This year’s Raymond Carver Short Story Contest had a near record-breaking number of submissions, far outpacing last year’s total of 541. (We’ll release final numbers when we announce the winners.) We did our usual advertising, but we know a lot of awareness of the contest stemmed from those promoting us through no asking on our part. We’d like to thank these organizations:

• Be-A-Better-Writer.com with Pearl Luke. A handy resource site offering advice, tips, and other services to help improve your creative writing. They listed our contest on their Creative Writing Contests page.

• TheReviewReview.com. Though we had a paid ad for one month they continued to advertise and promote the contest through Twitter. Thanks!

• DailyWritingTips.com. This site listed us in their “25 Writing Contests You Should Enter” feature.

• FreelanceWriting.com. Another helpful writer site that listed us in their list of Writing Competitions.

There were also some individuals that promoted us through blogs and Twitter and we thank you for that! Every bit of outreach means a lot to us as sometimes the hardest part of being a lit mag is just getting on people’s radars. There’s no better advertising than word-of-mouth.

We’ll be busy reading contest entries for the rest of the month and preparing our “fall surprise.” We’ll keep you updated as we get closer to announcing the winners. Thanks for your patience!