Why not team with Zoetrope?
paperhaus January 11th, 2007
Touchstone/Fireside books, part of Simon & Schuster, has launched a writing contest through the social networking site Gather.com. Gather, which tells the NY Times it wants to be”MySpace for grownups,” has a lot of growing to do first.
MySpace has more than 100 million registered users.
Facebook — mostly college students and recent grads — has 7.5 million.
Gather has 175,000. That’s not even 1 percent of MySpace. Not even close.
The way the contest works is this: unpublished writers submit their manuscripts through Gather.com (after registering, of course. They need your numbers!). Completed manuscript, but for starters the first 3 chapters will be shared through the site. People on the site will vote to decide which 15 manuscripts advance — with editors picking 5 more. Then second chapters, then third, will narrow the field. Then the editors pick the winner.
“It is akin to an ‘American Idol’ for thinking people,” snarked Tom Gerace, the chief executive of Gather.com.
Apparently Tom has never watched American Idol. The scheme there is that the experts — Randy, Paula and Simon — go through the singing slush pile. They sort, they cull, they groom — and then, in the final stages, they step back and let the people watching the TV show vote. That’s what makes it exciting for people — they have something invested. Their vote counts! Clay Aiken will win or not depending on their call! This, Tom, is not that.
The saddest thing about this is that Gather thinks it can invent a writing community from scratch. It won’t be able to.
Meanwhile there’s a perfectly good, functional writing community alive and kicking at Zoetrope. It’s free to join the Virtual Studio, where writers give (and get) feedback on their writing. It’s a genuine community of hardworking writers. I’d wager writers will get far more out of participating there than they will from entering this latest gimmicky contest.
Or wait, hoping against hope, for another Miss Snark Crapometer some day.
Gather’s been up to this sort of thing for a little while: http://amazonshorts.gather.com/ I tuned in from time to time and was generally underwhelmed (and annoyed by the spam I had to endure as a result of registering as a user).
Anyway, the difference now seems to be the fiction format and where the judges are inserted into the process. I think you make an excellent point about where the judges actually belong, and I would only add that they need a Simon Cowell. That’s what makes me read the entire Crapometer every time, of course.
As for Zoetrope, maybe they feel like they’re doing fine on their own — their screenwriting contest is (for obvious reasons) internal, why mess with the formula? But yeah, it’d be interesting.
I agree with you C. They’re trying so hard to be this cool site for grown-ups, but the more they push, the more I recoil.