Last year, I submitted Genesis Earth to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest and made it to the quarter-finals. I’m pretty sure I could do at least that well this year, but after reading the contest rules, I’ve decided not to participate.
Why? Because of this:
5. GRANT OF RIGHTS. By submitting an Entry and if you are selected as a Quarter-Finalist or Semi-Finalist, you grant Penguin the exclusive first publication rights to your Entry. If you are selected as a Quarter Finalist, Penguin’s exclusive first publication rights to your Entry terminate when you are eliminated from the Contest (unless you are selected as a Semi-Finalist); and if you are selected as a Semi-Finalist, Penguin’s exclusive first publishing Rights to your Entry terminate after June 30, 2012.
But mostly because of this:
A. Grand Prize. If you are selected as the Winner in a category, you will receive one of two Grand Prizes each consisting of a full publishing contract with Penguin to market and distribute your Manuscript as a published book…you may not negotiate the publishing contract with Penguin, and you must sign it “as is” upon receipt of the executable contract.
The language is a little unclear as to whether the grand prize winner can elect to turn down the publishing contract, but considering how merely submitting to the contest constitutes a grant of publication rights, I’m guessing no.
So why is this a big deal? Because it gives the writer no room to negotiate. Suppose the boilerplate contract is unfavorable when it comes to rights reversion, non-compete clauses, or derivative works. Penguin could conceivably retain the rights to my book indefinitely, even if I’m earning less than $10 a year on it. With a non-compete clause, they could forbid me from writing or publishing any other books. Even worse, they could conceivably buy up rights to the world or the characters, making it impossible for me to write any other books in my own series without their approval.
But even if none of those unfavorable terms are in the contract, the standard royalty for erights is 25% of net, not gross. For those of you who know the difference between net and gross, that’s a red flag in itself, but even supposing Penguin does pay me the full 25% of the 70% it receives from Amazon, that comes to only 17.5% of the cover price. Right now I’m getting 70%. Is it really worth it?
I checked the sales rankings for the last three years of ABNA winners, and they aren’t all that great. The ebook versions for the 2010 winners have a slightly better ranking than mine, but they can’t be selling more than a couple of books a day. At the prohibitively high price of $9.99, that’s $.30 less per unit than what I’m earning for Genesis Earth at $2.99. And the 2009 winners? Their sales rankings are abysmal. Whatever Penguin did to market those books, it either didn’t work or they’ve given up and moved on to other things.
Now, I don’t expect to win the grand prize even if I submit to this contest. Most of the previous winning novels are either literary, mystery, or mainstream YA–no science fiction. Even so, by submitting to this contest, I would not be able to negotiate a publication contract with any other publisher until my book is eliminated. That’s a headache I could do without. And as for the consolation prizes, if this year’s Publisher’s Weekly reviewer is anything like last year’s, I already know what she’ll say: “science fiction is garbage.”
So yeah, I won’t be submitting to this year’s ABNA contest. If I win, I’m forced to sign a contract that I haven’t seen and have no power to change, and if I lose, I get an unnecessary hassle for all my time and effort. Thanks but no thanks.
Joe, thanks for a very informative post. The information about what the writer might giving away and how the winners didn’t sell that well to begin with is very useful. Good luck with your writing! — Cara O’Sullivan
To be fair, I have no access to the numbers for those past winners. All I have to go on is their current sales rankings, which is only a snapshot of how they’re selling right now. I imagine when the books were first released, they sold a fair amount–but now that a couple of years have passed, they aren’t doing that much better than I’m doing on my own.
Point is, these books are midlisters. $15,000 is a midlist advance, and based on the sales ranking, it appears that they’re getting a midlister marketing push–which is to say, they aren’t getting much of a push at all.
That’s why I’ve had no desire to submit at all.
Good call, Joe. Especially given Penguin’s recent “self-publishing” pseudo-scam.
Yeah man, contests are bull. There’s a writing contest run by the main public radio here in Canada that I’d love to enter, but it’s got a $25 entry fee. GET THEE HENCE, FIENDS.
GET THEE HENCE, FIENDS.
lol!