#Pitmad, #PitchWars

Last week was one of four times a year in which a #Pitmad or #Pitchwars is used on Twitter. The idea is that you use 280 characters to describe a completed story, and literary agents hit “like” if they’re interested in hearing more about the story. And that begin the process of connection to an agent and seeing if your work can get its way to being published.

One can’t pitch stories that are published.

There was one story I thought worth presenting, “The Neallys”, but I self-published it on Kindle, I put a link here, and I published it on Literotica. So it was ineligible.

That creates a dilemma. Do I refrain from posting anywhere in the hopes of being able to pitch a story either via one of these events or through an agent-query? Having come to this casually—my initial intent at writing was to post on Literotica—I was unaware of this whole world of writers pitching.

So the dilemma is whether to blow a chance to get a book deal by posting elsewhere first. There is one story that was begun as a possible one for Literotica that I think has the makings of a decent novel. I have the initial part written, but don’t know where it will go. I think the initial part went well, so I’m saving that as a real novel. When it’s done, I may pitch it in December or earlier via a query letter. But apparently there are a zillion query letters outstanding at any one time. I realize that I’m not the next Stephen King or whomever is the dean of Romance-with-a-splash-of-erotica novels.

Other than that, though, there’s quite a bit to be said for posting. At Literotica, I get a significant number of readers. The stats tell me how many times a story has been read—right now “The Professor,” a Summer Lovin’ 2019 entry, has 13.606 reads—but I don’t know how many of those are people who went through the whole thing. With a decent number of “favorites” and comments, it’s been read by a fair number. Other non-contest stories have a good number of reads too.

At this stage, posting my stories for free seems to make sense given my objective, i.e., to have people enjoy what I write. If there is a story I think worth a broader, more-formal distribution, that will likely change. For that story. But as a writer or an author, the first objective is to get readership, and Literotica, and I assume there are other sites for other types of works, works for me.