In past years I’ve posted info on the Rattle Poetry Prize numbers here, so I might as well keep that up, even though I haven’t had time for a real post. We got all the submissions logged in last week, so by the timing of last year’s post, we’re ahead of schedule.  Here are the numbers:

750 hardcopy entries
924 email entries
1,674 total entries

For the first time, emailed entries have surpassed hardcopy entries, which finally catches up to the general trend — we’ve been getting more regular submissions by email than hardcopy for years. The total is less than 100 more than last year, but last year was a big year. Here’s the growth rate:

Year / #entries / %change
2006 / 805 / –
2007 / 991 / +23%
2008 / 1160 / +17%
2009 / 1593 / +37%
2010 / 1674 / +5%

I wonder if we’re hitting the glass ceiling when it comes to people entering poetry contests.  Every year there are always more new entrants than there are repeaters — probably 1/3 submit every year and form a baseline, just less than another 1/3 submit more than once but not every year, and just more than 1/3 are names we’ve never seen before.  The fact is, no matter how nice the contest is, it’s no fun to enter over and over again and never win, and the vast majority, of course, won’t win.  So you have to expect a lot of attrition.  That means you have to rely on fresh blood, so to speak, just to maintain the same volume year after year.

1,674 entries x 3.8 poems/entry = 6,361 estimated total poems

And Megan’s already read them all. My job this week is to catch up.  Odds of any one poem making the top 11 on a random draw are 1 in 578.  In other words 0.17%, which once again pretty much mirrors the odds of any single poem from a regular submission getting into Rattle.  Of course, it’s never a random draw, it’s an emotional/intellectual/aesthetic decision.   What one poem moves us the most.  But if it were random, there’s the math.

In a post last month, detailing the stats behind this year’s Rattle Poetry Prize, I made the following statement:

[W]hen you read the winners in December, if the honorable mentions seem no stronger than the rest of the poems in the magazine, and there are a few in the open section that seem even better than the $5,000 prize winner, don’t worry — that’s exactly what should happen, statistically (if we assume the quality of a contest entry is the same as that of a regular submission, which is probably the case). [...] The contest winners won’t necessarily be the best poems in an issue — they’re simply typical of what we always publish.

My reasoning was that publishing 11 out of 6,000 poems gives us the same rate of publication that we see with standard submissions (about 0.2%).  The only unknown variable was the relative quality of the poem-set.  Are contest entries better poems, on average, than regular submissions?

It might seem easy to answer this question at first — the contest has an entry fee, and there’s a lot of money at stake, so of course entrants are going to send their best poems to the contest, right?  But while that certainly would drive quality higher, there are other mitigating factors.  Regular submissions may be sent to other journals simultaneously, whereas in the contest that’s forbidden.  Poems sent to our contest can only be sent to our contest and none other — we tie them up for at least six weeks, and since other magazines’ reply times are slow and irregular, this often means poems people would like to submit have to be held, because they’re still under consideration elsewhere.  What’s more, a big prize draws the weaker writers out of the woodwork — if you’re willing to go through all the hassle and postage for the meager payment of a couple review copies, you probably take this poetry thing pretty seriously.  If it was the $5,000 that caught your eye, that might not always be the case.  It certainly seems like the absolute worst poems we every read are some of the contest entries. All poems are scored 1-10, and there are a disproportionately high number of 1′s.

So that’s why in last month’s post I felt confident saying that the quality of contest entries was probably similar to that of regular submissions.  Contests cut both ways.

Now that we’re (finally) done with all aspects of the 2009 contest, I have to correct the record.

We always have to pick 11 poems to publish, the big winner, and then ten honorable mentions.  No matter what happens, we’re going to publish at least 11 poems from the contest.  So the best way to judge the quality of work received is by looking at the number of additional poems we offered publication — each of these appear in the following summer’s issue.  The idea is that we follow through and offer publication to all the poems that we normally would, regardless of how they were submitted.  After publishing zero additional poems in 2008, we found 19 we wanted to publish this year.  Here are the historical numbers:

Year / additional poems / total publication %
2006 / 7 / 0.42%
2007 / 12 / 0.51%
2008 / 0 / 0.25%
2009 / 19 / 0.49%

So in terms of total publication percentage, the anomalous year was actually 2008 — I have no idea why the entries were so weak last year, but honestly, they were.  We love the winning poem, and there was a solid plateau at the top, but the drop-off was steep — I remember being worried that we might not be able to find a full 11.

