I'm thinking of ditching my account with this website on the basis that I've not had anything from it that has been remotely useful to me.
Also, the 2013 & 2014 short story competition entries were NOT ALL read by the judge OR any other resource. I have asked them for an explanation for this and hit a blank wall. If anybody can shed any light on either of the above I would be much impressed.
Dear Oliver,
We do appreciate your feedback but unfortunately, we can't do much more than reiterate the fact that we already read every entry.
The winning entries are chosen on merit alone. We're sorry you didn't enjoy the winning stories as much as our judge did and that they did not feel your entry was to their taste. Don't be too disheartened about this though. As mentioned above, this is a very subjective industry.
All our competitions are free for writers to enter and if you don't enjoy taking part, we encourage you to participate in the other writing competitions out there. We provide lots of information on writing competitions in our blog posts.
Regards,
The W&A Team
Well written Louise - I didn't realise this thread would get so heated when I commented. Um, I don't need to see the blogs from admin, I was just curious. And yes, writing is a subjective art form, like all the others. Sometimes people will like your work, sometimes they won't.
Ugh, I wasn't going to "feed" this thread but then I read 'a third division north writing competition'. Really, Oliver? If that's all it is to you, then why all the fuss? Why bother about who won, what they wrote, who read (or didn't read) the entries? Why not just click away from the site and find something more interesting to do?
The subjectivity point is spot on, of course. Passing no comment on your tactics, it doesn't surprise me in the least that "your" short story got nowhere. My guess is that it just didn't hit the sweet spot of whichever reader whose pile it fell into - simple as that. Even Alice Munro is not to everyone's taste. A similar thing recently happened to a friend of mine: a short story of hers that she'd entered in several earlier competitions recently won a very prestigious national one. Luckily for her, she's the phlegmatic sort.