A shelf for the manuscripts you collect, judge, and publish.
For literary contests, playwriting prizes, and fiction and poetry competitions that have outgrown email attachments.
Built from running playwriting contests since 2018
A contest run over email ends up with submissions spread across inboxes, judges unsure who is reading what, and writers waiting on status updates that someone has to send by hand.
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Submissions scattered across inboxes
Email attachments, Drive links, and the occasional envelope, with no single list of what came in.
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Judges are hard to coordinate
Nobody is sure who is reading which script, or when the reviews are due.
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No view of review progress
You can't tell who is behind until the deadline is close.
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Writing to writers is manual
Every status update is an email someone writes by hand.
What a shelf does.
An entry page for writers
Writers submit through your shelf's entry page, and every entry lands on one list.
Assigning judges
Assign manuscripts to judges one at a time or in batches, set the review deadline, and see how the reading is spread.
Review progress
See who has finished, who hasn't, and the scores as they come in.
Updates for writers
Writers can be emailed automatically when their entry's status changes, and you can send updates from TextShelf.
Annotation on the manuscript
Judges highlight and comment on the script and fill in their scores beside it.
We built it to run our own contest.
TextShelf started in 2018 with an annual playwriting contest that drew hundreds of scripts from writers around the world. We needed a better way to assign readers, keep track of entries, and write back to playwrights. The same shelf now works for fiction and poetry contests, literary magazine submissions, and writing fellowships.
Free — run a small call
100 submissions a year, 5 readers per shelf, unlimited shelves. The reading room and the free Mac app.
Standard — a program, a journal, a studio
Up to 1,000 submissions a year. Unlimited shelves and readers. 25 GB storage. Exports and reporting. Billed once a year.
Organization — several programs
Up to 5,000 submissions a year. Custom branding, your own storage bucket, priority support. Billed once a year.
Priced by the submissions you take in each year. Nonprofit discounts on request; for larger programs and institutions, talk to us.