With three stable plot points, even with one inexplicable dip, the pattern is clear:  contest entries are indeed a higher quality at the top than regular submissions.  Even in the worst year, we published at a slightly higher rate than our typical 0.2%. Our tastes don’t change; the poems must be better.

So when I said last month that being published in the open section of Rattle was as difficult as winning money in the contest, I was wrong.  The competition in the contest is more fierce than I assumed.  If you crunch the numbers, the 11 winning poems aren’t just typical of what we publish — they’re firmly in the upper third.

There are two reasons I’m announcing the Rattle Poetry Prize numbers a full week later than I did last year.  First, our editorial priorities had to be adjusted to fit with Alan’s travel schedule, as he’s going to be gone for much of September.  But the bigger issue was the volume of submissions we received.  You might be surprised by how long it takes just to log them all in.  Here are the totals:

812 hardcopy entries
781 email entries
1,593 total entries

As you can see from last year’s post, this is 433 more entries than we received last year, and we blew past my goal of 1,350 with ease.  This is more than just a record total, it’s also an incredible and unexpected spike in growth rate:

Year / #entries / %change
2006 / 805 / –
2007 / 991 / +23%
2008 / 1160 / +17%
2009 / 1593 / +37%

What was the secret to this year’s success?  It’s impossible to disentangle the variables.  What’s clear is that the growth was digital.  Email submissions increased by 63%, while hardcopy submissions only rose a modest (and expected) 18%.   So I think it’s safe to assume that we don’t have our new print ads in Poetry magazine to thank, as happy to place them as I was.

A better explanation would be the positive change in our internet profile.  Just 14 months ago, Rattle.com introduced its blog-style format, and began posting a new poem or review every day.  In the time since, traffic has swelled — unique visitors per day have doubled to over 1,000, and page views per day have nearly tripled to 10,000.  As more consumers read Rattle online, our demographic shifts toward a more tech-savvy profile, and email submissions for the first time are nearly matching the hardcopy numbers.

But that’s not the whole story.  I also better-utilized email marketing this year.  In the past, we’ve sent flyers to college English departments, announcing the contest, but this year I sent emails as well, asking administrators to forward the information to their students.  I’ve also learned, from trying to publicize events, that people are natural procrastinators — rather than sending our deadline reminder out with a month to go, I waited until five days before the deadline.  As a result, half of the entries came in the last two days.

So the lesson to be inferred this year is that successfully utilizing technology is far more important than traditional means of advertising (not to mention a fraction of the cost) — which is the gospel I’ve been preaching on this blog for years.

I broke down the revenue situation last year, and you can still do the math for yourself.  The honest truth is, production costs haven’t increased much in the last 12 months, beyond the postage rate hike, which was covered by our slightly higher entry fee.  We made an extra $10,000 and get to use all of it to help offset our annual budget.  My long-term, pipedream goal is to make Rattle a fiscally solvant magazine, something unheard of in the literary world.  We’re not close to that goal, at this point, but we’re closer than we were last year. If we keep growing at this rate, a full year out of the red might actually be plausible at some point before print media disappears altogether.

That’s the good news for Rattle, and I’m not too shy to pat myself on the back.  But the bad news for you, if you entered the contest, is that the competition has gotten even tougher:

1,593 entries x 3.8 poems/entry = 6,053 estimated total poems

Obviously that’s 37% more poems than last year, and your odds of placing in the top 11 in a random draw have fallen to 0.18% (from 0.25% in 2008).  As bad as that sounds, it’s still roughly equal to the 1 in 500 odds of any given poem from a regular submission making it onto the pages of Rattle.

So when you read the winners in December, if the honorable mentions seem no stronger than the rest of the poems in the magazine, and there are a few in the open section that seem even better than the $5,000 prize winner, don’t worry — that’s exactly what should happen, statistically (if we assume the quality of a contest entry is the same as that of a regular submission, which is probably the case).  It depends on the slope of the bell curve, but the odds that the Rattle Poetry Prize winner actually is the best poem in the magazine are something like 1 in 5 (pretending we could find an objective measure).

If that sounds counter-intuitive to you, you’re not alone — it sounds weird to me, too, every time I crunch the numbers.  The contest winners won’t necessarily be the best poems in an issue — they’re simply typical of what we always publish.  So if you happen to have a poem already forthcoming in Rattle you should be kicking yourself for not entering the contest — you really might have won!

