Monday, July 12, 2010

Submissions Are Now Open (Round One)

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES (please read carefully):

* Submissions are for COMPLETED MANUSCRIPTS ONLY. If you wouldn't want an agent to read the entire thing, DON'T SEND IT. If an "entire thing" doesn't exist, you shouldn't even be reading these rules.
* Manuscripts THAT HAVE BEEN IN A SECRET AGENT CONTEST DURING THE PAST SIX MONTHS (January-May) will not be accepted.
* You may submit A DIFFERENT MANUSCRIPT if you've participated in any previous Secret Agent contests.
* Only ONE ENTRY per person per contest. If you send more than one, your subsequent entry(ies) will be rejected.
* If you are PAST WINNER, please DO NOT ENTER THIS CONTEST. (Unless it's a different manuscript.)
* Submissions are for THE FIRST 250 WORDS of your manuscript. Please do not stop in the middle of a

Your submission for this contest should be formatted as follows:

SCREEN NAME: Your Screen Name Here
TITLE: Your Title Here
GENRE: Your Genre Here

(Followed by the excerpt here.)

* No "chapter one," chapter titles, etc.
* You will receive a confirmation email with your post number. I don't always get through quickly. Don't resend.
* Submissions go to authoress.submissions(at)gmail.com. (And, um, you replace the word (at) with an @ sign. Yeah, sometimes people don't realize that.) They DO NOT GO to my facelesswords address. Or any other address.
*PLAIN TEXT is your best bet! And if you receive a rejection notice that claims you didn't include TITLE, etc., please TYPE THE SCREEN NAME, TITLE, AND GENRE BY HAND and resubmit. (In other words, don't copy and paste that part.)

This month's contest will include the following genres:
  • Young Adult (all genres)
  • Middle Grade (all genres)
  • Contemporary Women's Fiction

11 comments:

  1. THANK YOU for doing this!

    How soon will we receive notice that our submissions made it/did not? I've been acting like a two-year-old for the past five minutes, refreshing my inbox every ten seconds. ;)

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  2. Filled up fast! 12:06, submissions closed. Look forward to reading them.

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  3. Just got my notice - I got rejected, even though my entry was received at 12:01. *sobs* Did submissions fill up THAT FAST, or did I do something wrong? (The rejection simply said I was rejected, not that submissions were full.)

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  4. I also got a rejection that I was over my word count even though I wasn't. The word count in the e-mail was about 80 words over what I had.

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  5. I had a signature in mine and that's what put it over, but then I resended it. I'd just check to make sure that you didn't have that.

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  6. Hmmm - my rejection said I was trying to auto-reply to the address. I wasn't. I sssume the entries are filled.

    I'll cross my fingers for the next window - good luck to everyone!

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  7. Authoress, have you ever thought about having a first-250 in-house critique session? Just so we could get some feedback on our opening page before we're playing for keeps:)

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  8. Jemi -- That means you had an "RE:" in your subject line. The bot reads that as a reply to an email, and will reject it. (To avoid having the program inadvertently post an email to the contest!!)

    Resend during the 2nd window, and DO NOT put an "RE" in your subject line.

    Krista -- We do those occasionally. Like, when I feel like it. LOL :)

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  9. Authoress - yikes! Oops. Thanks for the tip - I will try again! :)

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  10. Ahh...the excitement is palpable! I've set a timer for 7pm.

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