You’ve got to give Jeff Bezos credit for cojones, if not business savvy. The guy still hasn’t learned to stay off the trapeze without a net.

Motoko Rich of the NY Times and Christina Warren of Mashable both report this week that Amazon is back to swinging wildly from the highwire with a club, demanding a three-year contract from publishers and a guarantee no other bookseller gets better prices. For “other bookseller” you can, of course, read “Apple.” And Bezos isn’t asking nicely—he’s on the offensive.

Well, Apple has the same sentiments about pricing. Nobody wants to be underbid.

But Bezos appears oblivious to the bad fall he took only a few months ago pulling a high-profile stunt like this. Has he forgotten. . .um, he LOST?

And whether or not Amazon and Apple get the Mexican Standoff they want, guaranteeing neither wins the pricing game, that time-lock contract is one spangly costume blowing in the wind. A three-year lockdown? In this technological climate? Is Bezos joking?

Even in Silicon Valley, they don’t know where they’re going to be in three years. There’s Super-Top-Secret Classified stuff going on everywhere, NDAs popping buttons in all directions, deadly competition for marketshare with very real, very heavy millions of dollars hanging in the balance. Lock into three years of emerging technology with one company? I wouldn’t sign a that kind of contract locking me into a high-paying job.

Steve Jobs has five of the six big publishers onboard with him—Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins, Penguin—and he’ll have Random House before he’s done. They’ve got the money, he’s got the time. He’s a wheeler-dealer. That’s what he does.

It’s not about bullying, Jeff. It’s about making someone an offer they can’t refuse. (Although it’d be nice if someone could teach Steve to pull his legs in and stop blocking the sidewalk in front of Palo Alto cafes, where he likes to do business on his cell phone.)

BUT. There is the possibility Bezos will succeed in splitting the market into Big Pubbers and Small Pubbers if he can offer small publishers deals Jobs isn’t interested in offering. Bezos is already courting the small pubs/self-pubs people. And, I have to say, that would be a fascinating development, reconfiguring Amazon’s rather tarnished persona as the “indie friend.” (Writers are indies, too, and they don’t necessarily appreciate seeing their already laughably-minimal profits chiseled even further just to promote Bezos’ stock.)

But are there enough nickels and dimes out there to balance the Ben Franklins? (See this article about The Long Tail by Chris Anderson in Wired in 2004—oddly retro for only five and a half years ago.)

And what about the reputation of a lot of what’s being self-published right now? Would Amazon come out looking like the champion of mom-&-pop businesses against the big box stores? Or just a franchise of cheap dimestore head shops?

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I’m reproducing here a blog post I wrote about indie pubishing as a guest blogger on She Writes. You’ll all recognize the reference to Pamela.

I spent yesterday morning in a fascinating conversation, a twenty-minute interview that ballooned into an hour and a half. I was talking to She Writes member Pamela Mahoney Tsigdinos, author of the independently-published Silent Sorority.

Indie publishing is at an extraordinary crossroads. Right now—today, this minute—it’s evolving out of the old vanity press model, through a veritable tsunami of slush that couldn’t get accepted by traditional publishers, into a radical new paradigm in which excellent authors deliberately choose indie over traditional publishing. They’re carving out a new publishing world, and as the stigma of self-publishing slowly disintegrates, authors can now publicly admit to their excitement over the flexibility and creative possibilities in going independent.

The truth is I’ve always kind of hankered after publishing my own work.

I’ve been writing for so long, and I have so much background in the actual mechanics of publication from my years in the composing departments of newspapers, that I’ve never been able to totally convince myself traditional publishing was worth all the effort. You pursue agents, so they can pursue acquisitions editors, so they can pursue their colleagues, so they can pursue distributors’ reps, so they can pursue booksellers, and maybe, somewhere down the line, you can sell a book to a stranger.

And, besides, I’ve been traditionally published. I know perfectly well how little an author makes. I’ve gotten used to nice, fat writing paychecks in the technical industry, and it never made any sense to pin my hopes on a career path that obviously couldn’t compare.

And now publishing houses are laying off editors in droves, agents are scrambling to make up the difference, and even award-winning publishing authors are losing their publishers. Coincidentally, the technology of ebooks and ereaders has suddenly become mainstream, along with POD and self-publishing. Six years ago, when I wrote my first annual chapter book for my son, my husband and I had to find a local bookbinder to hand bind a single copy. Now we can get it done professionally for a matter of a few bucks.

