RWA might have been advantagious for some, as for me, I don’t think they’re worth my time or effort. Hopefully the attitudes will change especially seeing as how many “Big girl” publishing houses are now offering eBooks. Guess none of us can be taken seriously, huh?

For 2008, as we all know, the rules changed again to say it had to be not just issued by but mass produced by the publisher, presumably in response to whatever happened last year, which was — the excess of entries? Complaints from judges about the entries? Complaints from authors who didn’t get to enter? I don’t know and I don’t remember any rumblings. Certainly nothing like this.

Shiloh, it's because of the possibility the text of the book may be changed. I don't think there's any way RWA could guarantee this wouldn't happen, even if they made authors sign a paper saying it wasn't changed. I gather it's a legal thing. But I am not on the Board, have never been on the Board, will likely never be on the Board and am not speaking for the Board.

I’m sorry, but IMO, that sounds like a bunch of bull.

If it’s a legal thing, then legal stipulations can be placed to assure the fairness/consistency across the board.

Excluding ebooks just because they ‘think’ it might be ‘easier’ to cheat is anything but fair and consistent because it’s showing a slight towards epubbed authors.

Most epubs would probably be delighted to provide hardcopy, thus removing the author from the equation.

Hardcopies could be printed by a third party.

Sorry, but it sounds like some reason concocted out of nothing just to keep ebooks from being submitted and no amount of sidestepping will change it.

As somebody mentioned, make the penalty high.

Request a volunter who will randomly compare hardcopy to ebook copy and make it clear that an additional hardcopy and ebook copy must be submitted for this very purpose.

Using that as a reason is insulting. It basically makes it out like any and every ebook author may very well be out to cheat so we’ll just exclude them all.

I’m sorry but RWA does need to catch up with the times. More and more print publishers are accepting electronic copies of manuscripts. More and more agents are accepting them.

Sooner or later, RWA is going to need to do the same. Resisting it only makes the organization itself seem like an old curmudgeon who’s screaming high and loud, I won’t change and you can’t make me. If they don’t want to read ebooks in ebook format, that is FINE. But if it’s made available in print format…that’s not so fine.

Shiloh, I think that’s the crux of the problem with RWA’s position.

And if the concern is over altering text, then make the penalty high. If you’re caught altering the text of your e-published work for entry in the RITA (even if you don’t final or win), you forfeit your membership — drummed out publicly, although the PC police probably have serious heartburn from that idea — and can never rejoin RWA or its chapters.

When dealing with those who slam small press publications, a good response is to point out that a lot of the works published there are not picked up by NY because the marketing folks don’t think the appeal is broad enough to warrant their investment. It most likely has little to do with the quality of the writing or the storyline. How wrong the marketing gurus can be is evident in the paranormal and erotic romance sub-genres, both of which took off in the small press world before NY jumped on the bandwagon.

Janet/Cricket, that’s an interesting data point. RWA is much more interested in what the small press authors can do for it than what it can do for those dues-paying, contest-judging small press members. Someone told me not long after I joined (more years ago than I care to think about) that RWA offers a lot more for the unpublished than it does for the newly-published.

Has anyone seen any figures on how the membership of RWA breaks down, in terms of those published by small presses and big publishers? I expect that balance is going to tip one of these days.

Now that will be interesting to watch. Will the small press authors take up their torches and pitchforks, yank the board off its dais and take over? Or will they knock down the doors as they stampede out, taking their dues and their vibrant ideas across the street to form Writers Unashamed of Small Press Romance (WUSPR, pronounced “whisper”)?

I’ve already said that if this situation exists next year, I will not judge and I will encourage as many people as I can to join me. If they really believe that the problem is that there aren’t enough judges so that small-press books can’t participate lets see if they can live without small-press judges.

When ebook readers are more commonplace, I hope the RITAs can shift that direction. I know anyone who loves their ebook reading method would probably love to be able to judge using that method. But that may not be for awhile.

But what if those ebook authors are willing to provide a hardcopy?

That’s an issue I’d have. if it meets the requirements for romance, and the author is willing to pay the money to provide hardcopies, I see no reason why RWA shouldn’t allow it.

