Tuesday, August 25, 2015

Timeless Tales Magazine Cover Contest Cancellation



A special message from the editor of Timeless Tales, Tahlia Merrill Kirk:

Creative projects are all about throwing new ideas onto a wall and seeing what sticks. Which means that sometimes that idea you thought was brilliant and destined for success ends up sliding into a mushy pile on the floor.

That’s pretty much what happened with the Timeless Tales cover contest. It was a total shot in the dark and the shot missed its mark. We had the contest open for nearly a month and got a grand total of TWO entries. This is obviously not enough to be considered a proper contest.

I seriously considered letting our failure slide under the radar while privately emailing the artists an explanation, but then I saw a series of blog posts by Wil Wheaton* (links at the bottom of this post).

Wil is the creator of several webseries I follow closely. He’s one of those really down-to-earth people who I’ve never met, but have a ton of respect for his accomplishments. His summer has been full of professional frustrations this summer and isn’t afraid to share them with his fans.  His honesty made me appreciate all his hard work even more than before. So I’m hoping that I can follow in his footsteps here.

I suspect that the contest’s failure is related to my lack of knowledge about the illustrating community. Possibly, my budget was too small, but I also didn’t have a clue where to promote the contest beyond our own social media. If anyone has suggestions for what I could’ve done better, I’d love to hear them so I can learn from this experience.

I’d like to thank Terry Fischer  (www.TerryAFischer.com) and Scott Klase for being the kind souls who sent in their work. Terry's is on the left and Scott's is on the right:
Inline image 1
The good news is that our story submissions are as strong as ever and I have some great ideas for issue #6 that I’ll be announcing later on this year (pretty sure we’re finally going to be adding poetry!) For this upcoming issue, I’ve hired my graphic artist friend who designed our logo (www.dreambrella.com). In the words of a famous fish:




2 comments:

  1. I've had problems like this. I just didn't have the guts to be honest! Kudos to you!

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  2. I know this is an older post but I wanted to recommend that if you reboot the contest in the future I recommend sharing on artist sites like deviantArt.com where there are specific forums for contests like this too.

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