It’s scared me since I was 12, when I read Writer’s Digest religiously at the library every day (which, in retrospect, was my first mistake). To my twelve year old mind, it described a world full of arcane rituals, secret handshakes, nepotism, and strange protocols – and a game at which nobody made a dime to boot.

Of course, I’ve learned better in the meantime, but the terror never quite went away. For years I’ve coped by doing other things I needed to do anyway in order to go pro – focusing on craft, learning to network at cons, podcasting and learning about how to interact with an audience, building my platform, and romancing the occasional agent, but I’ve hit the point in my career where I’ve got a hell of a backlist piling up (at least, for someone at my point in their career), and a handful of fiction sales that prove that my terror (which is largely born of the sense that I don’t understand a goddamn thing about the fiction publishing culture) is well past the point of being about 75% bullshit.

So, this summer, in addition to bringing you Free Will and working on the other projects I talked about at Balticon, I’m sending everything out that is not currently under contract — and I do mean *everything.* And I’ve got a pile of treatments in front of me to keep the pipeline full once all the existing stuff is in the mail.

I was going to just do this quietly and wear my glory or shame quietly, but after some conversations at Balticon and then reading Mur’s blog post this morning, I’ve realized I’m not the only person in this boat.

I’m getting off my ass. And I’ll put up ten bucks against anyone who wants to race me. Let’s make this a proper horse race. Here’s what I’ve got in mind:

We’ll go from now till the end of the year (or perhaps we should go to next Balticon?). Everyone bets $10. Every story we submit gets 3 points. Every novel proposal we send in gets 4 points. Every nonfiction submission/query gets 1 point. Every sale – of any fiction – gets 8 points. Every sale of nonfiction gets 3 points. Any sale that pays money and has a contract counts. Non-paying and/or clickthru and/or under-the-table markets do not count.

At the end of the year, the person with the most points wins the pool (which will operate on the honor system – those of us that lose will paypal our $10 to the winner).

We can keep a running tally for this and a forum at ANMAP. We prove our submissions and sales by posting photos/scans of the query and acceptance letters.

Thoughts? Should I formalize this, start a forum dedicated to it, and get this rolling? Any ideas for how to make it better/more useful? Chime in in the comments!

—Edit—
We have a few participants, so I’ve officially opened things. You can find the rules and competition forum here.

What to look for: Blog posts containing printable PDF bookmarks at Digital Magic, Metamor City, and Literary Abominations.

What you can win: A free book, maybe two or three! (Prize details for each contest will be available at each author’s website).

Your Mission:

• Download and print the bookmarks
• Cut along the dotted lines
• Take to your local libraries and bookstores
• Leave a set near the checkout (1 pt for a stack) or put a stack inside of similar books (2 pts ea – Philippa, Chris, and Dan will each provide a list of authors to target)
• Take photos of each instance of bookmark distribution
• Send photo(s) to the author
• Each point will count as one entry of your name in the hat – so repeat as often as you wish to enter before December 20th.

Winners will be drawn December 21st.

Anyone who enters all three contests will have their names automatically entered into a second drawing – this time for a basket of tasty treats from San Francisco and New Zealand!