Hello fellow Wordsmiths!
As you can see, things are all change here, and for the better, too. What you see before you is the product of many months of hard work, and it’s all just for you.
So, what’s new, you ask? Well, lots. Namely, the shiny ‘My Dashboard’ button in the header. If you click that, you’ll be taken to your dashboard (or to a login/register screen). We recommend registering an account for a couple reasons. Mostly, because it’s a super helpful way to look after your entries, but for these reasons too:
It’s free. Totally, utterly free. No strings attached. No weird Terms and Conditions that give us legal rights to your eyeballs after you die. None of that. Just free.
It’s the best way to enter our competitions. You can view the full list of open competitions, and enter them right from the dashboard
You can create and save drafts. This makes our platform not only a submission platform, but also a fully functional text editor. On top of that, it’s also mobile friendly. So, if you’re out and about, get a great idea that would make a killer story, you can just hop onto Grindstone, write it into a draft, and boom, it’s saved and ready to flesh out when you get home.
All of your entries are tracked, and you can view your feedback right there in the browser. When one of our judging periods ends, you’ll be able to see competition results in your dashboard, along with your ranking and personalised feedback.
You can see your stats, also in your dashboard. If you’ve entered a bunch of competitions, you can see where they all placed, mapped neatly on a graph, updated with every new placement. That way, you can see how you’ve done, and how you’ve progressed.
Submissions to our critical reports have now been integrated too (well, it will be very soon), so if you’ve written a draft, want some feedback before submitting to a competition, you can send it over for a report and get a jump on the other competitors. All’s fair in love and war, as they say.
Submission to our Literary Magazine have also been integrated (also very soon), so again, you can write a draft and send it to our Literary Magazine instead, if you want. From your drafts, you can submit to either a competition, our critical report service, or our literary magazine, all with the click of a button.
And if that doesn’t whet your appetite, well how are these for some added bonuses?
We’re running more competitions than ever. We’ve been thinking long and hard about our writing competitions, and all the feedback we gathered last year, and as a result we’ve split our competitions into three tiers, so that no matter what your capabilities and intentions are, there’ll always be a competition for you. All of our competitions come with the opportunity to get published, and what changes is the amount of feedback we provide, along with the amount of prize money we offer. And if you don’t want to compete for cash at all, then submit to our Literary Magazine, free of charge!
We’re going to have a competition closing every month. That’s right. May 28th marks the end of the first competition of this submission season, and then at the end of every month after, we’ll have another closing, with four closing during September alone!
Loads more prize money. Because we’re running more competitions, that means that there’s more cash prizes to be had. Lots more.
More publishing opportunities. Because we’ve now got the magazine, the blog, and our year-end anthology, there’re more chances than ever to get your name in print.
The blog! How could we forget. This blog will be your second home from now on. We’re piling all of our free time and effort into making it the one stop shop for writers. If there’s something you need to know about writing, you can bet your butt we’ll be writing about it.
And if that doesn’t all sound fantastic, then I don’t know what fantastic is.
Grindstone is a rapidly growing community of writers, and we sincerely hope that with all of these amazing features added, that you find yourself at home here. Because honestly, that’s what matters to us.
We’re a company run by writers, for writers, like you.
So, on behalf of the whole Grindstone team, I’d like to personally welcome you to your new Grindstone.
Have a look around, and let us know what you think!
All the best,
Daniel
Grindstone Co-Founder
Comments