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June 21, 2010 blogroll No Comments

Yesterday was a special day for Cogitate; it marked the five-year anniversary of our editorial partnership. We celebrated with some take-out and the Cogitate Studios Writers’ Contest questionnaires. What a way to spend the day! Thank you to all who participated.

While we had a lot of fun reading your answers, the judging was…well, it was excruciating. We had such a hard time because there were many amazing responses. So many, in fact, that we decided that instead of just picking two grand prize winners, we decided to add two honorable mentions. So, without further ado. Here are our winners:

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Fiction

Audry T

Golden Vampires

(Blog at http://talshannon.livejournal.com; Twitter @AudryT)

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Non-Fiction

April Streeter

Cycle Chic: The Woman’s Style Bible for Urban Biking

(Blog at www.treehugger.com; Twitter @april2462)

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Honorable Mention

Robin Lemke

Johnny Steam

(Blog at http://mysteryrobin.blogspot.com; Twitter @rebobinar) 

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Honorable Mention

Ben Spendlove

The Sense

(Blogs at http://bcspendlove.blogspot.com)

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Our fiction winner receives, of course, a free copyedit with developmental notes on the first 5 chapters or 50 pages of her manuscript, and the nonfiction receives a copyedit and feedback on her proposal. Our two honorable mentions get a free read with notes, but no copyediting. We’ll be contacting you all later today! Congrats!

The winner of the three books from our title list this time around is: Candace Ganger (who was very close in the running for the other prizes, fyi)! You can check out here awesome blog at http://themisadventuresincandyland.blogspot.com and her Twitter @candylandgang. We’ll email you with the list, Candace, and you can contact us with your choices and mailing address.

Everyone, please stay tuned because we may have loved your response to one of the questions even if you didn’t win one of the big prizes, so you still may see your name in future posts about the contest results. Also, we’ll be posting statistics about answers and tips on things like genre/demographic descriptions, 1-2 sentence summaries, etc., which you may find interesting. (And we aren’t getting out of it; we are still posting our own responses to these questions later this week and giving a brief rundown of general scoring methods.) Now for some quick numbers:

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Manuscript Stats

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13% Nonfiction

  • 60% self-help
  • 20% religious
  • 20% memoir

87% Fiction

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66% Juvenile Fiction

81.5% Young Adult

  • 27% mainstream
  • 23% romance
  • 5% steampunk
  • 45% sci-fi/fantasy

18.5% Middle Grade

  • 20% mainstream
  • 40% adventure
  • 40% sci-fi/fantasy (we include paranormal in this)

34% Adult Fiction

  • 7% romance
  • 50% fantasy (this ranged from historical to urban, and from religious to paranormal, which is why we broke the adult category into separate sci-fi and fantasy categories)
  • 29% sci-fi
  • 14% literary fiction

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Writer’s Stats

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Do you have a website? Do you blog and/or tweet?

  • 60% have Twitter accounts
  • 78% have author blogs/websites
  • 8% don’t have either a Twitter or an individual blog

Have you ever had your work professionally edited?

  • 13% have had their work professionally edited
  • 37% said maybe (These responses were mainly due to having previous work edited but not the work in progress (WIP) that they submitted for this OR they are editors as well as writers, so they have *sort of* had a professional editor look at it.)
  • 50% have not had any type of professional editing

Feel your manuscript is complete?

  • 50% said yes
  • 26% said no
  • 24% said maybe (These responses were mainly due to wanting another pair of eyes/editorial review, because their WIP was as far as they could take it without outside involvement − great answer, by the way.)

Average word count for:

  • YA – 69,000 (highest was 120,000; lowest was 36,000)
  • MG – 40,000 (highest was 50,000; lowest was 35,000)
  • Adult Romance – 95,000
  • Adult Sci-Fi – 84,000
  • Adult Fantasy – 94,750
  • Adult Literary Fiction – 78,000
  • Nonfiction– The genre had no average, as very few are complete, but one weighed in at a hefty 130,000 words, with the shortest coming in at 25,000
  • Three fiction projects were submitted as WIPs.

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