only Emma knows hot classmate Alex isn’t dead…but going ghost will kill him if they can’t find out why it happened & fix it. #BLOGPITCH

I thought this one rocked. It had 5 characters to spare, included the main characters (Emma & Alex), the conflict (Alex is a ghost and they have to find out why), and the stakes (being a ghost will kill Alex if they don’t fix it). So I sent it off to two of my critique partners.

The first said it was great. The second pointed out a problem. Yes, in my MS, I explain the whole going ghost thing and it makes sense in the context of the story, but anyone who reads the tweet but hasn’t read the MS will be like WTF??? So my critique partner sent me a suggestion to get around the going ghost thing:

Everyone noticed Alex, until an accident turned him into a ghost. Now only nerdy Emma can see him, and help him turn back. #BLOGPITCH

I liked it. But while it fit in a tweet (with 7 characters to spare), I wasn’t sure it included the stakes (that this will kill Alex if they don’t fix it). So I took my CP’s suggestion and worked with it more. I came up with this:

After an accident turns popular classmate Alex into a “ghost,” only outcast Emma can see him & help him before it kills him. #BLOGPITCH

Now, this one fit the character requirements with 5 to spare. But I still wasn’t in love with it. For one thing, I struggled with the comma. Yes, it was supposed to go inside the quotation marks, I thought, but I Googled it just to be sure. I also wasn’t in love with the him, him, him…but I didn’t quite know how to fix that. Also, the it that’s the third word from the end, I wasn’t sure it was clear was that it was. Not that this one was BAD, I just wasn’t sure it was good enough.

For now, my pitch stands at this, but I plan to stalk the hashtag until this evening and see what others are pitching. I hope to borrow ideas from them on how to actually write a pitch because, as you can see, it’s definitely not my strong suit. If nothing else, I’ll go with this pitch, calling it my best shot at getting into this contest. I’ll also hope that with more characters (aka words) allowed in a query, I’ll be able to get an agent’s attention someday.