110). The Book Excellence Awards is run by Literary Excellence Incorporated, and up to now are the only awards program provided by that company–but I’m sure will change. Profiteering honors often come in clusters. Just what exactly is a profiteering award? Why are such honors a “beware”? Read on. Here are some is a post I put online in 2015 originally but is still very relevant today. I’ve updated it to reflect changes in prices and details and to then add newer profiteers that have sprung up in the past few years. If you have been reading this blog for just about any length of time, you might have guessed that I’m not a big fan of writing contests and honors.
Partly it is because so many are a waste of time, with minimal prizes, negligible prestige, and little or no true name acknowledgement. You will want to spend your energy on something that can get you nearer to building a readership–submitting for publication, or publishing by yourself? There’s also the chance of bad things in the entrance guidelines–for example, the Best Story Competition, where the grant of publishing rights is prolonged to any “alternative party” finding a copy of the admittance. Writers who don’t browse the fine print carefully enough could find themselves trapped by such procedures.
And then there are the contests/honours with a hidden agenda: earning money for the sponsor. Such honors aren’t really about honoring authors at all. There is a complex of red flags that …