Just a quick update for those who submitted elevator pitch entries for our New Year contest:

1. I was able to get two members of the AFW team to agree to be judges. Clint Osterholz and Yolander Prinzel will help in judging the contest.

2. Later today or tomorrow I’ll assemble all valid submissions (those coming in by 11:59pm eastern on December 31st) into a single document and sending it to the judges. Entrant names will not be included on that submission page to avoid any potential for personal bias (I’ll be the only one with access to who submitted what), and I’ll use a random number generator to determine the order the entries are placed on that page. I think that’s about as fair as things can get.

3. Each of the three judges will choose their top five entries and send them to me ranked in order from their 1st pick to their 5th pick.

4. On Friday of this week I’ll assign point values to those picks — 5 points for a first place pick, 4 points for a second place pick, etc. Then I’ll total the points for each entry to determine our three winners.

5. On Monday of next week I’ll publicly announce the winners on this blog, including sharing the winning elevator pitch entries. At that time, I’ll contact the winners privately at the email addresses they sent their submissions from to confirm their mailing addresses for the books and their Paypal addresses for the cash prizes.

I’d like to thank everyone who submitted an elevator pitch during the contest, and I hope that you found it to be a worthwhile exercise whether or not your pitch is chosen. I’d also like to thank Linda Formichelli and Peter Bowerman for getting us autographed copies of their books (and Peter’s e-book collection for the first place winner).