Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing has launched the Pen to Publish contest to recognise literary excellence in English language. Under this competition, the winning author will receive a prize of ₹10 lakh, a print publishing deal with Westland Publishing for this winning work and 1-on-1 mentoring by a popular author. The winner will be announced in early 2018 at a popular literary festival, said a statement from Amazon.
“The winner will be selected based on several criteria, including creativity, originality, commercial viability and quality of writing. Five finalists will be short-listed and one final winner will be selected from this group,” said Amazon. The judging panel for the contest includes authors Joan Collins, Chetan Bhagat and Ashwin Sanghi. It also includes KDP author Sundari Venkatraman and V.K. Karthika, who is a publisher with Westland.
Authors can participate in the contest by publishing their books using Amazon's Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). KDP is a fast, free and easy service for authors to self-publish their books in digital format to a global audience and receive up to 70% royalties on the sale of their eBooks. “Currently, nearly 20% of the Top 100 books on the India Kindle Book Store are self-published through KDP,” said Amazon.
Ashwin Sanghi, author of The Rozabal Line, Chanakya's Chant said, “As an author who started out self-published, I believe that this contest is a terrific opportunity for many aspiring authors to be discovered.”
The KDP Pen to Publish contest is open for submissions of new English language books from all genres. Participants need to visit kdp.amazon.com to self-publish their book, and participate in the contest. All eBooks entering the contest will be available on Kindle as well as the free Kindle app for iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, PC and Mac as well as Kindle e-readers. The contest is open till 10th November.
