Notes from the Lead Reviewer
Congratulations! To the Author and Book of the Month Winners:
AOM – Stories of Faith and Courage from the Vietnam War by Larking Spivey
BOM - Wishing for Rain by jim greenwald
Both are available in paperback and kindle.
Volunteers to handle the Registration Desk at the Conference:
Time is running out and the need still exists, if you have not volunteered yet now is the time to email me and help fill in the blanks to help your fellow members. Need one person for Friday – 8-12.
For all of this year’s nominees, now is the time to give back to your organization. Volunteer to review books. Always in short supply this area requires many more volunteers in order to be timely in the process of getting our authors books reviewed and out where others can see them, help promote your fellow authors. Stop in at the conference to talk about filling these openings. You can contact me on line to volunteer (LeansToFar@aol.com).
If you are not coming to the conference, you are missing out on great seminars, lost opportunities to connect with others as well as sharing in the success of your fellow members.
Congratulations to all the nominees! The judges have received all the nominees’ books and are immersed in scoring your entries, and like all of us, looking forward to finding out who won what this year at our annual Conference Banquet. That you were nominated is a “win” by itself. This year the competition was tighter than ever and we all should be proud of the overall quality of the books nominated.
A brief reminder of how the process works. A committee of three volunteer members assigns the books to twelve pairs of volunteer judges, they do not have the judge’s names, this keeps the process fair. The authors are notified to send copies of their books to each judge. Volunteers for these do not and cannot include officers and or board members.
This eliminates any possibility of ethics violations or favoritism in the process. Yes, the awards are a competition, scores do count. But it is not about the medal, it is about the writing, getting our words out there. If you do this just for an award, then your goals are not in sync with MWSA’s purpose.
Submissions for 2013 are flowing in, over sixty already. Remember, this year, if you submitted an entry after July 15th. there is a fee to enter the Awards Contest of $25.00. If an author does not pay the fee their book will still be reviewed and posted to our website, it will just not be included in the contest.
Hope to see many of you this year in Dayton at our conference!