apologies for the length of the reply
Wow, I feel like I am going to be a long time answering this one.
I am going to mix up the order of the answers a bit here, as I feel some factually incorrect comments need addressing first.
Our terms and conditions clearly state that copyright of the work remains with the author. On every page containing work posted by one of our members, this is again stated at the bottom of the page. May I say again. at the bottom of every page of member content, it states that the author owns the rights. We are a very open group, if you have suggestions for other places to display this, we would love to hear from you. However, up until now, the bottom of every member content page and the terms has been enough.
Now, about the flash competition. We run regular competitions, mostly bi monthly. The previous one was poetry. As we have run our community for years we have some knowledge of what new and up and coming writers want. We learn more everyday, but feel we have some knowledge. One thing we are aware of is that new writers often find submitting their writing, in the early days, a bit of a hurdle. This has been the feedback we have received. Other feedback we have received is that what our members, many of whom are up and coming and very talented, want the most from a writing community is publishing opportunities. We happen to think they are right, publishing credits, in our humble opinion, will help, rather than work against, capturing the interest of a prospective agent. So we (Alan Emmins, Chris Ramsden & Sean Merrigan, the EditRED founders) sat down and wondered what we could do, if anything, to bridge this gap. We certainly don't have time to field submissions for a publication and I can't imagine any publication wanting to hand over such a job, their selection speaks about who they are and what they do. At the same time, we ran a zine for 4 years. We published our first hardcopy anthology last year. We know something about handling submissions too.
During this thought process it occurred to us, through our last competition, that we actually read a huge amount of submissions. For the poetry competition we read 500 poems, produced a short list of ten and then awarded $100 to the overall winner. We sat there feeling it was a shame there was no reward for the other 9 writers on the short list. This married perfectly with our idea about helping our members actually get published. So we emailed the 10 short listed writers and asked them how they would feel about us pitching their poems, promoted as the best of a batch of 500, to zines and journals that we have known and enjoyed in the past, or new ones that we thought looked like they could really stand out, or whose editors we knew. EVERY single writer came back (all were previously published) saying they thought it was a great idea, they supported it, welcomed it and encouraged it. We then approached, as a trial, a new journal called 34th Parallel, that we had already been talking to about announcing them in our forum. We had known the founders of this journal for more than 12 months. We asked them how they would feel about looking at the short list, they said yes, we mailed the poems and that journal, 5 days later, mailed us back selecting 7 poems. I then had the pleasure of emailing the selected poets. In my email I shared the good news and gave them the email address of the editor they should now contact. That was it, I had no more to do with it. We were very happy. The selected writers were very happy. The journal was very happy. As a parting note to this particular experience, over 50% of the poets we pitched were not paying members of EditRED.
Based on this success, we would like to do this with all our competitions. We are reading the content anyway, so if we can pull out the top pieces and help get them published, great. We decided to give this idea a name, 'Edit Rep'. In the about us section on our site it says, 'it's early days for Edit Rep...'. It is. This is something we are trying. We hope to place work. The idea is that eventually we will have a list of maybe 20 zines and publications, who we will list as part of the program, who will look at our short lists and consider them for publication. When talking to publications we are pointing out that we are reading a lot of content to pull our the top percentage, this is a huge saving on time. Having once edited a zine for 3 years, I know the value of this.
We do use MySpace to promote our site, like 1000's of others. We send friend requests to writers who might be interested in our site as a member or who might be able to offer valuable feedback. We also use myspace to promote individual competitions.
Our site has a free membership that allows members to interact with other writers, enter competitions, submit to our books, post their work AND RETAIN ALL RIGHTS TO THEIR WORK. It is true there are upgraded packages that offer extra features, these packages that bring income to our site are where the money comes from to pay programmers, publish a yearly anthology AND run competitions, as opposed to 'thin air'. That said, a $100 prize, being so little, hardly draws suspicion.
The people behind EditRED, myself, Alan Emmins, Chris Ramsden and Sean Merrigan all have backgrounds in writing. Our bios are easily available on EditRED. You may want to know what we know about submitting for publication? I have been a freelance journalist for 8 years, this is how I make my living. I have written for the New York Post, Stern, Daily News, Playboy, Politiken (yes we are based in Denmark, though of English nationality) and my books are published traditionally in Japan and the UK. I have submitted a few things over the years.
All of this information is easily available and has always been, on EditRED.com.
As a parting comment I want to say that a forum like this one here holds incredible value. It also holds incredible responsibility. I feel you owe it not only to those that read and those who partake in this forum, but to those who find themselves as your subjects, to be fair and factual. Posting assumptions without taking a minute to see if your assumptions have any grounds, for me, dilutes what should be a credible and valuable forum. It would have taken little more time to look at our site, google it, browse the posts in the our forum for validity, than it took to start this thread. But to actually go to our site, skim it and then report incorrectly that we (in secret) retain the rights to work posted or entered into a competition is wholly irresponsible.
I love the web, I love it as an open source of information. I know I will regret this reply for how personally I taken the above posts. But it is impossible no to take things personally. EditRED takes up most of my time, as it does for Chris and Sean. None of us have ever taken a cent for ourselves. Every penny goes back into the site. Sure, one day we would love to take a salary, so that we could invest even more time into it and really push the bounds of what an on-line community can do for writers. There is only one reason we are still here, with no financial reward, several years down the line.
If anybody needs wants any more validation, I would suggest speaking to the members, they are the best judges. If you want to post more questions here, or email me directly ( alan 'AT' editred.com ) I will not only answer as best I can, I promise to take a deep breath and not take things so personally.
Kind Regards
Alan Emmins
http://www.editred.com/Alan_Emmins
http://www.myspace.com/emmins
http://www.alanemmins.com