Well hi there!
Maybe you were expecting to see the Twinners and lottery winners here.
Frankly, so was I. But I am still deliberating and narrowing down the Twinners, and I have to do that before I can announce the lottery winners.
One of the issues was how many entries I had to disqualify, both from the Twinner nominees and the lottery winners.
Now, submission guidelines are not new for writers.
But I know that some of the #pg70pit rules are quirky and/or complicated. They were for the following reasons:
- For you to have fun with the contest
- To help make things easier on contest judges
- To narrow down the list of entries for us, since narrowing it down ourselves to just a few is so difficult!
Still, so many entries that won the lottery—even ones that were our top picks for Twitter winners!—were disqualified this year that I wanted to take a look at the rules and get your feedback on them.
The whole reason of doing #pg70pit is to amplify voices that might be missing out from other contests. (You know the ones—they have a different focus than pg70pit, and they are very successful! But not all manuscripts are made to fare well in those types of contests.)
Can you respond to the following survey to give me some feedback and improve the contest for everyone involved?
In the meantime, I’ll be figuring out the Twinners to post here ASAP.
Lara Willard 
To my mind, rules are rules. Those who might have had an advantage by not following them should not have advanced, even if that left fewer than 77 entries. Would I have preferred to, say, included a few more words or to tweet about my book’s premise rather than its MC? Sure. But I didn’t.
The ones that advanced didn’t commit any egregious sins. I only relaxed on rules that weren’t clear on the entry form.