The NOTY Award

I found out about this through an unsolicited email. A press called CovingtonMoore Publishing House is accepting queries for the Novelist of the Year (NOTY) Award. Well, this is a new one on me.

I Googled CovingtonMoore Publishing House and could find little help there. So I checked Preditors & Editors and Writer Beware. I could find no mention in either place. That doesn't tell you much, does it?

I can tell you that CovingtonMoore Publishing House appears to publish only works by an author named Ara 13 who (according to his bio) won an IPPY Award for "Outstanding Book of the Year" (doesn't say which year, but you can verify here that his book DRAWERS AND BOOTHS won a bronze for "Story Teller of the Year" in 2008).

And I see that the Writer Beware blog suggests here that the IPPY is a "more established" award geared toward "independent publishers and self-published authors." Well, that's nice for Ara 13. However, that same post cautions against paying steep entry fees like $75 per title to compete in another contest, called the Next Generation Indie Book Awards. But like I said, nothing specific there about NOTY that I could find (and I wish there were a search function on that blog).

So I checked out the NOTY entry guidelines. The $80 fee isn't exactly chicken feed. Especially for a contest I've never heard of sponsored by a publisher who I've also never heard of that seems to publish only one author.

And the prize for winning? You guessed it. A publishing contract with CovingtonMoore Publishing House.

Um, okay. I'll leave it to your judgment. But I'm taking a pass on this one.

And, of course, if you have any information on this, please feel free to leave a comment.