I was looking at the winners of past RWA contest like the Golden Heart, and some from the regional chapters. All the winners are women. Now, no where in the rules does it say you have to be female, so I assume males can enter. Do males ever win such contest? Can they? Does being a male make it harder for you to win such a contest? If so, should I have my sister enter my novel in the contest for me? Is that illegal?
I don't see what gender has to do with it but I have found that women are usually better at portraying romance and getting the right words down for that sort of stuff. Now I'm not saying that is always the case because there are good male romance authors too. I say you should enter the competition as yourself, after all, it should just be the writing that is judged and not the gender... right?
If it were a gender contest, I don't think they'd be measuring writing skills so much as other things.
Gender is irrelevant. Someone once told me about a writing context where judges were not allowed to know anything about the writers until after they had selected a winner. The story that won was about a black woman set during times of slavery. The person that wrote it was a man who couldn't have been any whiter. You'd probably be surprized to see how many pennames are used by Harlequin writers.
I do know that some major romance writers are men, but that they use female pen names. The perception is that it is a women's genre, so authors tend to uphold that image.
From Romance Industry statistics from Romance writers of America Interesting. Sorry. I guess that's a little off topic, but I read this and thought "I wonder how many men read romance novels."
On the current bestselling romance list, three of the top ten that I know of are authored by men. For contests, the thing to be worried about is the quality of the writing and a thorough understanding of the genre. If the writing is good and has the elements of a romance novel, you can be a three-headed hermaphrodite and still win.
This is exactly why a good writing contest does not allow the judges to know anything about the authors before they select a winner. Everyone has biases and, try as we might to prevent it, we do let them get in the way sometimes.
When I was one of the judges in a local contest we got manuscripts with only a contestant number on them. So for all we knew, one or more of them might have been written by the three-headed hermaphrodite that Cog is so eager to see.
I was reading the rules of the Golden Heart Contest, and it says you can put your name on the header of your manuscript, but the chapter house contests' rules said you absolutely cannot put your name anywhere. I wonder why you can on the Golden Heart Contest. I guess for the other contests it wouldn't matter if you are a male because the judges will not see your name. I also wonder if an editor at a publishing house might skip over a manuscipt if she sees a guy's name.
For contests there will be more than one judge, and a name in a header will be blacked out on the copies the judges get. If the editor thing really bothers you just use J. Doe instead of John Doe. Problem solved.
