Tales of a Contest Coordinator

After coordinating a chapter contest for three years and seeing it grow from 55 entries in 2000, to 98 entries in 2001, and finally 177 entries in 2002, I think I could write a book about my experiences. I’d call it Blood, Sweat, and Tears. There’s an old Native American saying about not passing judgment on someone until you’ve walked a mile in his moccasins. I’ve come to the conclusion that the sentiment should apply to contest coordinators as well.

Unless you’ve coordinated a chapter contest, you have no idea how much time and effort goes into the task. It takes a year out of your life. From the moment the contest begins, a coordinator spends anywhere from one to six hours a day devoted to contest business. Forget your own writing. Forget your kids. Forget your husband. Forget the dust bunnies collecting in every corner of your house and the lack of food in the fridge. Have a part-time or full-time job? Expect to get little sleep because you’ll be working into the wee hours of the morning finding judges, cataloguing and sorting entries, and answering e-mails queries from contestants. Your weekends will be spent standing in line at the post office, the office supply store, and the copy center. In other words: forget about having a life.

So why do we do it? In my case there were several reasons. First, I believe in the worth of contests as a tool in a writer’s journey toward publication. Second, as a board member, I was aware that the funds generated from our contest were what enabled us to bring in outside speakers—speakers that directly benefited me as a writer. Finally, there was the sense of responsibility and duty I felt toward my chapter.

I first agreed to coordinate when the current coordinator backed out at the last minute— within days of the contest deadline. Naïve fool that I am, when no one else volunteered to take over, I raised my hand. After all, I reasoned, how hard could it be? Little did I know at the time that the departing coordinator had done nothing other than remove the entry fees from the envelopes and pass the checks on to the treasurer. She hadn’t even bothered to return the reply postcards informing the entrants that their entries had been received. But worst of all, she hadn’t secured more than a handful of judges. Thus began my baptism by fire.

Somehow, with the help of my trusty sidekick co-coordinator (it pays to have friends), I muddled through. I’ll spare you most of the gruesome details other than to tell you we basically reinvented the wheel in a day. No one seemed to have a copy of the contest rules, the scoresheet needed rewriting, and there were no guidelines for us to follow. Plus, we still needed more than two dozen judges.

After surviving that first year, being the organized duo that we are and the kind of women who learn from experience, we had a relatively easy time of it the second year, even though our entries nearly doubled in number. And even though one editor forgot to judge the finalists sent to her. And even though another editor’s packet of finalists got lost in the mail. So like cocky fools, we agreed to run the contest a third year.

The moral of this chapter in my life as a contest coordinator is: Be Careful What You Wish For. Three weeks prior to our contest deadline this year, we didn’t have enough entries for any of our five categories. After repeated postings on various loops, the entries began arriving by the dozens. One day my mailman drove up with two cartons of entries and more than a few complaints about his aching back. By the time the deadline rolled around, we had 177 entries that qualified.

Then disaster struck. My co-coordinator lives seventy-five miles from me. On her way to my house to help sort entries to mail out to our judges, she learned her mother had been rushed to the hospital. She turned around and headed for the hospital instead. I spent the better part of that Saturday and Sunday buried knee-deep in 885 thirty-five page partials. My house looked like every editor’s worst nightmare—a nearly 31,000 page slush pile! Somehow, though, I managed to get all those entries off to the judges on time. And all but one panel managed to make it back to me. Somewhere there are five entries floating around in postal Siberia. I have visions of finally receiving them years from now, after the entrants have all become highly successful published authors.

So that’s the blood and the sweat of coordinating a contest. The worst part, however, is the tears. I cannot stress the following enough: Please be kind to your contest coordinators. We’re not out to get you. We’re volunteering our time to help make you a better writer and hopefully aid you in your quest to get published. You cannot imagine how upsetting it is to receive a nasty letter or e-mail from an entrant who believes otherwise.

Many contests automatically disqualify entries that don’t comply with the rules, and they keep the entry fee. We went out of our way to give our entrants a second chance. Our contest allowed them the opportunity to send a corrected version of an entry that would otherwise be disqualified as long as it arrived prior to the contest deadline. And we were the only contest I knew of that refunded the entry fee for anyone whose entry was disqualified. Still, I had to deal with far too many disgruntled writers.

When an entry arrived, I checked it to make sure it complied with the rules. If it didn’t, I notified the entrant at once as to the problem. Believe me, I didn’t sit with a ruler and measure to verify that the margins were exactly one inch. I was only interested in making sure our contest allowed for a level playing field for everyone. For this reason, the contest stipulated that all entries must be in either 12-pt. Courier or Courier New and have no more than twenty-five lines per page.

Although I received entries with the author’s name in the header, more than the allotted page count, too few copies, and single-spaced text, it was the typeface and/or the line count rule most often ignored. Entries arrive in Times New Roman with as many as thirty-four lines per page. This just isn’t fair to the other entrants who have followed the rules. Twenty-five pages of text in TNR is roughly thirty-three pages of text in Courier New. That’s eight more pages to get in all that necessary hero and heroine goal, motivation, and conflict that judges look for. Add to that another possible nine lines per page multiplied by thirty-five pages, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that such an entry in TNR will have a tremendous edge over an entry in Courier.

Most contestants were pleased that I gave them a second chance to correct the infraction, but there were too many that came close to cursing me out, the rationale being everything from how editors don’t mind TNR submissions, so I shouldn’t either, to the fact that they’ve already spent too much money on the entry fee, copying, and postage—and how dare we run a contest that requires five copies of an entry, anyway?

Excuse me? We were giving the writer the opportunity to have thirty-five pages of her work evaluated by a minimum of three judges, four if there was a large discrepancy between any two scores. Many contests charge as much to have only two judges read a maximum of twenty pages. And correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t remember anyone from the chapter holding a gun to the writer’s head, forcing her to enter the contest. So please don’t take it out on the contest coordinator if you can’t bother to follow the rules of the contest.

Likewise, please don’t send a vitriolic diatribe to a contest coordinator if you’re not happy with your scores. Our judges were all either published authors or writers who have gone through the RWA judge training at national or within their own chapter. Many of our judges were fellow contest coordinators. Still, judging is very subjective. I, too, have received lousy scores on an entry that has won other contests. Does it make me unhappy? Of course it does. But I’ve been on all three sides of the contest triangle, and I know that entering a contest is a crap shoot. I have had published judges tell me my work is wonderful and ready for publication. I’ve had other published judges tell me that my work sucks (in very diplomatic terms, mind you.) Ditto with unpublished judges. I take it all in stride. What I don’t do is badmouth the contest to everyone I know and over various writing loops. But I have received e-mails and letters from disgruntled entrants telling me that they fully intended to do just that.

If nothing else, I hope this article will give anyone who reads it a better understanding of just what goes into coordinating a contest. Those of us who do it get nothing out of it other than the satisfaction of knowing we’re hopefully helping our fellow writers. So be kind to your contest coordinator. And don’t hurl your keyboard at her until you’ve walked a mile in her Manolos.