[Contest] Golden Book Awards

The things to consider before entering a competition like this are:

1. Have you ever heard of the Golden Book Awards before receiving/seeing the spam? If you can't name at least one winner, then it's probably not worth entering.

2. For any competition to have worth, the judges should be identifiable up front and should preferably be known names. Saying that your judges are "industry professionals" is a meaningless statement unless you can actually say who they are and what their expertise is. Advertising a competition when the judges are not already in place is not a heartening sign.

3. How much is the entry fee? Here the $125 is steep and that's only for entry into one category. The fact that they're charging an extra $100 for each additional category suggests sharp practice.

4. Where competitions/awards carry weight in the publishing industry, you can expect your publisher to be putting your book forward as a matter of course. The fact that the entry rules for this competition envisage authors putting themselves forward is not a good sign because it suggests they're targeting and looking at self-published/vanity published authors rather than the commercial published industry.

5. What are the judging criteria? The fact that here the competition rules have to point out the need for good spelling and grammar is again a sign that it's targeting the self/vanity published and is not a good sign.

6. Who is the competition open to? Many competitions are restricted to books published in certain territories or languages within a set period of time. This competition is open to any English published book from "late 2009" (no guidelines as to what this is) or 2010. It's also, critically, open to unpublished manuscripts - further devaluing the worth of the competition.

7. What are the categories? Most competitions will have restricted criteria for what they will consider (e.g. the Hugos will look at SF and F, the Booker primarily looks at works of literary fiction). The Golden Book Awards has 20 categories that basically cover every genre and subject, including such niche areas as "dystopian" (which I would have thought comes under science fiction or possibly fantasy), "western" and "war and military".

8. What's the prize? Ideally, a competition/award should carry either a cash prize or prestige within the writing/publishing community that it represents. For example, the Booker carries a £50,000 prize. Winning a Costa category will earn you £5,000 (and £25,000 if you're the overall winner). Winning the Bram Stoker will mean you're recognised by the horror community. Winning the World Fantasy Award will mean you're recognised in the fantasy comunity. The Golden Book Awards (in return for your $125 minimum entry fee) give you a sticker and publicity on the website that they've had to spam to emails/message boards. That doesn't strike me as a good return for the outlay.

All in all, I don't think there's anything here that makes it worth the time, effort or cash.

MM