Countdown to First Chapters Romance

The First Chapters Romance contest is only a few days away!  It begins on August 27 and will continue to three weeks.   I was a participant in the original First Chapters contest with my novel Growing Up Single and have also decided to participate in this contest with a different manuscript.   

The first contest was absolutely crazy.  Over 2600 entries were submitted and entries were only posted for 14 days.   During that time, the writers checked their articles every day to look for comments and find out their current score.    Very quickly, it became important to devise marketing strategies to get your work noticed.   

I wrote several articles both about my entry and about related topics.   I started getting pinged by other writers to review their works.   I reviewed lots of other stories and started to look for people that I would like to have review my work based on the quality of their comments.    It was exciting.  The quality of comments was uneven, but many of the reviewers had valuable things to say that helped me to improve my writing.  I also got a lot more comfortable at laying out my own comments on other writers' stories.  

As it turns out, all of these practices were honed to a fine art by the lucky-smart folks that chose to post their articles toward the end of the  contest.  They learned from all that went before them and got by far the largest readership among the contest entries.  

So here we are and there is another First Chapters contest.  Gather has changed the rules a lot this time and it looks like for the better.   All of the entries will have the same 3 week voting period, so that there will not be huge variations based on when an article was posted.  

The vote counting is also different.  Only the "10" votes will be counted.   As readers, we will need to look carefully to see which works merit this vote.   This also should eliminate the impact of the so-called driveby "1" votes, from disgruntled voters.   There were a lot of drivebys in the first contest, though Gather claimed that they took measures to counter them.   

There is a tendency to get caught up in the horse race, but for the writers, this is an invaluable opportunity to get your work reviewed by people who really care about writing and are willing to make comments that will help to make you a better writer.  

After the first contest, threads in the aftermath of the contest turned into a new group that was originally made up mostly of First Chapter participants, <a href="http://writingwombats.gather.com/" TheWritin' Wombats</a>.   This group loves writing, both the words and the craft, and conduct spirited debates about the writing process and whatever else is on their minds.   So, look at this contest as a chance to make new contacts, make new friends and learn a lot about writing and reading.   

The theme here is Romance novels, but as many of us are finding, this is now a broad category and there is ample evidence in the entries to back this up.   Enjoy!

You can find my entry in the contest at: 

http://www.gather.com/viewArticle.jsp?articleId=281474977091085