Goodbye 1000 Poems Celebration Contest

It has been an interesting experiment/experience running the contest, which ran from December 12 2009 to January 31, 2010.

The idea was to get some substantial feedback from my readers.

The result was as follows:
I received one email through the entry form from a reader who legitimately requested that I edit his book of poetry, and something like thirty spam messages per day. Over the course of the contest, that amounted to about 1500 spam messages.

I think I'll have to conclude that the prizes (signed, hard copies of my work and podcasts by request) were not commensurate with the task of creating an entry.

The other element of my expectations, that of attracting more readers to my poetry and more listeners to my podcasts, seems to have worked. Poetry readership and podcast listenership are up substantially.

Now: I wonder if, now that I have closed the entry form, the spamming will stop.