writing competitions

Which Bad Novel Is Perfect for You?

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This post by Katy Waldman originally appeared on Slate on 3/18/15. While authors who are interested in exploring the possibilities of the Kindle Scout program may find the article’s tone dismissive or even inflammatory, it provides some solid insight into the reader’s-eye-view.

Reading, and voting on, the books of Amazon’s new Kindle Scout program.

As the title of one of the new century’s most beloved novels reminds us, complexity can exist where we see only the absence of complication. A single color contains multitudes. That novel’s author, E.L. James, might have been commenting on the category to which her own work belongs: “bad” books. Fifty Shades of Grey is a bad book—cheesy, boilerplate, and silly, despite its silky dreams of sophistication and naughtiness. But man, the simple descriptor bad encompasses so many other vistas of badness, strange and terrible to behold. These are planets of implausibility and awfulness that revolve beyond our wildest imaginings.

Welcome to Kindle Scout.

Kindle Scout is a new initiative from Amazon, a “reader-powered” publishing platform for “new, never-before-published books.” It works like this: Authors submit their manuscripts, 5,000-word excerpts of which are posted on the website for a 30-day scouting period. During that time, Amazon members can browse the selections and nominate the ones they’d like to see published. A reader is allowed just three swappable picks at a time, to preserve the integrity of each recommendation. At the end of the trial run, a team of staffers tallies the nods, applying its own secret rubric to decide which manuscripts get released. (A Kindle Scout representative declined to elaborate on the criteria it uses.) Selected books, explains Amazon, “will be published by Kindle Press and receive 5-year renewable terms, a $1,500 advance, 50 percent eBook royalty rate, easy rights reversions and featured Amazon marketing.”

On the writer’s resource site Writer Beware, Victoria Strauss has a smart post assessing the authorial incentives and drawbacks of such a deal.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

How Short Story Writing & Flash Fiction Gets Judged in Competitions

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This post by Zena Shapter originally appeared on her site on 7/24/14.

As some of you may know, I recently judged the Australian Horror Writers’ Association’s short story and flash fiction competition. It involved reading 154 stories and over 385,000 words. At 12pt Times New Roman font, spaced at 1.5 lines, that was 1,066 pages of writing. Whoa!

I’m so glad I read it all though – thank you for sending in your wonderful stories, everyone! It was a fabulous experience. So fabulous, in fact, that I asked my writers’ group – the amazing Northern Beaches Writers’ Group – what insights they might like to have into the judging process, what might be useful to know when writing to win. I’ve answered their questions below. Hopefully you know all this already, but if you don’t then I hope it helps in some small way.

 

What do judges look for in a story?

The most important thing to realise about competitions, and slush piles, and submission calls, is that the reader reading them has a heck of a lot of reading to do. They are also, generally, reading in their spare time. So sometimes I would sit down with my laptop and a glass of wine at home, and have 30 stories to read but only an hour in which to read them.

I never managed it. 10 stories per hour was my maximum. Still, in that hour I wanted to read as much as possible. Some stories made this easy for me – they flowed well, had an interesting character doing something interesting, and showed me the action happening scene-by-scene, so I thanked them for it with my scoring. Other stories made the hour hard work, with their telling and info-dumping and my struggling to understand what was going on, and they were also scored accordingly.

 

Click here to read the full post on Zena Shapter’s site.