— Mark Paxson
When I first started blogging and publishing, there were a lot more writers out there in blog land. I got into what I felt was a pretty good community of writers looking to grow and learn, and also to support each other.
One of the tools I learned of back then was a blog tour. Basically, a bunch of bloggers sign up to promote somebody else’s book on their bl0g when it is published. I looked at that and thought, “Why would I promote a book I hadn’t read yet? Give me a chance to read it first and then I’ll decide.” But, for awhile, blog tours were a thing.
There is something similar now going on over on Twitter. #pitmad is a quarterly “event” where writers develop pitches for their manuscripts and tweet them out. Then others retweet those pitches as a show of support. There apparently is some kind of value to retweets. There are a bunch of agents and other writers who “run” this event. The next PitMad is scheduled for tomorrow.
The problem is that in the days leading up to tomorrow, I’m seeing all sorts of writers tweet that they will trade retweets with other writers or that they’ll retweet pretty much anybody’s tweet pitch. Which all leaves me completely unimpressed with the whole concept.
I absolutely totally, 110% believe that writers should support other writers. As Berthold wrote about last month, there are many views of how writers interact with each other, but at the end of the day we should all be in this together. II prefer to reside in a supportive community instead of a competitive community. As a result, I don’t want to bash the general idea behind PitMad.
The concept is a good one. Writers post their pitches and get feedback. It helps them hone their pitches and there are some who have got agents out of their PitMad participation.
However, the idea of blind support just puts me off the whole thing. It turns into a popularity contest instead of a value and quality contest. Support is good, but blind support just doesn’t seem to be very meaningful.
This is one of the things we indie writers should be careful about. I get that the point behind PitMad isn’t necessarily to support indie writers, but instead to support people in their efforts to get noticed by agents and publishers. I think it is relevant to what we do, however.
There is enough of a scarlet letter reputation for indie writers already. We are viewed as the trash heap of the published world by all too many people. So many of us can barely find any readers even when we give our books away. And all too frequently, we hear of readers who have no interest in indie books because of their poor quality.
What does it say about indie writers then that they are willing to endorse books they’ve never read or pitches they’ve never seen? I really think that we owe it to ourselves and to other indie writers to care about quality and to know what we are supporting in the industry before we put out an endorsement. There are enough good quality indie stories out there that we shouldn’t need to show our value in the community by supporting anything and everything that gets thrown out there.
Blind support, while it may feel good and may produce some blind support in exchange, doesn’t really produce any long-lasting value. At least that’s what I think. At some point, it becomes apparent that the support isn’t based on anything real. Here’s the real consequence. If you tell me a book is great on your blog, or on Twitter, and then I go read it and see that it is riddled with typos and barely edited, there’s a very good chance that I won’t pay attention to your recommendations anymore. There’s something else I won’t pay attention to — anything you produce.
Over the last few months I’ve thought of developing a pitch and participating in PitMad at some point. This week’s multitude of “comment here and I’ll retweet your pitch” and “retweet me and I’ll retweet you” tweets has turned me off of the whole thing.
What do you think? Ever participated in PitMad or a blog tour or anything else like that? Every endorsed a book you hadn’t read? (I’m open to the possibility. I’m interested in the why.)
Writers Supporting Writers 