Long time no see, litfarmers. Blogs, man. They don’t update themselves, do they? Err. Anyway.

The Federation of BC Writers is having a competition for short fiction: Literary Writes 2008. Deadline is right around the corner, July 1, 2008, and the entry fee is $20 ($15 if you’re a member). Any genre is acceptable, and prizes are $500, $300, $150, plus publication in WordWorks and an opportunity to read at Word on the Street, Vancouver’s annual downtown literary fest.

Good luck, and let me know if you enter.

Ack! I’ve been neglecting the litfarm lately–things are crazy at my day job–and I apologize for that. I’ve got over a dozen posts in the queue, but they all need some attention first. In the meantime, to hold you over, The Guardian has an article about the boom in the self-publishing industry.

While definitive figures on sales generated by self-published books are hard to come by, there are estimates that they could be well into the billions of dollars. A report, Under the Radar by the Book Industry Study Group estimated that non-calculated sales by smaller publishers and self-publish companies could be as high as $14.2bn (£7.3bn) in 2005, the last year statistics were available.

A quick look at Lulu’s list of best-selling fiction has an author who turned his self-published novel into a book deal with St Martin’s. Admittedly, he writes somewhat Christian fiction, which is a market that’s been under served by traditional publishing houses, but even so it’s encouraging.

Another interesting site mentioned in the article is Wowio.com, an online store that sells nothing but ebooks.

So go read that. When you’re done, there ought to be some more posts here.

Just in from the TWS mailing list: BC Federation of Writers is having a contest for short fiction. Any genre is acceptable, deadline is July 1, 2008, entry fee is $20, and prizes are from $150-500, plus publication in WordWorks and the chance to read at Word on the Street in September.

More submission details here.

It’s very late notice, but my inbox informs me that the Writers @ Work Competition deadline has been extended to March 15th, 2008. There’s an entry fee of $20 and they’re looking for poetry, fiction and non-fiction. See the guidelines for more details. First prize in each genre is publication in Quarterly West, a literary journal associated with the University of Utah, tuition to their June conference and $1,500. Not too shabby.

They’ll accept excerpts from a novel, so there’s really no excuse not to send in something. Angela.

Some more good news in the friends of litfarm department. Jennica Harper, a poet, instructor at Vancouver Film School and someone I harassed at a house warming party not long ago, was just named a winner in the Comic Creation Nation contest. It’s put on by zeros2heros.com, a social networking site built for writers, artists and fans of comics (and other genre entertainment).

This means that Jennica’s script Abigail’s War is going to get made into a graphic novel, and possibly more. Check out the other winners and the writer’s guidelines. Be warned that if you’re from part of North America that’s not Canada, you probably can’t enter, because they’re partnered with a government sponsored arts organization.

Just one of the ways Canada keeps the rest of North America under its thumb.

In this age of desktop publishing, internets and other fast… things… um, why is there such a long wait between signing a publishing contract and seeing your book on the shelves? Turns out that in spite of, and in some ways because of, our fleeting relationship with news and current events, the number one way of publicizing a book remains word-of-mouth. And building that sort of buzz takes time.

The bad news is that marketing budgets are small, especially for authors who don’t have a best seller in their backlist. The good news?

Much to the anxiety of midlist writers clamoring for attention, chain stores determine how many copies of a title to buy based on the expected media attention and the author’s previous sales record. Which is why publishers say it’s easier to sell an untested but often hyped first-time author than a second or a third novel.

This sort of news makes me optimistic for first-timers. Sure, you may not be hyped, but your competition is also starved for marketing attention, so viral marketing makes more and more sense, even before you’ve signed with an agent or a publisher.

So says Paulo Coehlo, who when his publisher was none too keen about distributing digital versions of his work, set up a blog, Pirate Coelho, to help fans find P2P downloads. What was the effect? Sales. In a speech at the Digital, Life, Design conference in Munich he talked about how uploading the Russian translation of The Alchemist made his sales in Russia go from around 1,000 per year to 100,000, then a million and more. Here’s a link to a blog post with video of the speech on torrentfreak.com.

Why does it work? From the Guardian book blog:

… giving away free digital copies of books makes a lot more sense that giving away free digital copies of music. Downloading a couple of chapters allows you to see how much you might like an author unknown to you. The point being that most of us who like what we read are then likely to go on and purchase the physical copy of the book, because so few of us have the stamina to read an entire book from a screen.

Coelho is one of the biggest names I’ve heard of adopting the strategy espoused by Cory Doctorow, et al. My guess is that we’ll see free sample chapters as a mainstream marketing strategy in a year or two, if not complete works. Good news for writers just starting out: setting up a torrent of your novel could emerge as a viable (and cheap) way of bootstrapping yourself into a publishing contract.

Geist is having a short fiction contest! Snail mail a short story, maximum 500 words, fiction or non-fiction, where the action takes place in at least two time zones within Canada, along with a cover letter and $20 dollars (includes a one-year subscription) by June 1st, 2008.

Prizes are $250, $150, $100 and swell Geist gifts. Winners will be published in Geist, geist.com and selected stories will be published the thetyee.ca.

Gory details at the link above.

Mary Schendlinger, the Senior editor of Geist Magazine, cartoonist, instructor at UBC, The Writer’s Studio and editor, talks with Kootenay Co-operative Radio (scroll down to show #35) about types of editing, the sort of writing Geist buys, how to find an editor, and the term “creative non-fiction.”

Mary teaches Getting Published at TWS, which is a fantastic class that really can’t recommend highly enough as an introduction to editing, literary agents, Canadian and American publishing and a lot more.

While you’re at it, check out The Writer’s Toolbox on the Geist site.

I suppose you feverishly clicked the link, hoping for a titillating account of my friday night. Well, you were tricked! This post isn’t about my bad sex, it’s about yours. Or it’s about you writing about yours. Not that I think you’re the kind of person who has a lot of bad sex, I don’t. But I assume you’ve been around the block a few times. What? I’m not implying anything. You’re the one who… hey look, a contest!

Poor Mojo’s Almanac(k), a “weekly online literary journal featuring poetry, fiction, rants and advice from the Giant Squid” is looking for Rants on Monstrously Bad Sex.

The prize is online publication, $33 1/3 dollars (US, I believe), and your name listed as a “$33 1/3 Meritorious Boon Winner”.

Deadline is March 31st, 2008. No entry fee.