The History of the InnermoonLit Contests

It's almost time to announce the results of the 2007 Best First Chapter of a Novel contest. These are the best two times of year--the announcements and especially the trips to the P.O. to buy the money orders and send the prizes! I think we get as excited as the winners.

Now for a little backstory.

As long as I’ve known Brian, he’s had big ideas. About his own writing, yes, but also about ways to help sustain writing in a broader sense. Here’s someone who’s sacrificed so much and poured his all into writing and who hasn’t yet received the recognition he deserves, and already he wants to give back. It is any wonder I love him so? [I am letting my mushy flag fly freely as we just celebrated our 6 year wedding anniversary last week. I am entitled. :)]

We’ve had extensive talks about starting a small press, down to picking out names, constructing budgets, and investigating all manner of business, legal, and tax minutiae. Time and again, we got discouraged at the state of publishing. Even an editor and publisher has limited power and is at the mercy of the distributors, book store chains, and assorted other members of the filthy lucre set.

If we started our dream press, published what we loved with no considerations about what would actually sell in this world of few readers and even fewer book buyers, it would surely be an endless money pit, not to mention an insane amount of work.

So those aspirations languished, till somewhere along the way Brian had a revelation. We didn’t need to start a press; we could just start a contest. No S-corporation rigmarole, no worries about whether our selections were the most commercial, no authors angry if we published them but were unable to make their books bestsellers, and a much smaller investment of time and money.

Brian decided first thing that he wouldn’t charge entry fees, aghast as he is at how much writers have to pay nowadays to enter most contests. This was never envisioned as a for-profit enterprise but more as a service to art.

We don’t publish the winning entries because that gets us back into purchasing rights, drawing up contracts, and generally acting more like suits than either of us care to. We don’t take snail mail submissions because that would mean you and us both would have to reveal our secret locations to the whole internet. Plus, who wouldn’t rather cut, paste, and hit submit than deal with printing out hard copies and toting them to the post office?

Anyway, that was sometime early in 2005, and the contests have evolved nicely since then. We hope they will continue to grow, so spread the word, will ya?