What is your opinion?
The Gemlight Book Awards
"Much better organized than it has been in the past. I am enjoying it and things are going smoothly. I highly recommend it if you want more exposure for your book or if you just enjoy competitions."
The "keep fighting for your justice, keep a kind heart" review
"Disclaimer: I am one of the winners of this competition but I will give my fair opinion based on my experience. How you decide to interpret it is entirely up to you. I put here my honest thoughts and I take responsibility for them and for how I will be judged for it. I am trying to find a way to make the ratings meant for a book apply to a contest - bear with me, please. Rating for Story overall - overall experience in the competition 4 stars I entered 2 of my books, specifying from the start their genre. Throughout the process, I had no issues with them being assigned in their genre or being assigned a judge. For the first round of the competition, everything was done transparently and I experienced no misunderstandings. I would have awarded here 5 stars :)) but the discussions stirred around the entire process chipped away on my experience. Plot of the story - judging criteria used 3 stars The judging criteria for the first round were perfectly clear to me and learning my score I found it to be a fair one(I did not score the highest in my genre or overall) The judging criteria for the second round did include some changes to the first round and I am still not aware if the scores from the first round were taken into consideration or not. I know there was mention of user interaction, something I believe is hard to be quantifiable but I thought it to be something to make this competition unique among the others. Unfortunately, it left room for interpretation. Writing style - judging process 4 stars I take my hat off to all the judges who volunteered to take part and helped shape up these awards. I had no issues learning who my judges were and no issues communicating with them. My first round judge was kind enough to have discussions and open opinions about my book and my writing style and promoted me to improve on my story right away. My second round judge sent me a heartfelt message to let me know she truly enjoyed my book. Having this feedback from her I did not press to find out more(yes - I took my laurels and was happy to adorn them :))) so I can not comment on how responsive she was to give more feedback. I did hear however other people were left confused on how this entire process went and their results. When it comes to judging I guess it depends on the judge and the ones who coordinate them. Grammar - communication skills 2 stars For round one I thought the communication process went well. There were regular updates, no confusion and no misunderstandings when it came to my entries. There was an issue with finding judges, as one always finds with these type of awards, so not starting with a full set of judges for some genres might have been the cause for the problems some other participants experienced. In the second round of the competition, communication got a little bumpy and ended up being confusing. The results were postponed and when they were announced there was no mention of the scores. I can see how this left the majority of the participants confused and disappointed when their inquiries got no clear answers. It is their right, and duty for the community, to ask questions and comment on their experience. To shed light on what I believe was the cause of this, I will add the organiser of this awards was confronted with personal issues and this could be the reason why she was not at the helm, coordinating the entire process. Yes, there are other members involved but I do not know how their communication process went. I believe it is room for improvement in this aspect. I read people saying they do not trust the entire process and they believe it was intentionally not made clear to give a boost to the judges/organizers' favourites. For my part and I can speak for some other participants I will say I only got to interact with the host and the judges only after I entered the awards. At no time did I learn or noticed anyone was being favoured or was submitting to bribing (I would award this 5 stars for willingness to act fair) I read from a reviewer that he found this experience disappointing and it discouraged them to enter other awards. I am sorry to hear anyone felt this way. I wish they could have had the chance to reach out to other participants, fellow authors and expand on their community and their experience - this is the best part of participating in any awards. My personal advice to anyone - do not enter these type of awards to win, enter to better yourself, enter to get to know other authors and their works. My final thought goes to the hosts of these awards. I know they are young and with other responsibilities. I commend you for being brave and willing to start this initiative to bring together the community. I commend you for your efforts and whether you were experienced enough or not to organise these type of awards please do not feel discouraged. My belief is that even God in all of his perfection still has things to learn. And having the opportunity to learn is one of the best gifts we can receive. Stay safe everyone!"
