Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Pen to Publish Contest which celebrates the work of self-published authors, across all genres, will launch its second edition this year. The contest will be bigger than ever as it is now open to writers in Hindi and Tamil languages in addition to English. Winning authors in each language for long-form content (more than 10,000 words) will receive a prize of ₹5 lakh and a merchandising deal for the winning work, as well as 1-on-1 mentoring by a popular author.
Additionally, the contest will also accept entries for short-form content (between 2000 to 10,000 words) in Hindi, Tamil and English languages. Winners in the short-form segment, one for each language, will win ₹50,000 each. All shortlisted finalists across both forms of contents win a Kindle E-reader. To participate, authors need to publish their original and new work through Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon.in from 10th November 2018 to 9th February 2019.
In addition to customer feedback, contest entries will be judged on creativity, originality and quality of writing. Up to 5 finalists will be short-listed for each language and content form combination, and one winner will be selected from each segment. The judging panel for the contest includes best-selling authors Ashwin Sanghi, Rashmi Bansal, Divya Prakash Dubey and Sundari Venkatraman.
Sudha Nair, who won the contest last year has since published 3 more bestselling titles, says “The KDP Pen to Publish Contest has been a stepping stone in enabling me to take up writing as a full-time career. I believe that it will empower more writers sitting on the edge to turn their passion into a career.”
“After a successful first year, we are delighted to make the contest even bigger this year. This time, we aim to unearth great stories and storytellers in Hindi and Tamil languages too and make them available to readers across the world” said Sanjeev Jha, Director – Kindle Content, India.
KDP is a fast, free and easy service for authors to self-publish their books in digital format to a global audience and receive up to 70% royalties on the sale of their eBooks. At present, nearly 20% of the Top 100 books on the India Kindle Store are self-published through KDP.
The contest is open for submissions of original and previously unpublished content across all genres in English, Hindi and Tamil languages. Participants need to visit kdp.amazon.com to self-publish their book on amazon.in while enrolling it in KDP Select program. All eBooks entering the contest will be available on Kindle as well as the free Kindle app for iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, PC and Mac as well as Kindle E-readers. For more information, authors can visit www.amazon.in/pentopublish.