Inkshares puts experience before genre, launches its first-ever all-genre contest

Inkshares is pleased to announce its first-ever all-genre contest which launches November 7th, 2020. The purpose of the contest is to discover debut storytellers with incredible stories. The contest will run the gamut of story-type regardless of length, fact, or fiction. “The reality is that the world needs story more than ever to be entertained, to be educated, to be moved. As we get ready for a brighter 2021, we want to end a downbeat 2020 on the most upbeat thing we do at Inkshares: greenlighting great books for publication, global licensing, and development in television and film across all genres,” says Inkshares CEO Adam Gomolin. “All of us at
Inkshares feel tremendously lucky to have such an incredible community of writers to draw from, and we look forward to welcoming more into the fold during this process.” The winners of the contest will be published by Inkshares with the winning projects represented for TV/Film as well.

The contest will run from November 7th, 2020 through February 28th, 2021, and unlike prior contests where pre-orders were used to determine the winners, the top three books will be determined through a combination of community engagement, our proprietary technology, Story Machine, and independent evaluation by the Inkshares Story Board. Phase one of the contest will come to a close at 12 p.m. PST on December 20, 2020 with the top contestants announced on February 28th, 2021. Inkshares will evaluate all submissions for publishing and representation, even if they didn’t make the finals and announce additional winners throughout the first half of the year, completing selections by July 1st, 2021.

“The great thing about Inkshares is the way in which they foster new writers, often believing in works that might have trouble getting through the usual tangle of gatekeepers in more mainstream publishing,” said Christopher Huang, author of A Gentleman’s Murder, which published in 2018 and is in development for television at Endeavor Content. “And then they keep pushing and supporting well after most other people would have lost interest and moved on to the next big thing. Without them, I would not be anywhere close to where I am today.”

This year was not what we expected. A pandemic and global economic collapse, followed by large-scale protests aimed at social justice, followed by the most devastating wildfires in human memory. Like many companies, we’ve had to delay many things this year. With so many bookstore closures, we’ve opted to delay the publication of many books. And with production
halted in Hollywood, we’ve also seen production on our shows and films slow. But through all this, we’ve been heartened to see so much exceptional writing on Inkshares, as writers do what writers do: process the world and their experiences through words. We are excited to see these experiences manifest themselves in this contest.

“The Inkshares experience isn’t just about getting a book out there,” said J-F. Dubeau. “It’s about working with a passionate team who is invested in the success of your story. That begins as a novel here in North America, but stretches into international licensing and TV and film.

Inkshares has allowed A God in the Shed to find fertile ground in Hollywood beyond any of my expectations.”

Inkshares is a social platform for serious authors premised on a simple notion that we could use community, data, and analytics to understand which stories matter and why. We represent those stories in every format and territory. Our story IP has been bought in
Hollywood at unprecedented rates by the likes of Amazon, Alcon, Showtime, Lionsgate, and many other major entertainment companies. Our books have also been licensed by the major houses across the globe and have sold twenty times the industry average in North America.

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