Niko LaamanenFounder, Publisher at Konsensus Network

Navigating Competition How to Select Winning Entries

7 Mar 2025 · 1 min

0:48

In this brief conversational segment, the speakers discuss the practical challenges of judging a competition with a large number of submissions. They note that they received hundreds of entries and had to narrow them down, leading to a decision to expand the number of prize winners from three to five in order to accommodate more compelling stories. One speaker references their editorial background in selecting finalists for anthologies, suggesting that experience informs their approach to evaluating and curating competition entries.

TranscriptAuto-generated · 1 min

I didn't even enter.
But the thing with any competition is there's a lot of competition. That's the whole thing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. We, we had, we had hundreds of entries and narrowing them down.
Yeah.
Especially to sort of, you know, we actually expanded the prize winners from sort of 3 to 5. Such tremendous stories. Um, and, you
know, I'm sure picking between the last sort of 10. I mean, I think it's probably from what I've done when I've worked as an editor on— I've done, published 2 anthologies myself and we got hundreds of submissions. And yeah, you can get rid of 3 quarters of them because they're just not actually very good, but that still leaves you with more than you can really use. And then just choosing the last few