Well, I had no idea either. And when an author pitch event happened on Twitter a month ago and everyone was telling everyone not to favorite any of the pitches (that's reserved for the publishing house; if they do fave your pitch, then be ready to submit your manuscript), it scared me enough not to even understand what was going on or how it worked. Two fellow authors did do the event and their pitches got picked.
So anyway, as of this morning, I can now say that I do have an idea on how it's done. And it's not as nerve-wracking as I thought it would be, though narrowing your blurb to less than 140 characters can be tricky and you'll need to craft a few versions of them to tweet out. I only tweeted the best one I could come up with out of 6 versions.
What is nerve-wracking is when your pitch does get faved by a publisher, as mine did during this morning's pitch event. It got faved five minutes after I tweeted it.
So what's next? Well, I'm supposed to send them the first four chapters of my manuscript and they'll let me know if it's good enough for them or not. I still need to see what else they'll need besides those chapters and work from there.
And whether or not the outcome is positive or not, I did get to learn what all the pitch madness is all about on Twitter and not be overwhelmed or intimidated by it when it happens again. And to answer that question whether someone can really pitch a novel or a screenplay in less than 140 characters? Yep, it can be done!
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