In only the last year, the independent publishing industry has exploded into an incredible primordial soup.

I began researching and blogging on this phenomenon a year ago, when I first began professionally editing fiction writers in the online community. At that time, serious professional writers were hiring independent editors, but not very many of them and not right out in front of everyone. Even six months ago agents were still telling aspiring writers, “You don’t need a editor.” (Some of them still do.) And I was blogging about the similarity between that moment in history and another moment, not so many decades ago, when publishers told aspiring writers, “You don’t need an agent.”

“The smart agents,” I said, “are going to start sending clients to independent editors.”

And now agents routinely send us aspiring writers. “The market’s very, very tough,” they’re saying. “Get all the help you can.”

In the same vein, a year ago traditional publishers were telling aspiring writers, “Don’t self-publish. No matter what your actual motivation, we will take it as incontrovertible proof that no other publishers would take you, and we won’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.” Six months later I was hearing from top acquisitions editors they were buying self-published books. “They’re proving through sales they’re really good!” Now, this morning, I heard about an author who turned to indie publishing after he’d not only been accepted by an agent and one of the big-name traditional publishers, but assigned an editor, for whom he waited quite awhile before discovering she’d been laid off. His traditionally-publishable book was dead in the water, and rather than waste any more time and energy he went with Smashwords. Any author can now hire an editor and designer, get their own ISBN and copyright, and collect all their own royalties.

I can make my book anything I like. I have complete control over my title, my cover, my design, and my words. (That’s my hand-built desk in the cover photo! That’s my irascible cat!) My book doesn’t have to fit the standard model of a likely best seller by which traditional publishers make their decisions. I can promote it however I like. I can say whatever I like.

I can go renegade.

This is one of those wild-cat moments in the history of an industry you can’t plan for, you can’t deliberately create, you can’t even always recognize when you find yourself right smack in the middle. But you can look back on it later and wish you’d been a part of it.

Indie publishing.

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To live outside the law you must be honest.
—Bob Dylan, “Absolutely Sweet Marie”

Okay, guys, this week we’re going to focus on independent publishing. Because independent publishing has problems.

The biggest one is that people don’t take it seriously. And I don’t mean the people who don’t do it. I mean the people who do.

Hey, people—you people, the ones who jump into self-publishing your first draft first novels the same year you decide to be become a writer because, you know, everyone’s getting rich on it these days, so you might as well, too—GET A GRIP.

I know we all adore our own fiction. It’s like Phantom of the Opera around my house, all these stories and half-novels and full novels and bizarre fictional forays only a mother could love. You bet. I’ve been doing this for decades. I could bathe in my stuff. I could spread it all over the floor and roll around in it, and chances are I’d actually disappear. I’ve got that much unpublishable shlock around. And you know what? I heart that crap!

However, I’ve also been around long enough to know something really, really, really important about it. It is Number 1, Class A, Best-of-the-Breed Humiliation Inducer.

Publication isn’t necessarily about getting admiration and flattery, my friends. Publication is about eyeballs. Strangers’ eyeballs. Lots and lots of strangers’ eyeballs. Lots and lots and lots and lots of indifferent or even hostile strangers’ eyeballs.

Not the eyeballs of love.

The world is not populated by your mother. Or your father. Or your spouse, best friends, or kids. Not all of us out here have your personal best interests in mind.

I saw Jamie Lee Curtis on the Tonight Show once (was it the Tonight Show? who knows? who cares?) complaining that the last time she’d been on her host had not been sufficiently adoring of her new children’s book.

“My kids were really mad at you!” she said in all sincere affrontery.

Oooh. You really don’t want Jamie Lee Curtis’ kids mad at you for not being sufficiently adoring of her new children’s book. Because they are certainly the ideal objective audience for such a thing. Is it a real blockbuster, a guaranteed Caldecott winner, the kind of book no half-way intelligent child could possibly put down? Well, those guys would know.

WAKE UP!

We’re standing on the threshold to a whole brilliant, revolutionary, unexplored panorama of the publishing future right now. Anyone can publish. And this is an opportunity that has rarely ever occurred in the history of literacy before. We are so damn lucky to be alive and writing right now!

But the more the reckless amateurs keep peeing in the pool, the harder it makes it for talented, hard-working, long-term dedicated writers to bring serious quality and large-scale respect to the world of independent publishing. If you want to become one of those talented, hard-working, long-term dedicated writers. . .yeah. You have to spend some time developing your talent, putting in long hard-working hours, dedicating yourself to the craft of writing over the long term.