That being said, I hope the current issue with the RITAs doesn’t boil down to the common misconception that small press books are lower quality since they “weren’t good enough” for NY and thus shouldn’t be allowed to take up spots in the limited RITA pool. Alas, I am seeing rumblings that support this in other places. Not pointing fingers here, though! FWIW, it doesn’t appear to be about erotic romance so much as it does small press/”bad” career choices. I understand the need to draw a line somewhere for the RITAs, but I don’t agree with the current, and very confusing, litmus test.

But the call, as I understood it, was to allow *anyone* with a book available to the public to enter. Don’t agree with that, never will.

Or maybe — being, you know, an old fogey who doesn’t get all this newfangled stuff — I’m missing something?

However, you also can’t force judges to either read six or more complete novels on a computer screen, or plunk down several hundred bucks for a reader. The first is an issue of comfort, the second financial. Age — or unwillingness to “progress” — has nothing to do with it, since plenty of younger people who would die without their Blackberrys and iPhones and MP3 players don’t have, or don’t want, ereaders.

Ten, or even five, years from now, things may be very different. But during this transition phase, we can only work with what — and who — we have.

And don’t mistake it, guys. It is punishment no matter how the heck you try to sugarcoat it. How dare those upstars eauthors take money out of the pockets of the traditionally published. Who the heck do they think they are?

Ah, the wave of the future??????

However, there would always be fees involved, even if the contest were to go all electronic at some point, for the tabulation/distribution involved (divvying up the entered books). Since that’s true, you’d never, ever get every published romance (however one wants to define that) into the contest, since not every author is even interested in taking part. And the larger the numbers entering, the less likely some people are to enter. In theory, winning “best” out of a category of 1000 instead of, say, 100, is more prestigious, but I guarantee you many authors would feel they’d be throwing away their money in a contest that huge. So the likelihood of ever having a truly all-inclusive, completely representative contest is very slim, in any case.

And RWA isn’t QVC or Amazon — the organization might be large, but the office staff is very small. Yes, many print pubbed authors have readers — but many don’t. So there’s the extra nuisance of assigning e-books only to those judges who have readers or who are willing to read 6-8 books on their computers. And if more e-pub’d authors enter than there are judges with readers…

It’s just not that easy.

And I’m going to be very frank, here — while I don’t necessarily agree with all the current restrictions (esp. with e-books), and while I’m sure there are indeed some gems among the self-pub’d books, I’ve read far, far too many self-pubbed excerpts that are hideously subpar to be comfortable with the idea of a free-for-all. Sorry, but not everyone with a story idea can write…but anyone with the wherewithal can self-pub. So think of some of those restrictions as way of pre-screening entries, to at least some degree. As a judge juggling my RITA reading around my own deadlines and other obligations, I want to know the books in my packet have been vetted in some way before I get them. Call me a snob…or call me practical. But the fact is, if the contest were completely open — and still on a first-come, first-served basis — the finalist base could very possibly be REDUCED because books must earn at least a certain grade to qualify. And while, yeah, I’ve rolled my eyes at some of the traditionally published books I’ve gotten in my packet in years past, NONE of them has been anywhere near as poorly written as MOST of the self-pubbed work I’ve seen.

Sorry to play devil’s advocate here , but having seen the RITAs go through God knows how many changes over the past fourteen years — and heard many of these same arguments — I’ve accepted that it will never be all things to all writers. Not that changes can’t, or shouldn’t, be implemented, to make things more fair/balanced, but neither do I believe everyone who’s self-published his or her first attempt at writing a novel should be allowed to enter.

Ducking tomatoes now…:)

That would make too much sense, Ms. Midnight, and is so PC it is positively scary to ‘older’ minds. Please don’t muddy the waters by being reasonable and making statements that confuse those ancient, closed brains that simply can’t process all these modern, new-fangled notions! They have a hard enough time understanding the DVD-R! An e-reader? Great googly moogly! The horror of it! The inhumanity! Quick, call the postman to come get these boxes and boxes of dead trees!!!!!

Any idea where that figure of 8,000 romance novels came from? My WAG is that it falls short of the true number. Does it include releases from every digital publisher? Does it include books from self-published authors and those who used vanity presses? Yes, a lot of those 8,000-plus are going to be also-rans as far as any award is concerned, but they should be given a shot. I believe there will be some gems in that lot.

