It was madness, but of the fun kind, when agents and editors offered their PITMAD or pitch madness contest on Twitter the other day. All we writers had to do was pitch our book ideas in 140 characters or less and add the hashtag #pitmad. If your Tweet was favorited by an agent or editor, that was an invitation to send your materials to them. Of course that meant doing some quick research on their submission policies, but most helpfully put that in a Tweet as well. It's a generous offer by those we ordinarily have to do quite a bit of research on to see if they are even accepting new submissions. But as one agent said to me, they want their query boxes to keep getting filled because each query has the potential to be "the next big thing." And that could be your book!