I was surprised to see that the Merriweathers were actually being instituted. I'd heard some discussion about it a year ago, but nothing since, so I assumed that the logistics were too difficult to overcome.
However, I thought I'd add some comments based on my experience on the contest circuit this past year.
1. I've never known a judge by name--except one who pretty much panned my entry but had such insightful comments on the review sheet that I sent an email to her through the contest coordinator. To my surprise, she shed her cloak of anonymity and we corresponded until I was very clear on what she was looking for in my entry and how I needed to provide it. And she was right. If I don't correct it, the problem I had could very well keep me from publishing that book.
2. The one piece of information I had about each judge was whether he/she was a published writer in romantic fiction, published in other genres, an unpublished award winner (that would equate to our Kerth winners), or simply an unpublished writer. So perhaps these judges will be identified as award winners, fanfic writers, or fanfic readers.
3. I may be a multiple-Kerth winner in folcdom, but I'm a very little fish (is there something smaller than minnow?
) in the world of aspiring novelists, so when I entered contests, it was never with the expectation of winning. The only thing I was interested in was a critique of my work based on criteria similar to what is being used for the Merriweathers. And it was the quality of the critique that determined whether I thought the judge was any good or not. Generally, the people who scored me the highest tended not to provide much by way of a specific critique. On the other hand, some of the people who scored me lower provided wonderful critiques which have helped me improve my writing.
For me, that's the true value of a contest like the Merriweathers.Because of that, I would recommend that the Merriweather organizers not accept previously published stories. While most of you are concerned about judges recognizing the stories and being too biased in their judging, I think the main issue is that there is no purpose in critiqueing a work that the author has no desire to change or rewrite. Since only one person can win in any month's contest, that would mean all the other entrants who submitted already published work would receive nothing of value for their efforts.
BTW, the way the various RWA chapters manage to keep from overwhelming their judges is by putting a limit on the number of submissions in a particular category: the first 25 or 50 or whatever will be judged. The on-line chapter I belong to also holds an entirely electronic contest. All submissions are sent as email attachments to the contest coordinator who strips off identifying marks from the email and sends the entries to the judges who are identified only by a number. So in my chapter, my chapter-mates are the ones who are judging my work, and there are only 200 of us. The only requirement is that judges not judge a category that they have entered or judge an entry from one of their critique partners (BRs). From the website, it looks like the Merriweather committee is using the same practice.
Do different judges give different scores? You betcha! Out of 120 points, I might score from 91 to 115 (that's 76% to 96%), and I've heard of much wider ranges. I might have one judge who says I have a real storyteller's voice and another who says my writing is so bland that she can't identify my voice at all. One can't wait to see the book in print while another recommends beginning writing courses.
It's an entirely different kind of contest than the Kerths. Despite the obvious competition from using performance-based scoring, this kind of contest is less about who wrote the story that the most people liked best than about discovering what works in your writing and what might help you write a stronger story. If that's the kind of information you would like to have, then the Merriweathers are for you. Otherwise, don't worry about it and stick with the Kerths.