If an organization like RWA is made up of both published and unpublished writers who pay the same dues and supposedly have the same privileges of membership, then the organization should extend its inclusionary policies across the board.

I recognize that no contest can permit 8,000 entrants in printed copies. The logistics are beyond most organizations’ capabilities. Or are they? Think about how much money those 8,000 entrants would bring in and the power of barcodes and computers. I’ll bet a small investment in infrastructure would be able to handle it, given a budget of close to a half a mil — think QVC and Amazon, both of which handle far greater numbers of items daily.

Limiting participation to the first however-many received is more fair than winnowing the numbers by excluding books based on their publisher OR author.

Or how about categories for epublished books? The RITA awards show has been trying to emulate the Oscars. Why not extend that to include “indie” recognition?

And permit digital entries of any book! Those would be cash cows for the organization, if they can be entered and judged in digital formats. No postage, no warehouse needed, just a computer with a large hard drive. That could conceivably be run with minimal additional staff, located wherever. Maybe encourage the use of digital copies by reducing the entry fee for those who “go green”. Many print-published authors have ereaders and are comfortable using them (Roberta Gellis showed me hers at RT last year and was enthusiastic about its portability, ease of viewing and storage capacity).

I know there’s been criticism of the five-judge system for each book, but since there’s no way the entire membership can read every book, that’s about the fairest way to narrow down the entrants at present. (And just letting folks toss out their faves for nomination wouldn’t work, since the “big” books are bound to get more votes — a LOT more votes — than an indie pub’d book that’s only reached a hundred readers.) As currently structured, each judge gets several books to read and score (and no, it’s not a popularity contest, since it’s not as if the folks in Houston boxing up the books know which authors know each other — I’m judging eight books this year and don’t even know by name ANY of the authors). But even if the judging pool were opened to include the non-published members (not likely, since the award has been established as a peer award), making up judging packets of 40,000 books in a matter of weeks would be an absolute nightmare. They’re simply not set up to run a contest on that scale — and what writer’s organization would be?

And before someone suggests converting to all e-books for the contest — that would mean all the judges would have to be willing to either read on their computers or buy a dedicated reader. Not gonna happen.

In any case, even if every single romance novel published in any given year were judged, judging is still subjective, and there would still be the same complaints because someone’s fave didn’t make the cut — which would be even less likely since the field would become so much larger…assuming every publisher or writer would be willing to enter. Even if there were no cap on number of entries, you can’t force people to pay a fee to enter a contest, and you can’t possibly run a contest of that size without charging something to cover the expenses involved.
As long as we ARE dealing with print books, somebody has to sort and pack those suckers, and there will be shipping charges. Since none of that is free, neither is the contest.

Since reading is such a personal experience, having five — and then another five — judges actually AGREE on a book’s being award-worthy is no small feat. So while the system is still flawed, it’s not entirely horrible, either…even if some readers still won’t “get” why any particular title won in any given year. Just the same as people don’t always agree on Oscar or Golden Globe or Emmy winners.

Let me just say, though, that I do NOT agree with the constant flipflopping on the qualification issues. That definitely needs to be settled, and soon.

Having a smaller pool of entrants diminishes the value of the award.

Today, winning a RITA means that your book is the best of a restricted group of romance novels.

Remember those cute Venn diagrams in math class? Here’s the HUGE circle that contains every romance publication of the year. Now, down in the lower corner, here is the LITTLE, TEENY-TINY circle containing the books that are eligible to compete for the RITA. You could be the best of those!

Hell-O? Who wants to win that? If you won a RITA, wouldn’t you want the satisfaction of knowing that your book was the best of all the books (of similar genre and sub-genre) out there?

A fabulous book is a fabulous book is a fabulous book, whatever the medium of publication. Whether it’s self-published, from a big-name print publisher that gave it a huge print run (and BTW, I know that some trade paperbacks are not returnable, so who tossed that into the definition?) or only available in digital formats, if it’s the best damned book published that year, shouldn’t it be recognized? Oh, and let’s add that it might be written by an author who’s ::gasp:: not a member of RWA.

That’s what bothers me.

Things like this make me long to be a goddess and in charge of things. But that’s not happened so far and I’m not willing to invest the time and effort to run for office and effect changes, so I generally keep my gripes to myself. (Hey, I’ve got books to write. And lots more to read!)