Writing Contest Finalists

We'll be announcing the three finalists on the web page this weekend. The details for announding the winning manuscript will be forthcoming shortly thereafter.

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?

Deadly Spam Filter - Why You Can't Get Published

With electronic submissions for our writing contest, we've discovered some frustrating use of spam filters. So far, we've had a half-dozen authors register with an email address that bounces our registration confirmation back to us. We don't know how many other emails ended up in junk folders. In one case (our most frustrating), an author registered and submitted a manuscript using an email address that rejected all of our replies. The rejection email simply said that we were not on the user's accepted list and the email would not be delivered. After a few days, this author sent additional emails to us wanting to know why we had not contacted him/her as we stated on our website. A few days later we get an outraged email from the author about how we don't respond, followed by a pledge to 'expose' us to the writing world. This particular author didn't supply a phone number, even if we'd wanted to take the time to call. We have a snail mail address, but do we take the time to send a personal note to this author advising him/her of his problem? We chose not to, perhaps because the submitted manuscript was rejected in the first page.

So please check your spam filters and junk mail folders, particularly if you'd like to receive email from others. Also, we're running our emails through a spam check filter now so we try avoid the bulk of spam trigger issues in what we send.

Worth Reading

Check out Daivd Isaak's blog, Tomorrowville He's unpublished (at least in fiction) for a few more months until Macmillan New Writing launches his Smite The Water. He's irreverant, witty, and informative. And one of our main sounding boards.

Cover Design

We've made eighteen trips to the local B&N to check out book covers. Agreement has been reached on two points. First, some cover choices are truly bizarre. We asked "What were they thinking?" and we agreed on dozens of bad choices. Second, different things catch the eye of different people. Just because you think it's great doesn't mean the next person will even notice. It seems we've evolved a process here that is ultimately dictatorial - the owner makes the selects the cover from choices that are acceptable to many, including the author. We can't find total agreement.