How low-tech can you go?

Now I'll get back to assuring you that we don’t have any nefarious schemes up our sleeves here.... A lot of people enter the InnermoonLit contests, and yes, we collect their email addresses. But we have never sold nor will we ever sell our mailing list. In fact, we really only compile a mailing list so that we can send out email notifications with the contest results. We don’t bombard our contestants with spam. Need proof? Behold the InnermoonLit mailing list. (Hopefully from this angle, actual addresses are illegible.)




Don’t laugh. I’m sure there’s some way to tell Brian’s computer to automatically compile email addresses off the entry forms, but I don’t know what it is. Heck, I was amazed I was able to figure out how to create a working online form; I felt no need to press my luck and try to get fancy.

I have this fear of losing entrants’ addresses and of them never hearing anything back from us and having them feel like they’d thrown their work into a silent, bottomless abyss. So I use this snazzy book to keep a tally of entries for each contest, then I have an alphabetical list of addresses from all the contests in a Word file that gets copied and pasted into the BCC field at newsletter time.

Rest assured, if you’ve entered one of the InnermoonLit contests or plan to in the future, we will not abuse your address--or do you harm in any other way, for that matter. We are streamlining the newsletter, in fact, so from now on you will just get two brief emails from Brian a year stating that the contest results are available and providing a link to the winners’ page.

We hope you’ll click the link and spend a moment giving mental props to the winning authors (or even checking out their other work if they’re published). But of course that’s optional.

If you happened not to have won and, because of that, your hands are clenched into tight fists of fury and indignation to the point where extension of the index finger into link-clicking position is a physical impossibility, you are free to ignore or delete these biannual messages. Unsubscription is always an option, but that doesn’t involve some automated process the likes of which is used to unsubscribe from the J. Crew mailing list or perhaps the National Well Drillers’ listserv. It just means I’ll look through my big pretty book, draw a line through that addie, and delete it from my Word file. No strings, no catches, no worries.