Miss Snark mentions gather.com novel contest

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WackAMole

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Ok so, I was getting my daily dose of Snark this morning, and I see her blog about the novel contest at Gather.com. Looks interesting. Who's gonna try it and what do you all think of it?
 

PeeDee

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How very interesting. I'll be curious to see what other people around here have to say about this.
 

PeeDee

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It's not "too slow," it's "less competition."

I almost consider entering. It could be fun.
 

Uncarved

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And how about this question :
Does Publish America count as self-publishing/vanity press?


Doug J. commented Jan 11, 2007




errrrr, YES YES YES.


I mean it states you can have a previously published full length book (excluding vanity and self pubbed books) so I assumed I'm out, even though my books were nonfiction and this is fiction. The PubAm people can get in through this vanity loophole.
 

PeeDee

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PA isn't even a vanity press. It's a gulag. It's a hangman's platform, and here's a pretty noose, and would you like the lever to pull? Here you are. Easy does it. There. Wasn't that nice?
 

PeeDee

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So you're hesitant, but not actively against it.

Hm.

I admit, I'm leaning toward sending them a chapter. I love a good competition.

I'm sorry to say, I know very little about S&S's boilerplate publishing contract. Is it bad? Is accepting it at face value the equivalent of indentured servitude? I know nothing on this.
 

katiemac

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I admit, I'm leaning toward sending them a chapter. I love a good competition.

I'm sorry to say, I know very little about S&S's boilerplate publishing contract. Is it bad? Is accepting it at face value the equivalent of indentured servitude? I know nothing on this.

I'm not sure I completely understand, though. It sounds like you send them the entire manuscript, but they'll only post the first three chapters for voting.

Sounds a little weird, actually. But I don't have a full, so I wouldn't enter anyway.
 

WackAMole

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I'm thinking about it. What would it hurt? I have a couple fulls actually, might as well get em out there, though from the different blogs I have read there's a lot of skepticism about this.
 

PeeDee

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The impression I got was you send 'em chapter one. In the second round, you send 'em chapter two. Third round, chapter three. Fourth round, whole manuscript. Then decision.

Beats me.

Probably, what I'll do is this neat trick where I barrage people with queries until someone buys it and publishes it that way.
 

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I'm hesitant mostly because I think contests are a waste of time. Among all the other things that can be said about them, the most important (IMO) is that they don't test your viability in the marketplace. Only submitting for publication does that. (A contest that offers publication as the prize doesn't truly test your viability either, because it's a closed pool of applicants. Offering publication to the winnner is not like selecting a manuscript on its own merits.)

I've never seen an S&S contract, but I assume its boilerplate is fairly similar to the boilerplate of other major publishers. No, it's not bad--certainly not in the way that contracts from amateur micropresses and scam publishers can be bad--but it's weighted to the publisher's advantage, and a good agent would do all s/he could to negotiate it so that things were more to the writer's advantage--for instance, holding on to certain subrights, or making the publisher agree to re-negotiate your compensation if it exercises certain subrights itself rather than licensing them.

The contest rules say that the winner must agree to sign S&S's standard contract, and do it within 5 days of receipt, which I imagine is S&S's effort to cut down on the possibility that the winner might try to negotiate him/herself, or use the contract to find an agent to negotiate. Even so, you might be able to work with them to change some things--it would be worth a try.

Edited to add: don't rely on impressions (most of you who've posted so far are wrong about the procedural details), or even on what people like Miss Snark and I say. Go to the contest itself and read the rules word by word. That's the only way you'll properly understand what you're getting into.

- Victoria
 
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PeeDee

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Winning publication contests (much like winning American Idol) always struck me as....cheating, I guess. You got to where everyone else is going, but they're walking and you took the taxi.

The masochist in me says that I'll just keep doing the Query Jitterbug. I think I'd be happier in the long run than saying "I won a contest what got me published."

Edited to reply to Victoria's edited (this is just silly): I read what they had on their site before I read your blog entry. I haven't read Miss Snark's take on it, I don't wander over there very often. I read it and go "neat," but I'm not sure I go any further than that.
 

Julie Worth

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PeeDee said:
The impression I got was you send 'em chapter one. In the second round, you send 'em chapter two. Third round, chapter three. Fourth round, whole manuscript. Then decision.

No, you send the entire ms plus the first three chapters in a separate file. They'll then post those first three chapters (2-10k words total) for 14 days so that all your buddies there can vote for it...or at least that's the worry expressed in the comments--that it's a popularity contest.
 

skelly

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I entered the short story contest, never saw my story posted, couldn't contact whom-the-hell-ever is in charge, despised the manner in which they posted stories (once you drop off page one, your basically done ... oh, wait ... the people on page one when they broke for the holidays stayed there for nearly four days! Yay for them!), and saw nothing but complaints about the contract from people on this board (somewhere). I think I'll skip it.
 

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U.S. publisher plans fan-based contest to choose first-time novelists

In a kind of Peoples' Choice Awards for the literary set, New York publisher Simon & Schuster plans to choose first-time authors in a contest voted on by online fans.

The announcement of the First Chapters Writing Competition was made Wednesday, just two days after the cancellation of the Sobol Prize for unpublished writers, also backed by Simon & Schuster.

Is there a thread going on this already? If not opinions?
 

paprikapink

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Victoria Strauss covers this pretty thoroughly in her blog. She provides a link in her post on the thread about the gather.com contest, which is the same as this one.
 

The Lady

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I can't see what's in it for the readers. Who on earth is going to read and mull over 201 plus first chapters. I wouldn't. No one will. What if there's a thousand entries. It's craaazzy. Are they seriously going to post them all? I reckon it's a popularity contest, at least in the early stages.

Oh well, if that be the case. Who ever pms me first and promises me loads of rep points from now till eternity will get my vote. I'm sure all your writing is equally good so consider this a speed contest. Bear in mind though, I have a fondness for fantasy so in the event of two pms coming in at the same time, genre will decide.
 

TwentyFour

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The thread is listed under Novel Writing.
 

PeeDee

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Three threads for something that everyone's going "Well, I just don't know" about. Wow. :)
 

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Plus, they say you can't have the MS in circulation for publication elsewhere. Therefore if you have queries or partials out there, you're out. I'd like to know if you can pull it from the contest if you get an offer for it elsewhere.

Romance Junkies had a similar contest a few months ago, but they had special software in place that prevented people from voting multiple times, even from different email addresses. Plus, they didn't want you advertising yourself on the net to get people to vote for you.

The other difference was that you didn't have to sign up to be a member of the site in order to vote.
 
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