Hi everyone, Scott Brick here. Forgive the long period of silence, as I’m sure you’re all desperate to know the results of the Share the Experience contest. As originally laid out, we were supposed to have our winners chosen by this point, but as you may have read, the response we received was literally overwhelming: a staggering 392 entries!

Our judges, the casting people at the audiobook industry’s top publishers, were prepared for only about a quarter of that. So, given the stunning response we received, they’ve just had to work a great deal harder – and take a great deal longer – to listen to everyone’s entries, all in addition to the work they’re regularly paid to do, of course, such as putting out some fairly huge titles over these next few months. (Can anyone say The Da Vinci Code sequel, The Lost Symbol? And that’s just one example.)

The good news is that we’ve lined up several new judges to help out, and ultimately this will benefit all of you who entered, as there will now be a greater, wider array of casting folk listening to your demos. So whereas I’d love to be able to announce our finalists at this point, we’re still waiting on a few of the judges to get back to us. As soon as they do, we’ll post our finalists online (as well as list them in an email like this one), and begin working our way down to our winners.

My thanks to all of you for your interest in the contest, and especially for your patience as it takes longer than anticipated going forward. At first I was spending all my time hounding everyone involved to get done ASAP instead of keeping all of you updated, but it’s obviously frustrating when you’ve spent so much time and effort to enter and then don’t hear anything. That said, I’ll be doing both from now on: nudging our judges AND posting updates whenever possible.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll keep checking the site and our email newsletter, as we’ve got some other announcements coming very soon. I’ve been asked dozens of times over the last few months about the possibility of teaching classes in the LA area, and as it turns out I’ll be doing two classes in September and October. Dates to be announced in the next few days. Thanks for your interest, everyone, I hope you enjoy them.

As always, thanks for listening,

Scott Brick