CN Central: Book Competitions

Oliver - Lord of the reads: +3087

As some of you may know we’ve been busy building CompletelyNovel 2 which is going to be released very shortly. A month or two after launch we intend to launch a competition system for writing but before we launch this I would like to propose this to you and I welcome any constructive critism or suggestions.

So we’re building a competition system for helping organisations select books to publish. Anyone familiar with sites like youwriteon or Authonomy will know this kind of selection process in which the community ‘crowd sources’ potentially good books via a popularity competition.

These competitions are very popular but often don’t yield the results which are intended. A few suggestions for this failure are:

1) The competition ends up as a popularity contest among the entrants rather than the content.
2) The open nature of submissions means that all genres and books enter which doesn’t necessarily match the need of the organisation and hence doesn’t provide a valuable result.
3) The systems are limited in scope such as only one organisation sees the results or only writers take part so don’t represent the market accurately.

In our system I think the two things we need to crack are:
1) The contest needs to provide opportunity to books which are entered and excitement for the entrant.
2) The results of the competition need to be a meaningful, succinct selection of quality books in a genre which is required by the organisation.

The Proposal

• Instead of one big competition CN provides a platform in which any organisation can run a targeted competition(will get multiple competitions running at once from different organisations). The competition owners can specify the type of entries by limiting to various criteria such as book genre and past performance.
• The competition has three stages; nomination, voting and selection.
  • In the nomination phase anyone whose book meets the entry criteria can enter. The most nominated books are then entered to the second voting stage.
  • The voting stage comprises of a promotion to an audience of readers and writers encouraging people to read and vote for the books. People who vote will get a chance to win copies of a books in the contest.
  • When the voting period closes the organisation can select books based on the popularity of each book over that promotional period.

This may sound a little complicated but the nomination/vote system is a tried and tested competition format and is just as easy to enter. The difference is that the entry criteria and wide audience voting should provide meaningful results. In addition to this all entries will get a boost in promotion.

We will encourage agents, publishers and organisations such as Faber academy to take part. To incentivise further we will give them the chance to charge for entry to the voting phase to cover any costs of prizes etc.

To kick off CN would run competitions in hot genres and encourage agent participation. CN would also promote the qualifying books. Later we would like to see agents and publishers running their own competitions and getting really meaningful results.

It’s a concept right now with some holes still but we’d love to hear your thoughts so we can patch them up!

Harry - No-vel prize: +950

Hi Colin

You just may find something of interest here…
http://www.literaryfestivals.co.uk/eventcalendar.html#july

Colin - Wordsworth: +464

Thanks Harry for the info. I will certainly look it up.
I anm still waiting for a reply from both CN and a local newspaper for the project I mentioned in another thread. I hope Cn replies before I get the response from the newspaper.

Colt
A Time for Living

Bryony - Wild swan: +1577

Colin, i suggest you direct message Oli and Anna in respect of getting a response to your project question, or have you done this already? I’m sure they are busy with all the various things going on, however there is nothing wrong with reminding them.

Bryony

Colin - Wordsworth: +464

Thanks Briony. I’m not quite sure how to do that. I assumed, quite wrongly it seems, that by posting on a thread, they would pick up the project. I am still awaiting a reply from one newspaper before I consider two others. The one I have approached has a weekly reading audience of half a million. I think that would do us nicely even if we have to go it alone.

Colt
A Time for Living
(Note how I plug my book every opportunity I get)

Bryony - Wild swan: +1577

Colin just do a search under readers for Oliver Brooks and Anna Lewis, on each of there profile pages you can click send a message and the usual message pop up box will appear (the same way it does for any of us when we send a message to another member).

Best regards

Bryony

Colin - Wordsworth: +464

Thanks Briony. I have dropped a line to Anna today, maybe she can move things on a bit. One question on an entirely different thing. I notice that on Bookstreamer, you only have a portion of your book. Is it possible to edit Streamer so that I could remove chapters from mine?? (That is when I publish)

Colt
A Time for Living

Bryony - Wild swan: +1577

Hi Colin, i don’t think you can do this at the moment. I know lots of us have asked about it.

My book wasn’t published by CN in this instance but I wanted a way to share and expose it without “fleecing” myself in to giving a few years of work away for completely nothing. I hope that if people reading the excerpts really like what they read they will be happy to purchase it from the various places that it’s available as well as leaving me some feedback about it here. It is readily available from Amazon on both sides of the globe as well as direct from the publisher and some Waterstones. I have noticed that there are also quite a few independent book sellers out there selling my title.
Oliver Brooks said he would be looking at a way of limiting the streamer for books published under CN so that readers can sample it before they choose to buy it as paperback or indeed e-book.
Human nature would dictate that if someone gets to read a whole book online for nothing they won’t buy it unless they really want to own it as a paperback.

I think we need to wait until Oliver and the team have intergrated something in to the site. One other way of looking at it is you could offer free reading for a period to generate interest then lock out a certain number of chapters after that period which would hopefully mean sales for you. If you use Twitter and other social media in the right way you can advertise this and hopefully stir up enough interest.
It may be worth Alan Baker commenting here since he has full books loaded and has had good interest, not sure how it has translated in sales though. Alan?

Best regards

Bryony

Colin - Wordsworth: +464

Thank you for your reply Briony. I take your point and I too would be interested in Alan Baker’s comments on this although I believe he did make a similar point some time ago. I wrote to Anna and you will see from the posts I have written to Oli too. I am anxious to get some form of reply in case I get a reply from the newspaper. I will give it a few days more before I decide what to do about it. I have a similar idea with the paper but it would need a few ‘budding authors’ willing to give the info for inclusion in the paper. This would of course go straight to the authors address rather than via CN. Lets wait and see a few more days.

Colin

Harry - No-vel prize: +950

Hi Colin,

With you all the way…any publicity is welcome and what you have in mind is just what the doctor ordered…short of Penguin or some similar sized outfit making an offer!

All the best

H