Crickets Aren't The Worst Result

Week 38 of the 2019 challenge is "Whether or not to enter contests." A brief discussion of pros, cons, and tips appeared in Part 1.

This year I decided to break my own rule of not entering contests and submitted a book into an contest. Rather than an excerpt, I thought I'd use the spot in the #mfrwhook hop to post about his years experience.  I promise not to turn it into a complete rant. A summary of earlier years Contest Experiences appeared in the 2018 challenge.
Why did I enter? It was a chance to get a book before a large group of book reviewers in my genre. The reviews would be on their blogs, in their newsletters, on the contest site, and of course, all the readers of the above. I felt pretty safe, the book had had good reviews both from readers and editorial sites. I didn't do it for the reviews, but for the exposure to new readers.

My experience? Let's just say the contest button won't be on my website. I will not be promoting the results or recommending the contest to anyone. The first round judge gave low ratings to half the first group of entries. And it wasn't because of poor writing, typos, lack of editing or anything dealing with craft. Not every story reasonates with every reader and that is a given. However, when I judged contests the first rule was to keep your own personal preferences out of the judging. Not liking a story because it didn't reasonate with you was only one factor in the scoring. Not the total score.

No, this reason the books were ripped apart was because this particular judge believes there should be no romance in a fantasy.

I'm not going to tell you what book(s) were involved, nor the judge. I'm deleted the contest information from my tracking system and marked the task entry as DNF, Do Not Use. Now that the bad memory is blocked, it's time to move on to other projects. There are more reviews to be requested, books to be written and edited, and posts to be written.
~till next time, Helen