Becoming a writer isn’t something you just go out and get, like a new pair of shoes.

I read a fascinating piece this morning by Henry Baum on the Self-Publishing Review about why self-publishing isn’t taken seriously. He’s talking about Lulu’s marketing of Poetry.com, which they just acquired. (I’m sorry—”Need Help Rhyming”? Are you kidding me?) I’m really fascinated by his comparison of independent publishing to the punk rock movement of the late 1970s. Does indie publishing have the same potential for greatness as indie rock and filmmaking? I think so.

I also read the piece by MCM (why the pseudonym?) this post links to. I love the idea that independent publishing can become—not a stepping-stone to traditional publishing—but a viable literary form in its own right. Are we writing in the best of times, or what?

Is there more money in traditional publishing? Yes, there certainly is. Boy, howdy. Are there more eyeballs? Absolutely. Is it a better reflection of the very best literary production of our times?

Is it, really?

What do you guys think?

(And stay tuned for my interview this week with Michelle Davidson Argyle and Davin Malasarn of the Literary Lab, who just brought out Genre Wars, along with Scott G. F. Bailey, and will be describing their experience of working with Lulu.)

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Let’s talk a little about the self-marketing tsunami. Because it is huge. It is compelling. And it is omnipresent.

Can you turn your novel into a career, if you’re just willing to do the necessary legwork?

Well, first I’d suggest you look deep in your heart and ask yourself whether or not there’s a tiny little hyperactive ADD OCD bipolar marketer secretly living there.

Gary Vaynerchuk’s marketing video for his book Crush It! is a case-in-point. Vaynerchuk has apparently succeeded in self-marketing to the extent that he’s got a whole book’s worth of advice on it. Kudos to Vaynerchuk! And his video (self-marketing his self-marketing) backs him up: as a self-marketer, he’s good.

You’ll find other writers out there writing and blogging about how they did it, they turned their book into a money-making machine, all through their native pluck and ingenuity and the utter miracle of the Internet. Their angle is always that not only did they do it, but, gosh darn it, you can, too!

On the other hand, there’s Mr. Longevity, Bob Spear over at Book Trends Blog, who has a history of self-publishing that dates back to 1989. Keep in mind that Bob has a highly-qualified specialty he was writing about, it was non-fiction, and Bob marketed his butt off. He was putting in 12-18 hour days for years, touring, speaking, giving workshops on his specialty, spending his own money (including taking out a 2nd mortgage), while simultaneously running a catalog business out of his basement, and, in his day job—yeah, he still had one—running a bookstore (the one with the 2nd mortgage). And, in the process, Bob wore himself down to a shadow. . .until he finally couldn’t take it anymore and had to quit.

Alan Rinzler got a commenter last year who said he’s looking into getting a traditional publisher now that he’s sold 65,000 copies of his self-published book. Alan replied—with what I consider admirable self-restraint, to put it mildly—that 65k is a DAMN RESPECTABLE number of self-published copies! Heck, yes, it is. Just about 55,000 more copies than you need to get a traditional publisher interested, and just about 64,927 copies more than the average self-publisher manages to pawn off on family and friends.

What’s really happening with these people?

Are these stories based on the rising wave of entrepreneurial success being brought to us by the blogosphere, in which it turns out Andy Warhol was right—in the future everyone is famous for 15 minutes? Or are they freak lightning strikes? Is it Reader’s Digest or Ed McMahon? And how can we tell?

Well, let’s crack this stuff open and find the hidden assumptions these stories are based on.

Assumption #1: IF you’re willing to do the work, you can sell 65k (or at least 10k) of your novel. You just have to do the research (read books like Crush It!), put in the hours, and have the desire. Of course, it helps a whole lot if you approach it with dogged, unswayable, death-grip determination. But. . .You can do it!

This assumption sets aside all considerations related to the book itself, as in: is there a sizable market for your subject matter? (teenage vampires) Is that market not already saturated? (whoa—teenage vampires) Are you the best person to write a book on this subject matter? Are you doing a professional job of it? And are you bringing something to this market that nobody has ever brought to it before? This also ignores the difference between marketing fiction and non-fiction. Assumption #1 is not concerned with these issues AT ALL. See Attention Deficit Disorder above.

