The December #SFFpit has come and gone, and we’ve analyzed some of the data. Because…of course we did. That’s just the kind of nerds that we are. I’ll shared some of that objective data, as well as some more subjective things that I saw throughout the day.

Thanks to Dan Koboldt who founded #SFFpit and brought me in to co-host. He also did most of the work behind this post, so thanks for that, too. You can buy his book here. The sequel will be out in April.

The Numbers:

We found 2656 #SFFpit tweets, from 542 participating authors. If you’re doing the math at home, you’ll know that that’s about 4.9 pitches per author.  Comparing that to past #SFFpit events, in June of 2016 556 authors participated, and in December of 2015 578 authors pitched.

We had 27 agents participate from 23 different agencies. That’s up from 14 participating in June, and in line with 28 agents that participated last December. In addition we had 5 editors participating from smaller presses.

Subjective Thoughts:

Both Dan and I were super impressed with the pitches. At one point we were chatting and it was like, ‘is it just me, or are these pitches better than usual this time around?’ I don’t think it was just me. You guys were awesome.

The quality of agents was really, really high, too. The agents stopping by looked a lot like a list of agents I’d recommend to anyone querying SF/F. So happy for the participation. And remember, if an agent didn’t favorite your pitch, that’s not a rejection. There were 2656 pitches. They might not have seen yours. If you think an agent is a good fit, query. That’s how I got my agent.

General Contest Perspective:

There’s a chance we started too early in the day. We opened the hashtag at 8 AM, and while I had a lot of fun the first hour, I didn’t see many agents. I’m not sure I saw any. So I think in the future we may look at starting at 9. Dan and I haven’t discussed it yet, but it makes sense.

There were a lot of pitches. We decided to give everybody 10 pitches because we wanted to get enough action on the hashtag to draw notice from Twitter’s analytics. We accomplished that. But there’s a chance we went further than we needed to. We’ll take a look at it before the next iteration and see if maybe 6 or 8 is a better number.

Retweets are a lot of fun. I’m not sure if they make the contest better, but they definitely make it more entertaining. I think they’re here to stay.

Conclusion:

No #SFFpit would be complete without the requisite word cluster by Dan.

Thanks again to Dan, and thanks to everybody who participated: Writers, agents, editors, and general supporters. I had a great time. We’ll see you again in June.

Tags: #SFFPit