Contests

I just burned a few bridges today.

I'm still fuming and I have to burn off some of the steam.

A question had come through one of the author loops I belong to about contests. The original writer of the post was bemoaning that the number of contest entries has fallen over the past few years. The chapter was having a difficult time getting a fair number of entries. Contests are usually one of the largest money makers for a chapter.

Some other posters had made suggestions that the economy was in trouble and it was too expensive for people to enter many contests.

I suggested that there were too many bad contests out there. I said that when host chapter members seem to always win, other contestants don't bother entering anymore.

I was flamed.

The idea that a chapter would play favorites was juvenile and unprofessional. Someone pointed out that final judges were always from outside the chapter.

Well, guess what.... I did some checking and not all contests had final judges from outside the chapter.

AND... who chose which entries to send to the final judges? Those entries that "finalled" were chosen by someone within the chapter.

In my original post, I had also suggested that widely diverse scores for the same manuscript might also be why members are not entering contests anymore. Member enter to get good feedback. What kind of feedback is a manuscript that scores a 50 and 150 in the same contest?

Or course, bad judging was ignored by the loop. One can complain about people being juvenile, more so than fixing the problems.

If I didn't need this loop for other things, I would drop it.