Absolute disaster
"I've been on Inkitt for a few months, and this is the first writing contest I've entered. I came here hoping for an organized, semi-professional contest offering good feedback and a chance to see what kind of books other writers have. While, yes, I did get some feedback and met new people, this contest as a whole was unbelievably disorganized, confusing, and unprofessional. Thankfully, I had a reliable judge for Round 1 and got both my score and a review. However, I never got a score or a review for Round 2. The transition between rounds was anything but seamless, as it was extremely unclear which books made it in and which didn't. And, of course, why on earth did they choose to make one short YouTube video as a final way to announce the winners, without even saying who the winners were in this contest book? A very odd and unfulfilling way to end. The moment the contest was over, the people running it seemed to completely ignore its existence, leaving so many writers without their scores and results. Did the founder just not care about her own contest? Or were far too many head judges being ignorant? Most likely, both. Not to mention how unreliable both the judges and the heads were. I personally wasn't trying to reach out to any of them, but I know many people who did, and got laughable responses back. Seriously? They are the heads of the contest; they're supposed to know what's going on, and it seemed like none of them did. Saying "Oh, sorry, I don't know anything about your score" isn't helping anyone. (Plus, what was up with all the typos? They spelled authors' names and book titles wrong so many times and didn't bother to correct them. And the contest book itself? So. Many. Grammatical. Mistakes. This is a writing contest, not the first draft of some haphazardly put together novel that nobody bothered to proofread. Or, maybe it is.) Ridiculous."
Don't enter it-
"ONE BOOK. I entered one book- With not even 10 chapters in it. But it takes my judge more than a month to read it. And every time I asked, I had to wait more than a day for a reply, even by email. My deadline for my review got pushed back to April 4th. April 4th. 15 freaking days ago. After the competition was already over. Like what the hell? I had to post on multiple people’s walls to get my information. And I didn’t even get a reply for one of them. It was deleted off their wall. The judges don’t even know half of what’s going on. I had to wait more than a month for my review, I didn’t even get a score, and I didn’t even get notified that I hadn’t made it to round 2. Like what even? And my judge was just posting about how many followers she has and a bunch of spam posts that was useless to me. Just a complete waste of time. When I got my review, it seemed forced and didn’t have anything I could do better. Just said, “Nice job. Plot is a bit of drag.” I paraphrased that but like- that’s how easy it was to paraphrase my review. On top of that, I was misgendered when my pronouns were clearly in my bio. Terrible way to start out my first writing competition. Won’t be entering in the future."
What in the world?
"I entered two books. I judged three books. I still don't know what scores I received; apparently, based on the short YouTube video, I got fourth place and shared fifth place so yay for that but...one easily missed 'hey, there's a YouTube video out'? Read R. Johnson's review for much more in-depth feedback. Cannot recommend this experience should it be offered again UPDATE: circumstances alter cases. It doesn't change how things were run but I sympathize with the real-world troubles experienced by the contest creators and wish them all the best. Two categories updated to five stars to reflect heart involved if not execution"
A fiasco from start to finish
"I joined in the Gemlight Awards for the very reason they advertised: to promote my books and to secure an honest review. So, enter me, with The Unnamed in action/adventure and The Silence is Lifted in fantasy. I signed up, followed all the rules, and waited for my acceptance. My notification came a couple of days later, with The Silence is Lifted being assigned to a judge. But I heard nothing about The Unnamed... So I commented on the chapter asking about my second entry. No response. Over the next several days, I started tagging members of the Writing Community in my comments. Still no response. Several days later, I received a post on my wall from The Writing Community that simply stated "Your judge is @ Nazra" with a response from Nazra's personal account stating "ok." What I didn't realize at the time was that Nazra was the founder of the Gemlight awards and she was covering her own mistake in the 3rd person. I confirmed this after finding a similar post on another writer's page from Nazra stating, "I'm the head of The Writer's Community. I hope you are fine. My reason for leaving a message on your wall is that I missed your book in the list of the participants and I didn't assigned [sic] you any judge. I'm really sorry for doing so. I do hope you accept my apology. I will judge your book myself that is if [sic] you want. Agani [sic], I am sorry for the mess up." --Much more of an explanation than I'd received. But, I followed Nazra and awaited my results. A while later, I was supplied said results in the form of the lowest score I had ever received out of any competition. No review, no scoresheet, no indication at all that my story was actually read other than a one-line comment at my intro that said, "nice intro." Riveting. And far from sour grapes, The Unnamed has not only won several genre competitions, but a few cross-genre ones also, as well as earning publication in a literary magazine. This collective foundation was enough to make me start looking into things. And yep! Aside