Monday, November 29, 2010

Day 86 - Twitter Popularity and #AskAgent

I love Twitter the same way Twitter loves words - in short, precise bursts. When the Australian Open finished, I was sad that I wouldn't get to tweet on the #AusOpen hashtag anymore. When Masterchef finished, I may have shed a tear or so at the people I had spent half an hour with every night mocking people who can't make a basic cake, ffs, but can make a three-course designer meal.

Recently I discovered #AskAgent - it's an excellent resource for up and coming writers who are curious about how Agents work. Yesterday I learned:

- It doesn't matter when agents go on holiday, because if you're on the slush pile it doesn't matter when you get there, they still aren't jumping over themselves to read you.

- It is better, if possible, to have the one agent who can handle both genres your write in.

- For the love of all that is holy, DON'T self-publish, submit the MS to an agent and only tell them it's already been self-published after you get a contract.

- Most agents don't really care what you write about, as long as it's really well written.


I've also managed to come up with a formula for how to calculate popularity on Twitter. It's simple, you take the number of people following you and divide it by the number of people you're following.

I'll admit I haven't applied it universally, but using this method I have a popularity of 0.60 whereas Step-hen Free (or Stephen Fry as he is known in the current timeline) has a popularity of 37.6 - that seems about right to me! ^_^

Word count - 2, 534

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