General rules (applies to both judges and participants)

♢Respect all participants and judges. Be kind and friendly.

♢Give this book a shout-out on your message board.

♢Add this book to your library to get all the updates.

♢You can be both a participant and a judge but not in the same genre/special category.

Participants' rules

♢Follow TheGemmeCommunity and your assigned judge once announced.

♢Your book must have at least 5 chapters published and 3 if it's poetry or a short story collection.

♢You can only submit one book per genre and two books in total. Fill out one form per book. However, the same book can be used for multiple special categories.

♢Don't contact your judges anytime during judging and before the results announcement.

Judges' rules

♢Follow TheGemmeCommunity

♢You must have Discord, Instagram or a working email (Gmail is preferred). 

♢Don't contact the participants before the results are out.

♢You will have 2 weeks to judge the assigned stories. If you need an extension, don't wait until the last day or after the deadline.

♢You can judge up to 2 genres and 2 special categories (4 categories in total).

How it works

Follow the rules and submit your form. 

We will check all forms and reply "accepted" if the form is approved. We will try to answer fast but if we haven't replied within 72 hours, we might have missed the comment. Do tag us under your comment.

Once the spots of a category are full, we will post the assigned judges to the participants and judging will begin. That's when you have to follow your judge. Without payment to the judge, the judge won't complete the judging.

Judges will provide a score based on the rubrics we will provide and a final paragraph with feedback to justify their scoring.

The results will be published whenever the judging of each category ends. That means that we cannot know the order of the results in advance.

There will be 3 winners in each genre and 1 winner in each special category.