{"id":238,"date":"2008-11-17T06:00:52","date_gmt":"2008-11-17T14:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/?p=238"},"modified":"2008-11-15T13:30:20","modified_gmt":"2008-11-15T21:30:20","slug":"rita-changes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cindyprocter-king.com\/blog\/rita-changes\/","title":{"rendered":"RITA Changes"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m mailing Penny’s entry to the RITA<\/a>\u00a0contest today. Wish Penny luck! Erotic romance novellas don’t usually final in the RITAs, but a Secrets<\/a>\u00a0novella has finaled before, so you never\u00a0know. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, right?<\/p>\n

Um, not always. Recently, I was rather disappointed to find out that entry qualifications for the RITAs have changed yet again. Last year, for the 2008 contest, for the first time ever that I can recall, micro-press\u00a0books could<\/em> be entered in the RITA if <\/em>the entrant provided copies that were printed and bound by the publisher (IE. entrants could not print off and enter paper copies of their ebooks). Amber Quill Press<\/a>\u00a0prints trade paperbacks of all its novel-sized ebooks, so last year\u00a0I was able to enter RITA for the first time with BORROWING ALEX<\/a>.\u00a0I was very excited, as the same opportunity wasn’t available to me with HEAD OVER HEELS<\/a>. So I entered. That opened up another can of worms, because then I had to decide whether to enter a short novel in the Single Title category to compete against novels up to twice as long, or to enter BORROWING ALEX<\/strong> in the Series Contemporary category, the category descriptions for which included enough language loopholes\u00a0enabling me to\u00a0enter it regardless that BORROWING ALEX<\/strong> didn’t have\u00a0a number (as in numeral) on the cover, like books published by Harlequin and Silhouette do.<\/p>\n

I didn’t expect much. With judges not accustomed to reading micro-press books in the RITA, dared I hope I could compete? Well, BORROWING ALEX <\/strong>didn’t final, but it competed just fine, garnering one 9 (the top score in the contest for those not in the know) and an 8 out of the panel of five judges (IE. my peers). Yay, me. I’d hoped that by entering the RITA last year with a micro-press book I’d help pave the way for future entrants in similar circumstances. Alas, this year, anyway, it is not to be. Here is the information<\/a> from the public pages of the RWA website:<\/p>\n

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Books entered in the 2009 RITA contest must:<\/span><\/div>\n
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