 It's my vacation, which means doing a lot of the stuff I've been putting off. Except laundry and cleaning the toilet. Though to be fair, I finally found my toilet scrubber and I only thought about using it for a few days before I actually did. That's hardly even procrastination. Speaking of procrastination, while I was exercising this skill, I searched Google for the ABNA 2015. Nope, not going to happen. A little sad, but not really. Good book contests don't last because there's not enough benefit to the host. ABNA's primary benefit was in attracting new users to Create Space, which it did before reaching a saturation point. When upping the prize to $50,000 didn't increase participation, well it had to go. In the meantime Amazon has another g̶r̶e̶a̶t̶ ̶c̶o̶n̶t̶e̶s̶t̶ idea to bypass the slush pile. It's called Kindle Scout. If you're thinking this is somewhat old news, you're right. Better late than never, as they say. The program ( is similar to Authonomy) asks readers to vote for their favorite books and in theory, weed out the bad from the good while, in theory, generating book buzz. In reality, neither ABNA or Authonomy has generated the same kind of excitement that, say, a book auction where the writer walks away with a six figure advance. Since the news of ABNA 2015's cancellation r̶e̶a̶d̶e̶r̶s̶ writers are like, "It looks amateurish if possessive apostrophes are missing as in one of them. I insta-skip any work like that." And other writer's are like, " If I have a typo, someone will highlight it in a review and hold it up as evidence, “See, self-pubbers are terrible. ”But they don’t do the same thing to traditionally published work."(comments quoted from this post.) While writers are giving a big damn, readers are like, "Huh? What's this.... hmmm." And then, like, "Oh, this video of a dog barking "hello" is trending. I better go watch it. " Anyway, here's the break down of Kindle Scout (3).
1. Beyond some major controversy, why wouldn't Amazon renew a five year auto renewable contract? They don't need to even talk to the author. Further more, one sale a year doesn't hurt and times thousands of titles, it actually adds up. Also, Amazon gets exclusive content for it's lending library, Kindle Select and audible. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the contract limits and/or excludes royalties from free, loaned or subscription distribution. Free, good and exclusive content is a big marketing tool for Kindle.
2. The average self-published book earns about $100 dollars in it's life time. A $1500 advance is 15 times that. Not bad for the average writer. 3. I didn't say I wouldn't participate =) Comments are closed.
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