Sunday, September 16, 2012

What are you up against? #CAGI

OK, wow! This has been an interesting week. Well, first of all, if you're an aspiring writer, and you're not already following CAGI, FOLLOW #CAGI, Goddammit!

And it goes without saying that we are ever Ever EVER so grateful for Cupid for hosting this contest, and to all the wonderful judges for all their hard work. And picking us as one of the finalists. Woot!

Anyways, as we've mentioned before, in REAL life, we're boring engineers. But besides all the free pocket protectors (which ARE pretty awesome, we have to admit!), this career of ours gives us this weird, innate desire to analyze the ever loving shit out of everything. Which we're going to do now. Whether you like it or not. All over your face.

Now, there's going to be charts below. So if you don't like charts, stop reading now. And if you have NO idea what I'm talking about with all this CAGI madness, go to those links up top. None of this will make sense if you don't.

So, as a brief recap, there were 100 original entries. Each entry got sorted into a bucket, each bucket being judged by a judge. Of each bucket, they were allowed to pick 4 entries to go to the finalist round, for a grand total of 40 finalists. Here's how they chose.




Hmmm...one judge only picked 3 out of her allotment of 4. That's a bit weird, but no time to dwell! We're moving on!

What kind of entries made it? Well, let's see, shall we?


Wow! Young Adult is just MURDERING the other entries, snagging 59% of the finalist spots. Middle Grade is coming up second with 31%, and New Adult and Adult are trailing far behind. Looks like YA will be where it's at this contest!

But age group is only part of the picture. After all, YA can be mystery, scifi, fantasy, etc. What kind of genres are we looking at? Well, I don't know! Let's ask the chart!



Hmm, the two biggest genres seem to be fantasy and contemporary, but there are a lot of little subgenres adding quite a bit of flavor to this batch of finalists, as evidenced by that happy little rainbow in the top left corner. Go diversity! Go rainbow!

Now, what if we could see what kinds of stories each judge picked? Wouldn't that be awesome? Wouldn't that be magical? Well, BAM!


Interesting stuff here. YA is clearly the winner here, with judges Elizabeth and Jennifer picking EXCLUSIVELY YA. Now, this may be because the entries they got to judge were predominately YA, but who knows? Interesting right?

And finally, genre breakdown by judge.



This one's in 3D and slighty askew because THAT'S JUST HOW I ROLL BITCHES!

Ahem, anyhoo...

Because of the diversity of the entries it just looks like a Benetton ad. Which is good. The judges in this round seemed to go into the first round with an open mind for all genres, and seemed to display no significant bias towards any specific genre. So YAY for the judges!

So yeah, that was my extremely dorky, extremely nerdy statistical analysis of my fellow CAGI finalists. And again, if you're not already following the contest, check it out here. Good luck to everyone. Go get those agents, y'all!

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