from the round one results chapter being incredibly confusing, My Unnamed, which has NO "shipping" in it at all and not a hint of romance--had been judged as EROTICA. I really couldn't believe it, and I started commenting again. Again, several days went by with no response on several different threads, but by then, I knew to tag Nazra if I wanted something addressed. She eventually did, and admitted there had been a mistake (two, in fact, as The Silence is Lifted had been miss-assigned as well, as action/adventure instead of fantasy) and that the placement would be corrected. But she never addressed my concerns that the Unnamed had been judged to romance/erotica standards when it CLEARLY wasn't, resulting in a low score. She then went on to state that my score for The Unnamed was too low to have moved on to round 2. ...But I had already been assigned a round 2 judge... At this point, I just let it go. It was Silence I was really interested in for this competition, and it had earned 50 out of 50 in round one, tying with another writer who I have had the privilege of competing with AND tying with in the past. This actually really served to validate the ability and attentiveness of the judge responsible for reviewing us in round one. Thank you, Cindy Lou Harvell, for your time and attention. But then came round 2. We waited... And waited... I got a review on the Unnamed, solidifying that I actually had been judged in round 2. Then, the day before judging was due, a post comes out from Nazra that she is sick and "The reason, I'm telling is that I won't be able to announce the results of The Gemlight Book Awards anytime soon." Oooook... You have a whole team of writers in this community. Was there really no way for you to stay on schedule? Regardless, a few days pass. Then a few more. No notifications. No reviews from judges, no updates on the awards except for a bit more judge shuffling, based on the posts on Writer's Community wall. Finally, ten days later, the awards were announced in the form of a YouTube video with the winner's book covers animated to move across the screen. The Silence is Lifted was nowhere in the running. Neither was The Willow Rise Six, the other perfect score from round one. No review came for The Silence is Lifted. No scoresheets were released. No chapter was added to the competition book listing the winning scores, and I suddenly wondered if our judge skipped out on reading anything (my round 2 judge also judged for Willow Rise and for a book written by my round 1 judge, who is also an amazing author.) No scores, no reviews. Soooooo, I started commenting again. I asked my judge directly for my review, assuming that she must have just found a lot of stuff I needed to fix for me to have not made it into the running. She finally answered and happily left my review with all 5 stars and a disclaimer of, 'I don't think I need to give any suggestions, it's already so PERFECT! Keep it up!" ...Well., that's great but... How TF did I not end up in the running then?? So I commented again and asked her for my score to which she replied: "Hey! Sorry for the late review actually there was little misunderstanding and sure I'll tell your score... lemme check" Shortly followed by: "hey! Can you please ask your score from the writer's community? I'm not really sure what it is." Ok, now by this time I was REALLY confused. Aren't the judges responsible for assigning the scores? But, I agreed, and I wrote on Writer's Community wall asking for my scores. No response. After three days, I began tagging people, including Nazra, but still, no one responded. In the interim, I reached out to Cindy and Alan, the other authors who had been judged by Shreeya, our round 2 judge. Neither of them had received their scores or reviews. Alan made the suggestion that the "reader engagement" as listed in the round two criteria may have had something to do with it. So I got to thinking, how would one objectively measure reader engagement? Because they don't have access to Inkitt's analytics so there's NO way they would think they could look at review numbers and comments, right? I mean, They wouldn't ACTUALLY attempt to compare a book like Creature Seer's, whose author has been running around, busting her ass earning return reads for the past several months, to Silence or Willow Rise that have only been circulating for a matter of weeks and whose authors simply don't have time to invest in endless review swaps. I mean, they would have no way of knowing how long a story has been posted, no knowledge of reads-per-chapter, both of these things INSTUMENTAL to judging reader engagement. No, there's ABSOLUTELY no way they would try to extrapolate statistics from what they're able to glean from reviews and comments. That would not only be a ridiculous move, as writers flock to these competitions based on the fact that they AREN'T popularity contests like the Inkitt novel contests, but it would be basically be putting the judging into the hands of the previous reviewers and completely invalidating the hard work of the round 2 judges. And besides, reader engagement has absolutely NOTHING to do with the quality of the writing. Most of my start to finish readers are reader-only and never stop to comment or review. There are no reviews posted under their profile and no responses to any posts on their wall. Some people are simply here to read. But I digress... And here we are, nearly five days into my original query as to my scores. I've also asked how the judging was accomplished, but this too has received no answer. So until such time as my questions are answered, and all contestants receive their reviews and scores from assigned judges, this review stands. ***Author beware*** This is the most poorly run competition I have ever taken part in."