Assumption #1 is also not concerned with the competition. Believe me, people: you have lots of competition. Way more now than twenty or even ten years ago. The rise of the supposed ease of self-marketing through the Internet has created a parallel rise in hopeful aspiring fiction authors planning to take advantage of it. And the more of you who read those self-marketers’ books, watch those videos, listen to those workshop leaders on self-marketing and believe them, the more of you who are prepping yourself this very minute—long before your novel is done—on how to go about marketing that novel into a smashing success, the more of you are fighting tooth and nail over the very same brass rings.

To paraphrase Mark Twain’s father, “Invest in readers. The blogosphere ain’t actually making any more of them.”

You don’t hear a whole heck of a lot from the people who tried self-marketing and failed. Well, obviously. They don’t want anyone to know that about them! That would mean that they alone, out of all the zillions out there trying to build a following by claiming to already have a following, blew it.

You know what I didn’t point out up above about self-marketers writing books on self-marketing? They’re still hustling to sell their books! TO YOU.

Assumption #2: IF you’ve got a sizable market for your subject matter that is not already saturated, AND you’re the best person to write a book on this subject matter BECAUSE you’re both doing a professional job and bringing something to this market nobody has ever brought to it before, THEN you are automatically qualified to be the best marketer for this book. Assumption #2 blurs the distinction between writers and marketers until it’s—hey!—invisible!

Over and over again you hear, “You are your book’s best advocate.” But are you? Just because you know your material, you know the craft of fiction, and you’ve got something unique to say, does that make you your own best salesperson? After all, sales is an industry. Marketing is an industry. The people who succeed in it (to the extent that you’ll need to succeed in order to sell 2, 10, or 65 thousand copies of your book) did not get there by being good at fiction.

Assumption #2 is not concerned with your personal strengths and weaknesses. It is not concerned with whether or not you’re actually any good at marketing, you love salesmanship, and you have experience as a marketer and education in the field, including a basic, instinctive understanding of what motivates people to act, what fires up that timeless gesture of pulling out the old wallet, as opposed to what simply leaves them flat. Assumption #2 turns a blind eye to the fact that writing fiction and marketing are two completely unrelated industries, both of which require steep, rock-strewn learning curves in order to produce even competent professionals.

Assumption #2 operates on the principle that you are, implicitly, willing to devote whatever you must to exploring this industry to its nether reaches as a newbie, sacrificing all else to the pursuit, including the time, energy, and creativity you used to put into fiction, your family, and, um, living your life.

See Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder/bipolar above.

Assumption #3: You are writing fiction IN ORDER to make a bundle; that is your goal. Assumption #3 overlooks all other considerations of the craft. It overlooks the love of the work, the joy of the process, the reason you chose—and continue to choose—fiction as your medium, as opposed to any other form of writing, such as newswriting, non-fiction, or the far-more-lucrative technical writing. Assumption #3 operates on the principle that loving fiction and loving money are one and the same thing.

Sure, we all need to make a living. I love the craft of fiction. I also have a mortgage. In fact, I live in coastal Northern California—my mortgage would probably make you choke on your writers’ workshop bagel. But loving fiction and loving getting my mortgage paid every month are not the same passion.

Are you in a position to devote the kind of time and energy (and your own money) to self-marketing that others around you do in order to succeed? Do you have kids? A spouse? A home you love? Friendly loan officers at your bank? Friends who encourage and support you every step of the way, taking hysterical collect calls in the middle of the night when you need someone to remind you why you’re doing this in the first place? Friends who stay home in order to take your calls, even if that means they get to steal your ideas and put them in their own novels while you’re out pounding the pavement?

The worst part of the whole thing is that traditional publishers are supposed to solve this dilemma for you. Remember the promise? “You give us your books, and we’ll edit, publish, sell, and promote them for you.” Promote them! They used to do that! But they’re stopping. You know why you hear people in the publishing industry plugging self-marketing everywhere you turn? Because even traditional publishers are saying it now: “We don’t market most of the books we publish anymore. You authors have to Do It Yourself.”

Think about it. Think long and hard. Are you, at heart, a writer? Or are you really secretly an aspiring marketer?

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Happy New Year 2010 to you all! I hope you had as peaceful a New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day as we did here at our house, ensconced by the fire by a lovely (dying) tree all lit up, towers of new books next to everyone’s chair, sleeping cats on every lap, and Billie Holiday singing “A Fine Romance” over the rumble of an electric model train chugging industriously around and around under the tree.

