I'll declare an interest in this post from the start - it's a bit of a plug! There's a writing competition which my nephew has entered which seems pretty good to me. You can find it at www.scriblist.com.

It's a story writing competition where you write different chapters for stories, inlcuding with an option for fantasy stories. There are prizes and royalties to win or, if you don't want to enter, you could just vote for my nephew (though I won't tell you his user name, I'll let his writing speak for itself!).

Amber

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The author of each winning chapter will be paid 1% of all royalties accrued from sales of the book. The more chapters you write, the more royalties you can earn!

The winning author of each chapter will also receive a free copy of the final book as soon as it is published.

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30 chapters means scriblist.com is keeping 70% of the royalties.

Sounds very....poetry.com.

It's just too easy. I tend to loathe the easy path.
I'm much more of a masochist than that.

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You get 1% royalty off a book you could sell yourself and make 100% off of, right?

Sounds very....poetry.com.

It's just too easy. I tend to loathe the easy path.
I'm much more of a masochist than that.

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One thing to consider, royalties are usually only a percentage (not a large percentage) of the total sales volume. So it's not like they're offering 1% of what the book makes to each winner, it's more like offering...well, we don't know how their calculating royalties for this, so they technically aren't offering anything other than to pay 1% of the royalties, which could be set at zero or so near as to make virtually no difference. But let's say that they are paying about 10% of their cover price as royalties, or perhaps some larger percentage of their net gain. So if the book is ten dollars a copy you'd get a penny for each copy sold. Well...say they sell a thousand copies, you get ten bucks.

Will they really sell a thousand copies? Maybe, maybe not. It's more likely than them selling ten thousand copies, at least. Will they really set the royalties at 10% of the cover price rather than some percentage of net, or perhaps at 5-2%? I don't know, because they don't say. But since someone inside the company (maybe the editors) will be claiming 70% of the royalties anyway, I don't know why they wouldn't be reasonable rates. Will they really make an effort to sell the book, try for a hundred thousand copies sold? They don't profit from not selling the book, so I'm sure they'll try their best, but with the terms they offer they won't attract a lot of top talent. Your story will not have any coattails to ride, being published in this collection.

Still, if they sell a couple of thousand copies and don't try to make enemies out of their winners, then you could be looking at enough to buy one of those ten pound blocks of melting chocolate. For the winners, anyway. I guess that I'd give you a story for ten pounds of melting chocolate...but not a contest winner, unless it was a pretty weak contest. Which this could be...but not everyone is going to win.

But there are a few things you are forgetting. First and foremost, this is not a contest for seasoned veterans who will definitely sell their work to top markets. In fact, they are encouraging students to participate.

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Anyone can enter. From any country. Anyone!

We are especially keen to receive submissions from younger writers which is why we are offering the extra prizes for schools, colleges and universities. We would recommend that the minimum age in order to take part in the competition is 14 years old. However, for those younger students who enjoy writing and think they might be able to write to a high standard, don't let us stop you - feel free to have a go!

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They are encouraging students and newbies and probably people who are after a little fun and pride rather than a career. We sometimes forget that not everyone who writes and certainly not everyone on this site is looking for a career in writing. And even those who hope that one day they might want to really make it big would not do so badly to sell 1,500-2,000 words of a 45,000-60,000 word book at 1% of the royalties. I've sold short stories for $5 and was glad to see them in print.

On the other hand, there is at least some chance that this Scriblist thing could become the biggest thing ever, and sell millions of copies (ka-ching!) and make the first issue winners household names. Probably the next issue would offer 2% or even 3% of the royalties to each winner, since whoever was taking the lion's share before would be embarrassed to continue to do so.

The fact of the matter is that right now, this contest appears to offer no basis for predicting what kind of stories will win, or what quality the final collection will have. I have to say that I find this somewhat off-putting. But that's just me. Or, me and some other fogies who aren't energetic enough to pursue every chance to win. It isn't Scriblist's fault that this is a new contest, one that hasn't been established. It sorta is their fault that they don't bother to say how much the royalties are, or other things that more experienced writers would like to know (like...will they exclude material that is inappropriate for minors? Their rules on this point are a little fuzzy, at best). It is their fault that the judging is going to be handled by the contestants...but leaving aside the inherent problems, their system actually seems pretty good. I'd definitely use something similar if I were having random people on the internet do the judging. I'd just try to make it so that the contestants weren't the judges, or at least were only a small minority of the judges. Perhaps I'd do it through an established premium site, so that there would be fewer judges but they'd be a more select group.

Maybe I'm just not that impressed with the quality of the entries they've got up so far. None of the synopses gave me motivation enough to join Scriblist to read more of the described work. And without having already attracted quality entries, they don't have as good a chance of attracting more serious writers, and so you have one of those chicken and egg problems.

* You may procure the publication, by a third party, of the content that you have uploaded to the Website (but no other content), but any such publication must be accompanied by an acknowledgment that the content was first published on www.scriblist.com, and you hereby agree to pay Scriblist Limited 10% of any royalties received by you in respect of any materials which you uploaded to the Website and which are subsequently published by a third party.