A mini-rant. Gee, coming on the heels of my bye-bye to Bebo post last week, I almost feel grouchy!<\/p>\n
Okay, last year, I entered Penny’s first novella in the RITA<\/a>. That was the only contest Penny entered. Penny did not final, but that’s not the source of my gripe.<\/p>\n This year, Penny has entered her second novella in the RITA. Now, because Penny’s novellas don’t actually release until the end of December, the January 2nd receipt date for the five copies of the book reaching RWA in Texas is impossible to meet. I can pre-order Penny’s novella anthologies on Canadian Amazon<\/a> all I want, but I won’t receive them <\/em>until mid-January. Argh. (P.S. for those who’d like the link to pre-ordering Penny’s second novella on American Amazon, here it is<\/a>).<\/p>\n For the RITA, I’m willing to pester Penny’s publisher for five copies of the anthology\u00a0and, like last year, perhaps even\u00a0hassle her to mail them to RWA for me. I mean, it’s the RITAs\u2014the Oscars of romance writing. Even though there’s a slim chance of an erotic novella finaling, entering is a chance Penny can’t pass up.<\/p>\n So, I receive the October Romance Writers’ Report (RWA’s monthly magazine, for those not in the know), and I’m thinking this year maybe I should enter Penny’s new novella in more than one contest. However, every contest listed in the October RWR has an entry receipt date of no later than January 15, 2009. Usually earlier. That’s fine and dandy if you receive copies of your books from your publisher no later than December 15th (especially when the author lives in Canada, as I do), but when you don’t get copies until mid-January for a book released the end of December<\/em>, where on earth is the author\u00a0supposed to find the time<\/em> to enter these contests?<\/p>\n Hopefully the November RWR will list published contests with more reasonable entry receipt dates\u2014like February 1st. Because I would love the chance to enter a couple of contests other than the RITA and see how Penny’s work stacks up (assuming the contests have novella categories\u2014many don’t). However, I still feel like my freedom of choice of which<\/em> contests to enter is sorely lacking. Not to mention ironic. My book is copyrighted and published in 2008, but because the release date is the end of December and I don’t physically have copies in my grubby little hands until mid-January, I can’t enter contests with an early\u00a0January\u00a0deadline. Yet I can’t enter Penny’s 2008-published novella in next year’s<\/em> contests, either. Because then I’d need a 2009 copyright\/publish date. I dunno, I<\/em> think that’s wonky.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A mini-rant. Gee, coming on the heels of my bye-bye to Bebo post last week, I almost feel grouchy! Okay, last year, I entered Penny’s first novella in the RITA. That was the only contest Penny entered. Penny did not final, but that’s not the source of my gripe. This year, Penny has entered her… Continue reading Pubbed Contest Deadlines<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,21,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-authors","category-contests","category-my-books","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}