Josh Poole and Travis Wellman: Authors

How do you distill a 100,000 word novel into 280 characters?

It’s difficult as hell, that’s for sure.

Josh and myself both recently had the chance to participate in the #DVpit event. #DVpit is an annual pitching event for un-agented, self-identifying historically marginalized authors & illustrators, where we were able to pitch our novels to agents and editors alongside hundreds(thousands?) of other un-agented writers. It was fantastic!

For this year’s event, they switched the format from the former “bird site”, to discord. Now, I’ve used discord for years now thanks to gaming, but this was my first go around with it in a professional sense. And I think it was for the organizers as well.

That being said, they did an excellent job of powering through myriad technical issues, and pulled the event off. Well, I guess it’s still ongoing as now the pitches that were posted are being reviewed by literary agents and editors. This is ongoing for the next several days actually, but our part of the work is done. Fingers crossed that we get some interest in the six different novels that we pitched!

Now back to my opening, 280 characters to represent a 100,000 words. How is it possible?

Well, what we did was we started out writing short paragraphs without concern to character limits that covered the synopsis of each story. Then we chopped it down some, cutting out unnecessary words. Trying to find the essence of the story.

Then we cut that down again, replacing phrases for singular words.

And after a while of this condensing, we came up with our first batch of DVpit pitches. Then we ran them through the practice forum, where we gained valuable input that we used to create our final pitches.

Luckily for us, the event allowed each novel to have three pitches, so with each pitch we took the chance to highlight different aspects of the story. Here’s an example of the pitches for one of our stories:

[YA Fantasy/Sci-Fi] In the Dominion of Fire: Immortals abandoned by their galaxy-trekking creators awake to spawn the myths of humankind. Millennia later, while Smash Brosing with a friend, Ren is thrown into that secret world when his dad, a sci-fi author, is taken by a Norse God who then pursues Ren and his friend. 

#F #SF #YA #MR #TT #ND #MA #SFF #SPF #AC #AD

[YA Fantasy/Sci-Fi] In the Dominion of Fire: Ren is a typical teen, playing video games and looking forward to college until his dad gets kidnapped by a Norse God. Now on the run with his best friend, the two follow clues left by Ren’s dad, all of which point to an impossible truth. 

#F #SF #YA #MR #TT #ND #MA #SFF #SPF #AC #AD

[YA Fantasy/Sci-Fi] In the Dominion of Fire: When your dad writes sci-fi, it’s hard to imagine life being stranger than fiction. But when Ren, teen slacker, learns his dad was taken by Forseti, he finds himself thrust into a world that would’ve been at home in any of his dad’s books. Only, this time, Ren has to be the hero.

#F #SF #YA #MR #TT #ND #MA #SFF #SPF #AC #AD

It should be noted that the hashtags and the titles did not count towards the character limit, but you can see just how small a 280 character limit is. Which isn’t a bad thing.

It was a nice challenge and chance to really reflect on the importance of choosing your words. We learned a lot, and we’ll be using that knowledge in the weeks ahead as we continue to query literary agents.