While I was tipped back in my rocker with my chocolate and Brandy Alexander (thanks to a book called, appropriately enough, Happy Hours by Indian author and columnist Bhaichand Patel—take note of the reference to the novel he’s working on at the end of the interview in the link and ask yourself, “I wonder who he’ll get to edit it?”) reading all five hundred pages of the first ever full-length detective novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (published in 1866 and still RIVETING). . .as I say, while I was doing all this, other more dedicated bloggers than I continued to come up with fascinating stuff about writing, which I will re-direct you toward today.

First and foremost, Mira points out on Mira’s List that from now on the IRS is going to be casting a much more jaundiced eye in your direction. Yeah, YOU. I hope every spec of your taxable writing income is all recorded and properly filed, because they apparently feel you guys have been less than utterly and trustingly transparent in your dealings with them in the past. God only knows why.

Cory Doctorow gave a speech in November on the digitial ownership of books, partly transcribed and posted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “How To Destroy the Book.” I don’t necessarily adhere to all Doctorow’s theories on copyright, but he’s doing some very heavily-promoted work in the realm, and I’m interested in seeing how it pans out. We’re all groping blind right now—the ground keeps shifting under our feet—but light is being cast more and more on the issue from different angles by some very smart people. (Except for what he named his daughter. That was kind of mean.)

Wil Wheaton wrote a stirring piece on self- (excuse me, “independent-”) publishing with Lulu. This is important to you, personally, because independent publishing is beginning to earn some real spurs in the industry. This past year has seen in the change, and traditional publishers are now looking more and more to independent publishing as the front-line testing ground for salable books. It is a great idea? It is properly executed? It is WELL-EDITED? And is the author 100% personally invested in marketing it, so that sales are already hefty before a traditional publisher ever has to shell out dime? Of course, like Wile E. Coyote, the next thing they’re going to notice is that if all this is true, independently-published authors don’t actually need traditional publishers. But we’ll keep our lips zipped and let that one be a special little surprise.

This is also important to you because. . .drum roll. . .we are going to independently-publish my first book in 14 years, The Art & Craft of Fiction—that’s all the old in-depth blog posts on writing that you miss so much and wish were still posted, edited into a book! Yay! It should go up for sale on this blog sometime in February or earlier, as soon as I finish getting it cleaned up and writing a few extra pieces to round it out. I looked into shopping it around to agents and, by extension, publisher’s acquisitions editors and, by further extension, publishers and, by even further extension, readers, and compared that to the amount of editing, marketing, and promotions work authors are now expected to take responsibility for even if they get past all those hurdles, and, well. . .you remember the special little surprise.

And on the subject of author marketing, Alan Rinzler re-posted (or else it came to me in a dream) an excellent post from 2008 on what criteria a traditional publisher uses in determining what advance to offer an author, with some eye-opening advice about email “direct mail” and speaking to your Kawanis Club.

Speaking of websites (yes, I have been, a LOT), George Revutsky and Dustin Kittelson of the soon-to-be-launched online marketing company MyNextCustomer gave an interview on—not the demise of Search Engine Optimization, as I originally quoted the headline—but the state of online search issues and social media marketing.

On a more casual note, Lauren Leto has analyzed readers by their favorite authors and posted this exhaustive list for those of you too lazy to do it yourselves. Are you on it? I don’t necessarily agree with all of it—I’ve never even heard of some of these authors—but it does appear I should be reading more Jorge Luis Borges. I will be starting my own list for all of us here to contribute to (I think I’ll put Kathryn in charge of the YA section), but not until I get through the rest of my chocolate.

This has nothing to do with writing, but it does demonstrate beautifully that it’s the juxtaposition of essential details that creates action and dimension.

This also has nothing to do with writing, but it does provide a nice excuse for why novels are so much harder to write now than they were ten thousand years ago.

Also, as you’ve probably noticed, we here at A. Victoria Mixon, Editor, have re-designed the website. We have plans—big plans.

