The $1000 prize is nice...

[Karey]

$1000 prize for the winning story on your cellphone novel website? Cool! I was just on your website...and thanks for putting me on the board, Stan.

It will be fun to see where this goes. There are so many incredible young writers here that would have fun texting or emailing in their stories.

Good luck.

[Mockingbird]

Great! Good luck with your textnovel website, and good luck to the contributing writers for that $1,000 prize !

[Saoirse]

When you think about money and the publishing business, $1,000 is quite handy (and a very respectable prize, especially when you consider there's no entrance fee at TextNovel.com).

I had the pleasure of hearing the head of Imaginosis speak last October and he threw out a few typical numbers authors see in publishing--$200 is the average most publishing houses spend on marketing any one title they're publishing, so by industry standards the winner could apply 5 times the average if they chose to get behind the marketing of their winning novel. Also, as comparison, a pal of mine who has her third book coming out through a major publisher mentioned the advance for her first book was $1,000 (that, of course is measured against copies sold, so it's not necessarily a guarantee until that point in royalties is broken).

So, $1,000 without any entrance fee and with no stipulations that it's against royalties--Awesome!

I hope we continue to see even more promising writers with unique visions and voices on TextNovel.com -- I'm enjoying reading through everyone's work.

Shannon Reinbold-Gee