Amazon Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Pen to Publish Contest is Back

Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Pen to Publish Contest is one of its kind competition which opens up the opportunities to self-published authors, across all genres and it will launch its second edition this year. This year, the Pen to Publish contest will get bigger with the addition of Hindi and Tamil languages in addition to English. Winning authors in each language for the long-form content of more than 10,000 words will receive a prize of Rs. 5 lakh and a merchandising deal for the winning work, along with a chance to be mentored solo by a popular author.

Commenting on the second edition of Amazon’s Pen to Publish Contest, Sanjeev Jha, Director – Kindle Content, India, said, “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.”

However, the Pen to Publish contest is also accepting entries for short-form content (between 2000 to 10,000 words) in Hindi, Tamil and English languages. In the short-form segment, winners, one for each language, will win Rs. 50,000 each and all the shortlisted finalists in all forms of the contest will win a Kindle E-reader. The contest starts on November 10, 2018, and will go on up to February 9, 2019. Between that period, authors need to publish their original and new work through Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon India.

To judge the entries, customer feedback will be taken into consideration along with creativity, originality and quality of writing. Up to five finalists will be short-listed for each language and content form combination, and one winner will be selected from each segment. The judge’s panel for the contest includes best-selling authors Ashwin Sanghi, Rashmi Bansal, Divya Prakash Dubey, and Sundari Venkatraman.

Kindle Direct Publishing is a free, fast and easy to use service that lets authors self-publish their books in digital format and receive up to 70% royalties on the sale of their eBooks. Right now, on Amazon India Kindle Store almost 20% of the Top 100 books are self-published through Kindle Direct Publishing.

To participate in the contest, authors need to visit kdp.amazon.com to self-publish their book on Amazon India 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. To know more, authors can visit this dedicated contest page on Amazon India.