Continuing the series of Frequently Asked Questions about the West Virginia Writers, Inc., Annual Writing Competitions.  To see all of the questions, please click HERE.

QUESTION:  Would I qualify for the Emerging Writers category since my news articles have been published?

ANSWER:  It kind of depends on how large the paper's circulation is. The rule is that you can't have won a cash prize in our contest before and you can't have been published in a publication with a circulation greater than 5000.  Most city newspapers will have a print run of over 5000, but perhaps a small town paper would not.  Check with the paper in question to find out.   The other major factor in this is that even if the print run is below 5000, the piece being submitted must never have been published at all.

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Continuing the series of Frequently Asked Questions about the West Virginia Writers, Inc., Annual Writing Competitions.  To see all of the questions, please click HERE.

QUESTION: Is it permissible to re-enter a work that was rejected last year?

ANSWER:  "Rejected" is such an ugly word.  We prefer, "not selected."  But still.  You may certainly resubmit something from a previous year, provided it has never won a cash prize. There are different judges from year to year, so it can be a matter of a piece finding a receptive judicial home.

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Continuing the series of Frequently Asked Questions about the West Virginia Writers, Inc., Annual Writing Competitions.  To see all the questions, please click HERE.

QUESTION:  I would like to submit to the contest, but I have taken an online class from the judge of the category I want to submit to.  I've made lots of changes to the manuscript, but I'm afraid they still might recognize my work.  Should I still submit?

ANSWER: This is a tough one, but in this case we would recommend you do not submit if there is any possible chance a judge might be familiar with your work already.  The WV Writers contest is judged blindly, so that the judges are never provided the names of the authors whose work has been submitted to them.  The only possible way for them to know who has written a piece is if they recognize it as something they have read before.  We pick judges from out of state to help minimize the chances of this happening, but with prevalence of online writing workshops, the chances can increase.  For this reason, we give our judges strict instructions that if they recognize a piece of writing and realize the identity of its author, they are to disqualify that work from consideration.

If you think there is even a possibility that one of our judges might recognize your work, we ask that you save that work for submission next year when a different judge will be assigned to that category.

This has happened in the past and it created one of the rare situations in which we had to disqualify the entry.

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Continuing the series of Frequently Asked Questions about the West Virginia Writers, Inc., Annual Writing Competitions.  To see all of the questions, please click HERE.

QUESTION: Will the judges pick a subset of the best Book-Length entries and then request the full manuscripts to complete the judging or do they make their decision solely on the submitted excerpts?

ANSWER:  No, the judge will base decisions solely on the excerpts and synopses.

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Continuing the series of Frequently Asked Questions about the West Virginia Writers, Inc., Annual Writing Competitions.  To see all of the questions, please click HERE.

QUESTION:  If I submit a work to the contest (whether I win or not) will I be assigning/surrendering any aspect of my rights under copyright?

ANSWER:   You retain full copyright of your work and the copy of the work you submit to the contest will be destroyed after judging.  WV Writers has no ability to do anything with submitted work without permission of the author.  Typically, every few years we do approach past winners to ask them if they will allow us to use their winning entries in one of our contest winner anthologies, but the winners control all aspects of use, including the right to say, "No, thank you."  We have tossed around the idea of doing an online journal featuring winning entries, but this is likely a year off at earliest.

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