Hi all! Today is the last day to vote for me for Pitchapalooza, and to celebrate I am throwing a giveaway for query and one-page critiques! I’ll give away at least three, and more if enough people enter. Just vote here and then post to Twitter saying you voted with the hashtag #vote4mica. If you have already voted, you can still enter by posting!
So Much Support
I just want to say, wow, it has been incredible seeing all the support I’ve received from so many people on Twitter. So many of you have taken the time to RT my voting post with comments, telling others how I have helped you. I’ve even earned a few hundred extra followers thanks to those efforts, where I expected to lose followers because of my spamminess. All I can say is thank you, thank you, thank you. Just knowing I help others makes this worth it!
On Voting Contests
To be honest, I have the feeling I’m not going to win this thing. Every time I tie my opponent, she leaps ahead by a pile of votes. It’s actually driving me crazy, given how much work I and others have put in. On that note, I’d like to advise all of you readers: Never enter voting contests.
I say that because I don’t believe it’s worth the stress. I mean, I’m campaigning hard, and if I lose, it will be for nothing. I could have spent those hours on something else. Same for anyone who entered, including those early runners who got 100-or-so votes (and that’s a LOT!) and then dropped out to save their sanity.
Contests where you post your work online, and get votes from the general public are, in my opinion, unwinnable. (A curated panel of judges is different.) The fact is that strangers aren’t going to come into a voting contest and pick their favorites. They’re going to come on because their participating friends told them to, and they will vote only for those friends. And that’s where people like me, with 11K followers, have the advantage. However hard-earned my followers are, my pitch isn’t in second place because of its own merits. It’s only there because I know people – people who support me and value me, yes, but not people who have read every entry and decided which one they like best.
And then, there’s cheating. It’s easy and varied with things like this. It’s the reason online petitions never get attention by the government: they can be faked. All it takes is the right circumstances or the use of a bot. And the honest people get left with the reputation of being spammy, when all they wanted was a shot. And whoever runs the contest gets free publicity. I’m guessing that’s why these contests happen all the time.
So, in hindsight, I advise you: if you end up in a voting contest, run in the other direction. There are better ways to win.
What’s Next
There is good news whether I win or lose: my 35-word pitch and first page for The Goddess Candidate are going into Pitch Madness tonight at midnight. This means real agents will look at it and possibly making requests for more pages. Yes, I know – why try for Pitchapalooza when I already had Pitch Madness? To that I say: you never know when luck will come your way. Therefore, there is no such thing as too much of it – just a surplus or deficiency. When there’s a surplus, seize every opportunity, because who knows when the next deficiency will come!
Thank you all again, so much, for your support. Happy writing!