Hysteria – what happens when a writing competition ends?

Although entries to the Hysteria Writing Competition close on 31st August each year, the work to complete the competition is just beginning for the competition judges and organisers.

As people have often emailed to find out what happens when their entry has gone in, I thought it might be useful to give you a brief run down of what happens when a writing competition ends and the actions we then take:

The judges for each category have until the end of September to complete reading the entries and they mark every one against a specific set of criteria;

During September we publish interviews with the three winners from Hysteria 2016 and link back to their entries, published on the website earlier this year.

In October, we take the files generated by the judges marking and work out who’s top placed in each category;

We then check to make sure the finalists haven’t been published elsewhere, before sending out confirmations to them individually about being shortlisted;

During September and October we begin work on the anthology – just the basic book layout and content, as the winning entries are added in late October and early November – this is always a production rush;

One of the top three winning entries always inspires our cover design for the year and we set up a competition in November to win a free copy if you can guess the winning entry from the list of winning titles published;

Finally, the anthology itself is published in late November, in time for Christmas, and we use publication to announce the overall category winners;

And in January we start all over again with a call for judges for the 2018 writing competition.

Phew, hopefully that gives you a flavour of some of the work involved behind the scenes and, if you have any questions do let me know by leaving a comment below.

(Image courtesy: https://pixabay.com/en/uss-nimitz-basketball-silhouettes-108622/)