Contests Part Three--Blog Contests

Okay. I know my blog has been all contest, all the time lately. So this is the last contest blog for a little while--I promise.

But before I moved on from the topic of contests, I wanted to talk about blog contests.

We've probably all seen a few. Book giveaways. (Gotta love those.) Hat giveaways. (Again, gotta love those.)

But often you may come across giveaways that you couldn't get at the local bookstore. Things like agent query critiques. (Yes, I won one of those recently and the agent gave me some fantastic feedback.) Or things like agent synopsis critiques up for grabs. (Not to be greedy, but keeping my fingers crossed on that too.)

And if you follow agent blogs, they sometimes have query contests where they will invite people to enter for a certain time period. They read the queries and request more if they like what they see--with an added twist. The query doesn't count against you if they don't request more and you want to resubmit later. Pretty cool. I entered one of those recently (my first real query submission) and actually got a request for a partial! Exciting stuff. The reason I felt empowered to enter was that it didn't actually count against me if it bombed. Kinda took the pressure off a little, you know?

Anyway, there are tons of contests out there. And if you're lucky, you might find one that offers something priceless. A query crit without the public humiliation of submitting to the Query Shark. (Waves to Query Shark--love ya and the public humiliation, as long as it isn't me being bitten!)