John Caruso Wins a Prize

My friend John, who lives and writes in the midst of his amazing gardens-in-progress in Braintree, won Amazon's short-story contest this summer. The prize includes making his story, "The Art of Finding", available for purchase on amazon.com (for a nifty 49 cents). At that price everyone can read it. It's an excellent piece of work, and I feel only a twinge of envy. (The reviews are also uniformly positive, even if I do wonder a bit whether some of the reviewers read the same story I did.)


Better yet, John gets a shade under 20 cents for every copy of the story that people download. That's not much less than some publishers offer for a whole paperback novel. (When the contract first came in, John was a little scared, because it uses words like "exclusive" and "perpetuity" and phrases like "all media." Some of his fellow NWU-VT members kicked the text around for a while and decided that it really wasn't so bad -- although Amazon keeps the right to sell the story on its site indefinitely, John can sell rights to other publishers after the story has been at Amazon for six months.)

It's events like this that occasionally restore my faith in the business of writing. Even today a good writer without a large body of published work can win a contest, make some money, and impress other writers. Now if only someone who's impressed by "The Art of Finding" wants to publish a really big first novel...