Speaking as a guy in the submission trenches, small entry fees are pretty common for legitimate publications. It’s a guard against being spammed, especially important in the age of AI slop. But they’re SMALL - like $5 to $15, just a way to shield them from unserious stuff and keep websites up.
Of course it’s a scam. What is the value of an ‘award’ made up by some website with no professional status or standing?
A close relative of vanity publishing. Except you don’t even get a printed book.
Moderating
Let’s drop the politics, please, unless it’s actually relevant to this thread.
Correct.
That, then, would appear to be the answer.
I mean, what, exactly, is a scam? You probably get what you pay for. If you pay the fee, they probably give you some award that you can point other people towards. Maybe you want your annoying uncle to stop nagging you about your useless writing hobby, and this will do it.
It doesn’t sound like it’s valuable in many situations. It’s certainly not a generally recognized and well regarded award, like, i dunno, the Newbury medal, or the Pulitzer prize or the Nebula award.
Many small publications, especially literary magazines, need to have these fees just to survive, and that community has long sanctified them as legitimate. They’re almost never found in sf, which is what Writer Beware, as an affiliate of SFWA, concentrates on.
This particular grift is nothing like that. No fees should ever be charged for novels, in submissions, as agents’ fees, or for prizes. No “contest” can find an award for every submission. These scammers rely on the reality that orders of magnitude more writers are working in genre than in the literary mainstream. Only the top 5% or less ever get published, which leaves the bottom 95%, virtually all of whom are unpublishably bad, scrambling for any recognition. As Willie Sutton never said, that’s where the money is.
It’s common as well for novels and other book-length manuscripts to require a submission fee for contests. While some contests and publishers have adequate funding, even many university presses’ prizes and open calls charge a submission fee. For example, the Lambda Literary Awards, which are legitimate and well-regarded, charge $65 for independent or smallbpress publishers and $115 for books from the big publishers snd large university presses. Many state book awards don’t require a fee, and I presume they receive funding from the state arts council or library system.
Again, I didn’t make myself clear. I intended the statement about novels to apply solely to the genre fiction world, not the mainstream world I had earlier mentioned.
I think it’s scammy given that they seem to mis-represent the value of the award.
However, having said that, I googled one of the testimonialist, one David M. Beers, and that’s exactly what he does, pointing people towards the award on his website.
That is 100% what this is, and that’s exactly the publication I thought of when reading this.
I remember when I was young (20s?) getting approached about being in that publication, and my first hint that it was a scam is that there was absolutely no way I would qualify for anything legitimate.