Last week’s #SFFpit event on Twitter proved a smashing success! Leading up to pitch day, we had a few events: a warm-up event the week before, when I challenged authors to craft pitches for Lord of the Rings or Star Wars. The day before the contest, many authors made intros on the hashtag with “two truths and a lie.”
It was hard to say, at that point, how many authors we might have pitching the next day, though about a dozen literary agents and four or five small press editors had agreed to participate.
#SFFpit Summary
The first-ever #SFFpit ran from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. Central time. In that short window, we had:
- ~3,500 Tweeted pitches
- 527 participating authors, of which 205 got at least one favorite
- 27 literary agents from 21 different agencies (at least)
- 6 editors from 4 small presses (at least)
#SFFpit Pitches Per Hour
What a spectacular turnout! The hashtag was busy all day, with the peak period (>300 pitches per hour) happening around 2 p.m.
I’ve listed the participating agents and editors in a separate post on who’s coming to #SFFpit. It’s safe to say that there were many more than I’d thought to invite. They’re already getting #SFFpit submissions. My favorite note so far was the first in a #tenqueries session by Margaret Bail of Inklings Literary Agency:
| Margaret Bail @MKDB Jun 13 Q1: First up, from #sffpit, an archeological time travel. Love the voice, writing is good, premise interesting. Request. #tenqueries |
Yes! Seeing something like that had me pumping a fist in the air, because it means our event is having tangible results.
Pitches by Age Category and Genre
Pitches by Age Category
How did the pitches break down? One reason I tried to provide plenty of hashtags was so that I could give you the following breakdown. There were 3,248 pitches that contained at least one age/genre hashtag. Classifying these first by age category, we see that young adult pitches predominated, accounting for 44% of pitches. This is something we saw in Brenda Drake’s #PitMad and New Leaf Literary’s #NLPitchPerfect as well.
Adult was a close second (43%), but this needs a disclaimer: if a pitch had a valid genre but no age category tag, I assigned it to adult. So this likely counts pitches intended for younger audiences. We saw smaller proportions of new adult (NA) and middle grade (MG) pitches, and even a handful of comic books (<1%).
I had fun coming up with hashtags for subgenres of sci-fi and fantasy, many of which were specifically requested before the event. Broadly speaking, pitches labeled with a high-level genre were almost equally divided between sci-fi (18%) and fantasy (17%).
The most common subgenre, urban fantasy (15%), didn’t surprise anyone, but the #2 subgenre did: contemporary fantasy, accounting for 11% of pitches. These, together with epic fantasy (8%), accounted for about 1/3 of pitches. In other words, fantasy and its subgenres claimed the majority of pitches. The most prevalent SF subgenre was space opera (SO), representing 5% of pitches.
Favorited Pitches
In my previous post on the winners of #SFFpit, I told you that less than half of the 500+ authors who entered had a pitch favorited by one of the 26 literary agents I Twitter-stalked. Only around 15% got favorites from two or more agents. Strikingly, the age categories and genres of favorited pitches mirrored the entry distributions exactly. That is, agents weren’t searching for a certain type of book, just a really good pitch.
What’s Next for SF/F Authors?
Hopefully some of you got favorites from agents or editors. This is an invitation to submit, not a requirement. Do your homework, and only send your materials if you think the agent or press is a good match. And the work must live up to your pitch’s promise; this isn’t a silver bullet for literary representation.
Even if you didn’t get a favorite, almost all of the agents who showed up to #SFFpit are open to standard queries. Go find their guidelines, mention that you admired their participation in #SFFpit — don’t claim that they favorited your pitch, unless that’s true — and give them your best shot.
If you’re still searching for representation or publication in August, there’s a more in-depth pitching contest called #PitchWars. I’ll even be one of the mentors (in adult SF/F), so I’ll have a close eye on it. Follow Brenda Drake’s blog to get the details.
Other Authors Covering #SFFpit
Here are some other great blog posts from participants in #SFFpit:
- SFFpit Post-mortem (R. Alexander Spoerer)
- 7 Reasons Twitter Pitches Don’t Work (Debra Vega)
- #SFFpit and #NLpitchPerfect: My Twitter Pitch Party Experience (Kai Jordan)
- Why Writers Should Invest in Twitter (Cole Burke)
- My #SFFpit Experience (Nora)
- Quit Bitchin’ and Get Pitchin’ (Rachael Stapleton)
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I can’t stop reading this post. The amount of analysis you did on the whole event is amazing. Was it all you simply tallying tweets one by one?
Thanks, Kai! I used the Twitter API, Google Docs, and a Perl parsing script for the hashtag. Pulling the favorites, though, was a little more manual.