{"id":6622,"date":"2011-12-07T10:34:10","date_gmt":"2011-12-07T17:34:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/?p=6622"},"modified":"2011-12-07T14:45:33","modified_gmt":"2011-12-07T21:45:33","slug":"why-im-not-submitting-to-the-2012-amazon-breakthrough-novel-award","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/why-im-not-submitting-to-the-2012-amazon-breakthrough-novel-award\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I’m not submitting to the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Last year, I submitted Genesis Earth<\/strong> to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award<\/a> contest and made it to the quarter-finals.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Why? Because of this:<\/p>\n

5. GRANT OF RIGHTS.<\/strong> 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\u2019s 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\u2019s exclusive first publishing Rights to your Entry terminate after June 30, 2012.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

But mostly because of this:<\/p>\n

A. Grand Prize.<\/strong> 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 \u201cas is\u201d upon receipt of the executable contract<\/em>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

So why is this a big deal?\u00a0 Because it gives the writer no room to negotiate.\u00a0 Suppose the boilerplate contract is unfavorable when it comes to rights reversion, non-compete clauses, or derivative works.\u00a0 Penguin could conceivably retain the rights to my book indefinitely, even if I’m earning less than $10 a year on it.\u00a0 With a non-compete clause, they could forbid me from writing or publishing any other books.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

But even if none of those unfavorable terms are in the contract, the standard royalty for erights is 25% of net, not<\/em> gross.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Right now I’m getting 70%.\u00a0 Is it really worth it?<\/p>\n

I checked the sales rankings for the last three years of ABNA winners, and they aren’t all that great.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 At the prohibitively high price of $9.99, that’s $.30 less per unit than what I’m earning for Genesis Earth<\/strong> at $2.99.\u00a0 And the 2009 winners?\u00a0 Their sales rankings are abysmal.\u00a0 Whatever Penguin did to market those books, it either didn’t work or they’ve given up and moved on to other things.<\/p>\n

Now, I don’t expect to win the grand prize even if I submit to this contest.\u00a0 Most of the previous winning novels are either literary, mystery, or mainstream YA–no science fiction.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 That’s a headache I could do without.\u00a0 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.”<\/p>\n

So yeah, I won’t be submitting to this year’s ABNA contest.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Thanks but no thanks.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last year, I submitted Genesis Earth to the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest and made it to the quarter-finals.\u00a0 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… Continue reading Why I’m not submitting to the 2012 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[32],"tags":[596,89,164,516,560,577,99],"class_list":["post-6622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ge","tag-amazon-rankings","tag-career-decisions","tag-contests","tag-contracts","tag-ebook-pricing","tag-ebook-revolution","tag-science-fiction","entry"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7iXK-1IO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6622","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6622"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6622\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6631,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6622\/revisions\/6631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6622"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6622"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.onelowerlight.com\/writing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6622"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}