Wednesday, January 23, 2013

The Life Cycle of an RYS Submission

Holy cow!

Rate Your Story has apparently gotten popular...you've actually sent in so many submissions since we re-opened on January 2, we've had to temporarily close down submissions. Sorry for the inconvenience, but we need a couple of weeks to catch up and find a few new volunteer judges. (Do you want to be an RYS volunteer judge? Click here.)

So, in the meantime, let's answer this question for our Writing Wednesday topic:

What happens to your story once you hit the send button?

This blog post will explain a little bit about the Rate Your Story process. If you've submitted before, you probably know most of this. But if you're new, this post will be helpful in understanding what type of critique you'll get for free at Rate Your Story.

1. You hit "send" and, as long as you've strictly submitted your manuscript according to our submission guidelines (and we're open to submissions), it goes in our inbox.

2. You get an auto-responder, which looks something like this:

3. Then, it may sit in our inbox for a few days. Miranda Paul, site administrator, logs in every few days and disperses "batches" of manuscripts to various judges.

4. After a week or so (sometimes more, sometimes less) of reading and rereading your manuscript, our volunteer judges consult the Rating Scale and give the manuscript a number between 1-10. Many also write up helpful comments, and email their scores back to Miranda.

5. Miranda then copies and pastes the feedback in the Rating Template, which looks like this:


6. To be efficient, Miranda sends the rating templates back in "batches," about once every week. Along with the rating template for your story, you'll also get an email with a "Brag Badge" that you can post on Facebook, your blog, or Twitter, and it looks like this:



7. If your volunteer judge also wrote comments on the manuscript, you'll get that as an attachment as well.  (And we love the thank you letters and blog post testimonials like this one from you. Thanks!)

8. Once manuscripts are all caught up to a certain date, Rate Your Story will tweet the update using our Twitter name @RateYourStory and the hashtag #RateYS.

9. You then choose what to revise on your manuscript, and then submit it to agents and editors. Then let us know when your goal is achieved, like this RYS writer! (This is the happiest step of all.)

Last, but not least: If you think your manuscript has been lost in eSpace, contact us after 14 days. We're not perfect, so occasionally it takes us longer. But you should check anyway because sometimes we find that an email has been completely overlooked for one reason or another.

We're happy to help you become published writers!

3 comments:

  1. Thanks for the post explaining how it all works- I was just wondering that very thing when I stopped by your site today.

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  2. You guys rock! Thanks for the clear explanation...I'll be submitting something when you reopen.:) Question...the story I sent you last year rated a '3'...is there a place to grab a number logo to post on my website?

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  3. I submitted my MS just as you closed. I got a response saying you were closed to submissions. Then I accidentally deleted the e-mail. Does that mean you will hold my MS, is it out there in cyber space, or will I have to resubmit it again.
    Thanks,
    Patricia

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