One minute ago I will have posted the winners of the 2008 Rattle Poetry Prize.  (I’m writing this before I go to bed on Sunday night, which should explain the unusual verb tense — what is that, pluperfect?)

As I type this, Megan is wading waist-deep in SASEs, which she’s filling with notifications to all of those who didn’t win.  It’s quite a sight.  Each letter is sealed with a bit of regret — I never win anything; I know what it feels like to get the thin envelope in the mail and not even bother reading it.

I don’t think it’s possible to judge a contest honestly without worrying that you’ve made the wrong choice — worrying that you may have missed an amazing poem because you were too tired, or your brain too numbed from the dull poems that happened to precede it.  There’s always the temptation to read through the large stack of poems left over at random, and see if you might come across something good you missed.  And I always give in.

But one thing is certain.  I read the 50-odd semi-finalist entries at least a dozen times each, and Joseph Fasano’s winning poem was the only one that became more enjoyable and moving each time.  That’s a rare thing.  And when we got down the the final three, Alan read each of them aloud in his raspy baritone (think Garrison Keillor, only Alan doesn’t mangle with melodrama), and immediately the decision became unanimous.

More assurance that there’s rhyme to our reason (or reason to our rhyme?):  Two of the honorable mentions, Ted Gilley and Hilary Melton, already have poems appearing in the December issue of Rattle, and another, Douglas Goetsch earned an honorable mention in 2006.

As we were reading these poems, we had no idea who the authors were — we even made a game of guessing gender before we unveiled the winners to ourselves, and performed pitifully.  That we chose the work of poets we’re already publishing demonstrates that, as subjective as our tastes may be, at least those tastes are consistent.  We can pick the needles out of the haystack.  So while I’m sure another team of editors might have chosen differently, I’m confident that we selected the best eleven poems we received, according to our own proclivities.

First off, know that we always keep our promises.  Yesterday afternoon, with Rafael Nadal grunting in the background, we narrowed our 40 “quarter-finalists” down to 19 “semi-finalists” for the Rattle Poetry Prize, so we’re right on schedule to announce the winners on September 15th.  We’d hoped to choose the winner at that meeting, but this year the decision is proving difficult, with no clear-cut favorite, as there has been in years past.  I’ve read through each poem 6 times now, with reads 7 and 8 coming later today.  It’s nearing the point where I could recited them on command, but we’re still unsure which we like best.

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Angie Ledbetter is picking editors’ brains in seven parts over at Roses & Thorns (the blog of Rose & Thorn magazine), and I’m one of the lab rats.  Others include editors from Hayden’s Ferry and Monkeybicycle, Reb Livingston of No Tell Motel, and our old friend (from e.4) John Amen–nine of us in total.

I don’t know how much general readers will be interested in what we have to say, but I personally can’t wait for the subsequent installments.  I’ve never been particularly social with other editors–I avoid book conferences as much as possible, where most mingling takes place, and I didn’t rise through the ranks of other staffs to get here…I kind of came out of left field.  So the truth is, I have no idea what other editors think, and I can only assume our experiences are similar.  I can’t wait to see whether or not that’s really the case.  And I’ve seen the questions coming up: there are some interesting ones.

(I’m definitely going to win the award for worst metaphor.  I’ve already got a nominee in “plague cart” and I’m sure there are more to come.  For some reason, every time I do an interview the metaphor machine whirs to life and I start spewing out the kitchy half-formed comparisons that litter my quotes like lawn art.  See, there I go again.  I don’t really talk like this.)

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On Saturday, I posted the list of book received for review from August, and I’m really hoping someone wants to review John Kinsella’s Divine Comedy.  It’s such a beautiful, thick, expensive book, and the longer it sits on myself the longer I feel like I’m smothering a puppy.  (Damn, maybe I do really talk like this…)

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The cowboy/western issue is closed, but if you’re a kind of desert writer, you should send some work to Phantom Seed.  The call for submissions is here.  I really love collections of poetry that have a cohessive topical focus–themed issues like Runes, themed journals like Alimentum, themed anthologies like Between the Heartbeats.  Phantom Seed fits the bill, and Ruth Nolan is one of those few editors I’ve socialized with, being somewhat local.  I can vouch for her.

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There’s something else I was going to mention, but it’s completely slipped my mind…