Some great news for the Gather community: Today, Gather.com announces its short-form writing competition. The winners of this competition will have will be given the opportunity to have their stories sold on Amazon.com through their Amazon Shorts program.
Amazon Shorts is a year-old program offered on Amazon.com's site, where authors with previously published works are able to sell short stories of 2,000 to 10,000 words. On the site, located at www.amazon.com/shorts, writers like Danielle Steel and Jeffrey Deaver can sell their shorter works for $0.49. The buyer receives a digitally downloaded copy of the story to read whenever they're ready – it doesn't expire. Visitors to the Amazon Shorts site can find short stories in all genres. Before today, authors who had not published works (or published only through a vanity press) were not eligible to sell their works in the Amazon Shorts program.
Remember, this is the first of its kind opportunity for non-published authors to participate in Amazon Shorts. This could be your chance to sell your short-form work, and appear in the company of well-known published authors. Learn more at amazonshorts.gather.com.
This incredible news is exciting because it:
- Recognizes the quality of the Gather community's work
- Allows members to build their reputations on and off of Gather (just don't forget that we knew you "when"!)
- Asks the community to select who they'd like to see "make it"
- Helps Gather continue to grow the number and variety of writers who contribute to the site
Why are we doing this? Just like last fall when we introduced the Gather Short Fiction Contest, we continue to look for ways to engage the audience, help people gain visibility on the site, and provide contributors some benefit from their writing activity on Gather. We hope you agree, and that you'll submit the great stories that have been brewing on your computer for years.
This is important for another reason as well. One of the reasons Gather provides this platform is because we believe that user-generated content is changing the landscape for publishing text – in much the same way eBay empowered individual sellers or MySpace helped change the music business for indie bands.
Amazon Shorts is a great example of this, where writers can test a new story and see if the market is interested. Think of this collaboration as a way to see if "independent" writers are able to sell their work as well. Imagine the ability to test your efforts with your peers, rather than with the busy editors at publishing houses. The ability to easily download and read these stories will increase interest in them, reach new audiences, and benefit the sale of the content. We believe this will help Gather members who have not gotten a book published to compete with those who have – a major step forward for the publishing profession in this digital era.
Please join me in welcoming Amazon Shorts to Gather. We look forward to your story submissions and your help selecting Gather's best by reading and voting. The next John Updike or Maureen Dowd is out there for you to discover!
For full details on this exciting new program, click here.
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Comments: 14
I like the fact that the word range is broad (2,000 to 10,000 words) This gives us a comfortable level of flexability to experiment with.
I'm a little sketchy on what constitutes a published author. I have been paid for writing, but I've never published my own book, been published in a book (to my knowledge) or sold anything to a magazine. A little reporting, some crafting of marketing text and text for websites pretty much covers the gamut of writing I've been paid for. Combined with publishing to Gather, to my own personal website and crafting some distributed flyers for a band amounts to the total of times and venues that I've been "published" to.
Contest sounds like fun. Can't wait to get started on something.
The royalty split of $0.49 is part of Amazon's contract with the winning writers and therefore is confidential — standard in the industry. We can say however that it is a fair royalty split. As many of you have said in your comments, the big prize here is the marketability and visibility for winning authors on Amazon Shorts.