Son of a Pitch and How I Tally the Votes
The third Son of a Pitch has just finished the voting for the editor round. One thing I work really hard to do is to keep the comp transparent and focused on helping writers achieve their goal of publication. When I first started querying, writing comps were very different to the ones I see today. Less elitist and cut throat and way more feedback to benefit the participants. That's why, with the help of several of my good writing friends, I formed Son of a Pitch; to bring a comp back into the hands of the writers.
One thing I determined way back was that I would NOT vote. I have no say in the matter, it's entirely up to the authors who have volunteered their time to critique and help those in the query trenches. In fact, I don't usually read most of them until after the whole comp is done and over with. I did this so I can remain as impartial as possible.
When the votes come rolling in:
I keep a list of all the authors voting and check them off once they have given me their five votes, and nag the ones who haven't!
I sort the entries that have been voted under their blog host so they are easy to find when they have multiple votes.
The entries with the most votes go through to the next round.
Usually, with such a wide range of authors involved, I have too many voted entries for the twenty spots. This is where I have back up votes come in. Each author is given two back up votes that are off the record. These are used for the entries that are all tied up. I remove the entries that are already through from the list, and any that don't have any primary votes. Then, using these back ups, I bump up the count on the remaining primary votes. This round I had three entries that got bumped through this way with high back up counts.
The final tiebreaker, that I sent the editor in to do, were four entries that had a single vote and a single back up vote. I send her the links and tell her how many spots to fill. Again, I don't do the tiebreaker so as to eliminate any chance of bias.
So that's how I get my final 20. Does that make sense? There's lots of spread sheeting involved, but I want to make sure it's as fair as possible.
One thing I determined way back was that I would NOT vote. I have no say in the matter, it's entirely up to the authors who have volunteered their time to critique and help those in the query trenches. In fact, I don't usually read most of them until after the whole comp is done and over with. I did this so I can remain as impartial as possible.
When the votes come rolling in:
I keep a list of all the authors voting and check them off once they have given me their five votes, and nag the ones who haven't!
I sort the entries that have been voted under their blog host so they are easy to find when they have multiple votes.
The entries with the most votes go through to the next round.
Usually, with such a wide range of authors involved, I have too many voted entries for the twenty spots. This is where I have back up votes come in. Each author is given two back up votes that are off the record. These are used for the entries that are all tied up. I remove the entries that are already through from the list, and any that don't have any primary votes. Then, using these back ups, I bump up the count on the remaining primary votes. This round I had three entries that got bumped through this way with high back up counts.
The final tiebreaker, that I sent the editor in to do, were four entries that had a single vote and a single back up vote. I send her the links and tell her how many spots to fill. Again, I don't do the tiebreaker so as to eliminate any chance of bias.
So that's how I get my final 20. Does that make sense? There's lots of spread sheeting involved, but I want to make sure it's as fair as possible.
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