#PitchCB Jan 29 – Winning Tweets!

Another great Twitter Pitch Contest! I enjoy #PitchCB because they are a bit more selective in their favorites, thus they have the capability to offer more interesting prizes. This time the prize for being one of their ten favorite tweets was a ticket to #DiscoveryDay, which is described as below on the Curtis Brown Website:

Discovery Day 2016 will be the third event for new novelists to be held at Foyles, Charing Cross Road, in association with Curtis Brown and Conville & Walsh. Now sold out, hundreds of authors will attend Foyles for one-on-one agent meetings, group ‘writing surgery’ sessions, and an author panel event featuring author Emma Healey, her Curtis Brown agent Karolina Sutton and Viking publisher Venetia Butterfield.

I scourged the internet looking for how much one of these tickets usually costs, and came up with nothing. I don’t want to speculate but I wish I knew the value of this prize. Additionally, while it’s a lovely prize to be sure, unless you’re within travel distance to London it excludes a lot of persons who participate in this contest. Which leads to the question of: Did that influence their choice in favorites? Isn’t the prize for #DiscoveryDay just a bonus if you happen to live near London, and the real prize is getting a well-known agent to take a look at your work 5 seconds longer than the slush pile and the hope of starting a dialog? Look forward to my thoughts on that later.

Onto the rules! Curtis Brown regularly holds this Pitch Contest, so feel free to view their rules here. Otherwise, here’s a short run-down copied from their website:

– Each #PitchCB event will run for 24 hours on the fourth Friday of every month.

– To take part, simply tweet your 140 character pitch for your book, including the hashtag #PitchCB.

– The events are open to unpublished authors looking for agent representation. Fiction and non-fiction submissions, of any genre, are welcomed.

– Curtis Brown and Conville & Walsh agents will be logging on to read your pitches and will let you know if they would like to read more by ‘favouriting” your tweet.

– Please tweet your pitch no more than once – the Curtis Brown and Conville & Walsh agents will be reading every pitch, so don’t worry, yours won’t be missed.

They will announce their winners officially on Feb 1, so the list I am providing here are only the tweets I physically saw them favorite. Again, this is NOT an official list, only the research of a fellow writer and blogger who is compelled to document and analyze Twitter Pitch Contests.

As for the tweets I saw, many had random favorites, even from agents from other agencies, which I hope they understand by favoriting they are getting the author’s hopes up. (The ugly side of Twitter Pitch Contests: I WON–not really.)

In order to compile my list I couldn’t go the normal route of finding which had a favorite in the “Live” list since no rules said supporters couldn’t ALSO favorite. That’s extremely annoying, especially when you’re participating and get the I WON–not really effect every time there’s a favorite. So, my list is compiled based on the favorites listed by the hosts: Rebecca Ritchie ‏@Becky_Ritchie1 & Richard Pike ‏@LondonFarmBoy

Here are the favorited tweets in no particular order, non-italics are my personal notations:

Martha‏@fiend_fatale (London) #PitchCB Internal, bed-ridden (for the first third) hallucinatory recovery of a 29y/o man figuring out his reality & how to confront grief.

Mark Gallacher‏@GallacherMail (Denmark) — 2nd tweet on this account #PitchCB 20-year old James Linch doesn’t believe his father drowned himself. He starts to ask questions and people start to die.

Catherine Miller‏@katylittlelady (Southampton, UK) #PitchCB #Forever27 Nathan won’t live past his 27th year. He’s known it all his life, so is it too late to fall in love?

Amanda Brunker ‏@AmandaJBrunker (Dublin) How long before a woman can love again? After the death of a husband who cheated. AFTER JACK, dead bastard guilt & lesbian healing #PitchCB

Aidan Thorn ‏@AidanDFThorn (Hull, England ~4 hours from London) 13 years ago Mark Fitzgerald witnessed a violence so brutal it changed him forever. One call, a new case could tear his world apart #PitchCB

Nicola Rainbow ‏@RainbowMouse (So I did my fair share of stalking but couldn’t find where she’s from. But I did find she talks a lot about food and not a lot about books. We all start from somewhere though, so i can’t judge.) #PitchCB Z races to make it to her mother before she dies – will she find out what drove her mother to years of estrangement from Z?

Chelsea Billings ‏@cbillings90 (WA, US! Finally! Though, she’s only used Twitter since Dec 2015 and ONLY for Twitter Pitch Contests, and her profile has no other information. Tad strange given that agents usually check twitter profiles and tweets before dedicating a favorite.) Vanessa’s best friend betrayed her and her identity shattered. Now she’s starting over. But her past still haunts her. #PitchCB #YA

Phoebe Gibson ‏@PhoebeGibson (Middle England) @JonnyGeller #PitchCB Ever lost someone? The white grief – yearning for One More Day? And a last chance to say goodbye. Properly.

Rachael Richey ‏@RachaelRBooks (Cornwall, England) An impending wedding; an old high school crush; an ill-fated trip to Dartmoor and a secret kiss. Will Kate make the right decision? #PitchCB

RaverInRetreat ‏@RaverInRetreat (Moved to France from London) Seven backpackers; one guided tour. They think they are in safe hands, until one of them disappears… #generalfiction #mystery #PitchCB

Jessica Blasdell ‏@JessicaBlasdell This was the first tweet ever for this profile and was posted early in the contest. No other information was available. Seventeen-year-old Skylar Brayden never thought much about dreams, until the night she falls out of her own and into someone else’s #PitchCB

If you notice, that’s 11 favorites when it was announced there would be 10 winners. Though there are also 9 confirmed people within 13 hours of London and 1 is from the US. So that COULD be why there are technically 11 winners. I will be sure to follow-up with who their announced winners are and compare to this list.

After analyzing these tweets, I noticed some CLEAR trends. One, most of the tweeters are Close-To-Londoners. So, why mainly Londoner favorites? Is it just about the #DiscoveryDay prize? It’s hard to say without analyzing more Pitch Contests, so I’ll be back next month to see how it compares.

Second, their instructions indicate they welcome any genre, yet their favorited tweets are not as diverse as one would hope. The majority seem to be geared towards mystery, tragic romance, or general intrigue type of fiction rather than dipping into Sci-Fi and Fantasy at all. There was one tweet by Jessica Blasdell that seemed like it could be fantasy, but I’m not sure if that one really counts given there’s no information about the poster.

As for my constructive advice, if you’ve written a mystery, this is the pitch contest for you, especially if you live near London. Study the tweets from Feb 1st announced winners and ready yourself for the next contest! Feb 27th is the next #PitchCB, so see you there!