Writing Contest Status and Fallout

We've identified two candidate manuscripts as finalist in our contests. There are about a dozen that have not yet been reviewed. It would be really nice if we had a staff of twenty to read all the manuscripts, but we don't. We're getting through them as fast as possible. Should be complete in ten days and off to the judges for selection.

We've also been getting some negative email and web posts for no apparent reason (at least that we know of). Fifty rejections are bound to annoy a few authors. On the other hand, we are inching along, slower than we anticipated, but still moving forward. We hope to be able to post the covers for the first two books, maybe even a third, in a few weeks. Copy editing, cover development, and life in general seems to thwart our best efforts to hurry up.

Writing Contest Comments

Some of you who have submitted to the novel writing contest might be intersted in how it is going. So far, we have about twenty manuscripts that seem to be worth a full read. In our estimation, that's a lot out of 100 or so that were submitted. We're a little swamped with all of the reading so our planned website update is on hold for the moment until we catch up. Thanks for your patience.

Running a Writing Contest

Whew! That was a challenge. Our Novel Writing Contest is now closed so maybe our website issues will subside. We had no idea how many ways users would try to access the web pages. And here's an interesting one we still haven't figure out -- when non-US users enter data, they have their own computers with local keyboards and language-specific local characters. How do we search a database from our US-English keyboards where the user's name has an oomlat? We also learned that authors are terrible readers. Many don't, won't, or can't read the instructions. Of course, we learned a lot about writing clear instruction (and we'll do better at this next year). It was an interesting experience and we got some excellent manuscripts. We got some stinker's, too. We're still curious as to why some registered and paid their entry fee, but never submitted their manuscripts. And why do people register with email addresses that can't receive email from us?