book « Robin Writes

Should you enter your book (or poem or short story) in a contest? Like everything else in the book industry, “It depends.” Some questions to ask yourself:

Is the contest well known? Would readers recognize this contest and be more likely to buy my book?
What is the cost? What is the prize?
Does it involve publishing and rights?
Is it a scam?

Take the Newbery Medal, for instance, or the Caldecott Medal; we all remember those from childhood book fairs and libraries. Or the Children’s Choice Book Awards.

The Jane Addams Peace Awards have no entry fee; neither do those mentioned above. This is your first clue on how to avoid a bad contest.

Now, some writers think that winning any contest at all is better than winning nothing. Readers may not know the difference, but fellow authors and others in the book business do know, and they aren’t going to be impressed. That’s not to say you didn’t write a very nice book, maybe it COULD have won a prestigious award.

But just because you were “invited,” it doesn’t mean you should drop everything and enter—and often pay money. It’s been said that you could buy a package of gold stickers for much less, and it would mean as much.

Some contests offer a cash prize, which is always nice, but those generally involve paying an entry fee. Is the cost worth it? Is it a gamble? Should you buy a lottery ticket instead?

Other contests award a publishing contract or inclusion in an anthology. Be very careful of these, and know your rights. Read that contract over and over, or have an attorney look at it. Often, this is nothing but a vanity press, particularly those given out by new or small presses or known offenders in the industry.

And finally, the scam:

When you submit to some contests, that simple entry can sign away your rights and hand them over to the publisher—for how long and what you’re paid are probably two unanswerable questions.

And Lord knows, I gripe enough about vanity presses, but contests don’t always fall into their realm. However, many contests are ostensibly run by third parties, but under the surface, you’ll see they are not. Some contests are run by a publishing house that only includes that house’s books—how much meaning, really, is there in that?

Contest scams in general are noted for high entry fees, a large number of categories, convoluted ownership issues, short timeframe for judging, lack of information about judges, and spam.

What’s a high entry fee? $75.00 or more. Maybe even less, depending. Large number of categories? Again, subjective, but when every possible genre and sub-genre are included, you might be wary. Ownership issues? When a contest is run by one organization, but is connected by ownership to, say, a book review site and/or some type of publisher, that’s suspect.

Some of these will have a deadline of, for example, April 15th, and say they’ll announce winners May 15th. That’s not much time for panel of judges to read all those entries. Besides, who are those judges? Are they readers? Publishers? Agents? Someone in a back room surrounded by books who looks at the covers and tosses them aside?

And finally, spam.

Good grief.

When a company constantly emails, telling me to ENTER NOW! and reminds me of the due date umpteen times, I smell a rat. And most particularly, when I respond, politely, and request they remove me from their mailing list because I’m not interested, I get back things like “obviously [you] know nothing about the publishing industry, because [our] company is very famous and prestigious, blah, blah, blah,” and “we are not scam, we good company.”

Things along those lines. Sometimes, they’re downright rude and insulting and accuse me of all manner of things. But the spam never stops.

Just like vanity presses, if a contest is going to contact you out of the blue, they’re probably also going to take your money for no reason at all. Do your homework. Make sure you enter only legit contests with proven records, and don’t be distracted by their names or claims—but for heaven’s sake, don’t take the word of the contest promoter. And please don’t tout your “accomplishment” all over the Internet.

It’s embarrassing. Go buy some stickers.

Between kid activities and my business and a few other things, I’ve barely had a chance to get down to the farm lately; except yesterday, when I took my mom down to see the place. She’s visiting from Colorado, and won’t be back until fall at least, so we took the opportunity while we had it. It was a quick trip, which means I didn’t actually do any work . . .

However, my husband has been on the job—yesterday, he put in a new water heater and last weekend he spotlessly cleaned the bathroom and went over the kitchen again. So we’re kinda civilized now.

The downside of this is that things are getting a little crazy, and by “crazy,” I mean disorganized. Bless his heart, he’s a really hard worker and can do ANYTHING, but he tends to get off-track a little. So my immediate goal is to get a few things finished and organized, like the rest of the trash around the edges of the yard, the interim storage in the closet, and the odds and ends sitting around on the deck and in the kitchen.

THEN I can focus on what needs to be done.

Complicating things a bit is that the kid got a job and it’s mostly weekends. That’s going to slow us down for a few weeks, until school is out for the summer, but after that we can adjust. Of course, it might limit any assistance, as most people I know will be working during the week, but we’ll figure it out. And, too, the coming weekend has a rainy forecast . . . for now.

My short-term goal is to work on the garden area. Trim, pick up junk, mow, plow, plant. In that order, of course. And soon. My cabbage plants are crying for a new home.

And after that, we’ve got to get the campsite built out. No, it’s still not done, but to be fair, we had a heck of a time choosing the location. And then, too, our plans were a little ambitious that first weekend. But, we have the materials, so there’s that. Hmmm. This kind of falls under the “get stuff finished!” headline.

You know, when we started this venture, we’d been thinking about everything for quite some time; and then we figured we’d find a place in a few months and have some time over the winter to get started on improvements. As it turned out, we didn’t close until spring, about 14 months before our targeted moving date, plus we had a head start with the house and barn and utilities already being on site.

But.

There’s a lot of outside stuff to do, and come fall, we’ll be working inside, moving walls and re-doing others, and adding to the kitchen and maybe some work on the bathroom. It’s not critical that these things are done before we move in, but it sure would be easier to have the remodel finished without furniture and other “stuff” in the way.

A year seemed like a long time—but the clock is ticking!