• A new interview series, beginning with literary agent Donald Maass and independent editor Lisa Rector-Maass, followed by the second half of my interview with Carolyn Cassady (in which she talks in-depth about making the movie Heart Beat with Sissy Spacek), and then an interview with Guggenheim-recipient, Yaddo artist, five-time O. Henry award-winner, and biographer of both Jane and Paul Bowles, as well as dual-biographer of Isadora Duncan and Mary Cassatt, Millicent Dillon—just to start.
• A new Free Edit event, like the novel HOOKS event of last August, in which I will do Free Edits of your novel CLIMAXES. I hope to start that later this month.
• A secret parallel universe for griping, for those of you who like to gripe, on all subjects relating to fiction, including but not restricted to best sellers that should be lining bird cages, authors who should not be allowed near keyboards, and publishing horror stories from those of you with the scars to prove it. It’s not up yet, but if you keep your eyes open you’ll notice when it does go up.
• More in-depth discussion of the state of the publishing industry, leaning heavily on the way licensing and copyright have already played out in the computer industry, what’s happened in the music industry, how online communities, networking, and marketing are developing even as we speak, and the secret assumptions that lie behind a lot of the opinions being pushed out here regarding what aspiring writers should do to succeed and where and when and how and why.
• And an exciting way to get you some of those old posts back on this blog in a new less-easily-lifted format. They won’t replace the book, but supplement it, as it were. And, as an added bonus, you’ll get to see where I keep my rejection letters.

Finally: the New Year marks the end of my first year of blogging on the craft of fiction.

Thank you, all of you, for reading. Thank you for commenting! Thank you to all the great people I’ve met in this past year. Without you this blog would have gone the way of so many—six months of excitement and then sudden amnesia—but because of you I’ve leaped the abyss from a dead technical-writing career to doing the most fulfilling work in the world (can I still use that word in this decade? yes, I can, because I’m in California): editing gorgeous fiction, discovering amazing unpublished talent, working with dedicated writers who have completely given me back my faith in literature as a living, breathing, life-changing art in this day and age. And you know the condition of modern published fiction.

It’s a miracle!

Thank you—in all sincerity, from the bottom of my heart. Out of the zillions of blogs begun every year, you’ve made this one a success. You guys are my hope and joy. And you’re going to usher in a new Golden Age of Literature.

Dona Nobis Pachem.

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Fast-Breaking Bulletin from the Literary Lab
submitted by Michelle Davidson Argyle

We’d like to announce our 2009 Genre Wars Fiction Writing Contest!

We invite fiction writers to submit your 1 to 2,000-word short stories to us. The contest deadline is December 1, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. PST, and we plan to announce the winners on January 7, 2010, which marks the Literary Lab’s 1st anniversary.

With Genre Wars, we want to celebrate all genres of writing. So, whether you write science-fiction/fantasy, horror/crime, literary, romance, children’s literature/middle grade/young adult, or experimental, send in your work!

Write something new. Send something old. Polish something up. If you’ve never written a short story before, now’s your chance to try it out!

Prizes
20-30 special selections will be chosen for inclusion in the 1st Genre Wars Anthology. All of the profits from this print-on-demand publication will be donated to a writing/reading non-profit organization that will be announced in the future.

Six genre class winners will be selected, one from each of the genres listed above (assuming we have entries in all genres). Each of these stories will be posted on our blog, followed by an author interview. Each winner will also receive a $10 gift card to a book store of their choice.

One overall winner will be selected from the genre class winners. In addition to the prizes listed above, this writer will receive an additional $50 gift card to the book store of their choice.

Contest Guidelines
1. E-mail your 1 to 2,000-word short story to LiteraryLab@gmail.com before December 1, 2009 at 11:59 p.m. PST. Paste the work in the body of the e-mail with breaks between paragraphs (hit return twice). We will be reading all submissions blind, thanks to a kind volunteer who will send us the entries with all names removed. No attachments will be opened.

2. In your e-mail subject line type GENRE WARS ENTRY. In the body of the email include your name, the title of your work, word count, and which genre category you’d like to compete in: 1. science fiction/fantasy, 2. horror/crime, 3. literary, 4. romance, 5. children’s literature/middle grade/young adult, or 6. experimental–yes, you have to pick one.

3. Works must be previously unpublished, and we ask for the rights to post the winning stories online and/or in print in the anthology. Afterwards, you are free to include the story in your own collections or as a reprint in another anthology.

Judging
The judges for this contest will be the Literary Lab co-authors: Michelle Davidson Argyle, Scott G. F. Bailey, and Davin Malasarn. (We’ll temporarily post our own writing samples in the comments section.)

Please Spread The Word!
We’ve created a button for you to put on your blog posts, sidebars, and websites. Please help us spread the word. The more entries we get, the more exciting it will be for everybody! Remember, all proceeds of the Anthology go to charity.

Michell Davidson Argyle comments regularly on the A. Victoria Mixon blog under the name Lady Glamis.

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