Just yesterday, I posted regarding a book competition for unpublish romance novel writers, Gather.com's First Chapters Writing Competition. Although a representative of Gather.com had asked me to post on the contest, my biggest point in the post is the need for writers to thoroughly research contests before submitting.
One problem I've seen before is contests taking all rights to all submissions, whether or not you are a winner. I think contests like those are simply attempts to get a whole bunch of copy for free.
The other thing I was concerned about with First Chapters is the requirement of posting your chapters online: online posting can be counted as first publication, ruining your chances of selling first rights to your work. The exception is if the work is posted in a membership-only forum -- that's considered pretty much the same thing as emailing your work to a select group of friends or a writers' group. Fortunately, in this case the contest submissions are open only to Gather.com members, so I decided the contest was "safe."
However, I have an update on the First Chapters Writing Competition. While reading Writer Beware this morning, I noticed a post regarding the contest. While Victoria Strauss found no problem with the rules of the First Chapters Writing Competition, she did note that there have been some problems lately with Simon & Schuster contracts. Since by submitting to the Gather.com contest you are promising to give Simon & Schuster first dibs on your book until you are eliminated, this could be a problem -- after all, if they know they have you between a rock and a hard place, how willing to negotiate will they be?
Please keep this information about Simon & Schuster in mind if you decide to submit to the First Chapters Writing Competition!
Sponsored
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Sponsored
Popular Posts
-
This is a very long post, but the information contained in it is potentially very important, so please bear with me. On Monday I read a very...
-
Please scroll down for an update on this post. My posts on Freelance Work Exchange ( now GoFreelance.com ) have always attracted a lot of h...
-
Please see the bottom of this post for an update. Quite recently, I blogged about an email I received from Rob Palmer, the president of GoF...
-
I try to keep this blog mostly writing-related, but every once in a while I see something in the news that I just have to comment about. Tod...
-
Several months ago, Rob Palmer emailed me regarding my blog posts regarding GoFreelance.com, formerly known as Freelance Work Exchange or Fr...
-
I just ran across something that seems to indicate an even greater likelihood of Laray Carr (LCP) being a scam. Apparently, Quincy Carr is ...
-
When I was writing an article today, I used the word "agreeance," and Word automatically flagged it. I was flabbergasted. Althou...
-
Occasionally I run across job ads where the client wants writers to simply reword existing articles. The idea is that they want to "bor...
-
Not long ago, I was browsing on Facebook when I saw an ad for a software that automagically generates blog posts for you. This was news to m...
-
My last post talked a lot about how I'm trying to adapt to a lack of deadlines , now that I'm working on my own projects and not fre...
No comments:
Post a Comment