Yesterday – Thursday the 7th of March – was the latest round of #PitMad, a Twitter event in which novelists pitch their books to agents and publishers. I had dabbled in the past, deciding last minute to take part without giving it a lot of thought.
This time, I prepared. I pre-wrote my tweets. I scheduled the date in my diary. I double checked the timezone difference. (PitMad being mainly an American thing.)
Do things like this actually work and secure people publishing deals? Sometimes, yes.
Someone – last year I think it was – shared information of what they tweeted and how far they got with it. I find it fascinating to look at this data alongside success stories and crunch the numbers.
Naturally, I put together some stats for my own experience. I wondered if there was any point in sharing it – it’s a fairly niche set of information, of importance really only to me – but, hey, why not? I found that other person’s findings interesting. If no one else connects with this post, no harm, no foul.
But enough preamble. Here’s what I tweeted and how they did:
Tweet One
This went out at 8.02am EDT (just after 1pm GMT) and pretty much got lost in the initial influx of tweets. (PitMad ran from 8am-8pm EDT.)
It received: 4 retweets, zero likes, zero comments, and 275 total impressions translating into an engagement rate of 1.8%
Tweet Two
I shared this at 11.30am EDT (4.30pm GMT) and it did best, of the three, with 10 retweets, 5 likes (three from other writers, two from agents), and 1 comment (another writer complementing my hook) equaling 758 impressions and 30 engagements with an engagement rate of 4.0%
Tweet Three
Shared at 6.43pm EDT (1.43am GMT), this was retweeted 5 times, got 1 like (from another writer), and no comments. There were a total of 203 impressions, 14 engagements, and an engagement rate of 6.9%
It’s also worth noting that, during the day, I gained a few new followers to push me past the 600-mark.
What does all this mean? Is it a small success?
Well, those are highly subjective questions, but I personally am considering it a positive experience on the hole.
If I am still unrepresented by the time the next round rolls around in June, I will try again with the same tweets in a different order at different times. For science if nothing else. Wish me luck!
Updated to add, for the purposes of transparency: I typed this up in the early hours of this morning and have now woken up to a few more likes. This changes the data above, slightly, but seeing as none of these new interactions were from agents and that’s the whole point of all this, I’m not going to recalculate everything. I don’t think it matters.
If you took part, too, please let me know how you did in the comments below.
