Boaz Publishing, a tiny literary publisher in Albany, Calif., has created a new $10,000 award for unpublished novels. The Frances Fabri Literary Prize for Fiction honors the memory of holocaust survivor Frances Fabri, an unpublished poet and fiction writer who spent much of her later years recording oral histories of fellow survivors. Boaz publisher Tom Southern said he sees the prize as an ideal way for agents to find an outlet for “those books that they believed in, but just haven’t made it into print yet.”

In addition to the cash award and hardcover publication by Boaz, the endowment for the prize includes $5,000 for marketing. Southern said that the prize is being funded by investments from anonymous donors. The funds are sufficient for Boaz to plan a second book prize—most likely also for unpublished fiction—sometime later this year.

The deadline for the first Frances Fabri Prize is February 28. The winner will be announced April 15. Submission details can be found online at www.boazpublishing.com.

Read the full Publishers Weekly article here.

From Reuters, via Yahoo News:

A major U.S. book publisher is hoping its new Web-based writing contest can tap into the popularity of interactive competitions like hit television show “American Idol.”

As part of the “First Chapters” contest, aspiring first-time authors and members of www.gather.com can post manuscripts on that social-networking Web site, organizers from publisher Touchstone Fireside and gather.com said on Thursday.

Full story here.

From rapper to clothing designer and author, U.S. hip-hop artist 50 Cent is adding a new branch to his business empire — a book imprint of novellas set on the drug-ridden streets he grew up on.

The bullet-scarred, tattooed rapper, whose given name is Curtis Jackson, launched G-Unit Books on Tuesday in a joint venture with Simon and Schuster’s MTV/Pocket Books.

50 Cent, who took the name of a fabled New York thief, said the hip-hop novellas would feature gritty and true-to-life stories about sex, guns, cash — and the brutal short lives of players on the street.

Read the full Yahoo! News article here.

The Sobol Award, a controversial new literary contest that offered agentless writers a $100,000 first prize and a contract with Simon & Schuster for the top three winners, has been canceled.

Officials acknowledged that the prize’s entry fee and other contractual requirements had deterred would-be participants.

“No further manuscript submissions will be accepted,” award organizers announced Monday on the Sobol Web site (http://www.sobolaward.com). “All writers who have submitted manuscripts will receive a full refund of their entry fee ($85) and our copies of the manuscripts will be destroyed and deleted from our system.”

Weeks told The Associated Press on Monday that only about 1,000 manuscripts were received, far below the 50,000 that prize organizers were prepared to accept and well below the minimum of 2,000 that Simon & Schuster had required to ensure its participation.

“I think the criticism was probably quite damaging,” she acknowledged. “We should have responded more quickly, but startups don’t always do the right thing.”

Link to the Yahoo! News article

Previous posts on the Sobel Prize:
New prize for unpublished manuscripts
Sobol contest winners to get book deals

Paperback Writer has a funny list of definitions of publishing terms, à la Devil’s Dictionary:

Copyright - the author’s legal right to ownership of the work under federal copyright laws that protects the author’s only means of income; said shaky laws should collapse at any moment.

Cover Art - the design of the book jacket, generally produced in-house by the publisher’s art department, all of whom are near-sighted psychotics who never actually read the book and routinely forget to take their meds.

E-book (electronic book) - a book published in electronic format that will be illegally copied a thousand times and, no matter how well-written, will not get any respect whatsoever from most of the publishing industry.

Editor - 1) a sadomasochist; 2)) a kind but crazy person who makes a career out of working with authors to improve their manuscripts; listens to their lies, tantrums and crying fits; extends their deadlines; meets with them over mystery chicken entrees at industry cons and suffers countless bouts of depression, con crud and tinitus as a result; 3) an industry professional who drinks Maalox or Jack Daniels for lunch.

Fiction - 1) a story created by an author that is then lifted, rewritten and published by another author; 2) anything you hear when an author’s lips are moving.

Link to part 1; link to part 2. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has an equally amusing list of her own in reply here. (Links via BoingBoing)

Wired News reports on the growing popularity of reading - and writing - books on mobile phones.

A mobile phone novel typically contains between 200 and 500 pages, with each page containing about 500 Japanese characters. The novels are read on a cell phone screen page by page, the way one would surf the web, and are downloadable for around $10 each. The first mobile phone novel was written six years ago by fiction writer Yoshi, but the trend picked up in the last couple years when high-school girls with no previous publishing experience started posting stories they wrote on community portals for others to download and read on their cell phones.

“A mobile phone novel boom is definitely in place,” said Magic iLand spokesman Toshiaki Itou. “And these are people who hardly ever read novels before, never mind written one.”

Link to the Wired News article

A machine that electronically stores 2.5 million books that can then be printed and bound in less than seven minutes is to be launched early next year. It prints in any language and has an upper limit of 550 pages. The ‘Espresso’ will be launched first in several US libraries. The company behind the project - On Demand Books - predicts that, within five years, it will be able to reproduce every book ever published.

Niko Pfund, a publisher at Oxford University Press, said the evolution away from traditional bookstores was natural: ‘For hundreds of years, the industry was unchanged, then audio came out. Now it’s time for digital.’ It is estimated that the books will cost less than 1p per page - but a machine of your own costs about £25,000.

It’s not clear whether “early next year” refers to 2007 or 2008 (since the article’s from Dec. 31), but it certainly sounds way cool.
Article from Guardian Unlimited.

Literary magazines are increasingly converting to online submissions and on-screen editing, increasing efficiency, cutting costs and saving the rainforests.

Those editors reluctant to convert to online submissions have expressed concerns about economics and eyestrain. Printing out thousands of electronic submissions is not feasible for most journals, and the alternative—asking readers to stare at screens—does not appeal to editors like Stephanie G’Schwind, whose staff members at the Colorado Review consistently tell her “they don’t want to read submissions on-screen.” Michael Czyzniejewski, the editor of Mid-American Review, agrees. “Sitting at a computer terminal for so many more hours than I already do seems like a complete nightmare.”

Many editors do recognize the benefits of online submissions, however, and don’t want to miss out on the trend. “I don’t want to lose submissions because good writers are sending their work with a click of a button instead of wasting postage, stationery, and a lot of time,” says Czyzniejewski.

Before Glimmer Train switched to an online system several years ago, shouldering the stack of submissions was more than coeditors Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies could handle. “We’d come back from a three-day weekend and there would be eight mail buckets leaning against our office door,” says Burmeister-Brown. While not all writers and editors agree that the time has come for an exclusively online submission process, most would agree that eight mail buckets can hold an awful lot of paper—and in this time of heightened awareness of limited natural resources and green initiatives, the days of binder clips, SASEs, and slush piles may be numbered.

Link to the full Poets & Writers, Inc. article