5Continuing the series of Frequently Asked Questions about the West Virginia Writers, Inc., Annual Writing Competitions. To see all of the questions, please click HERE.
QUESTION: Does the guideline about a work not having been published in a "publication" with a readership of not more than 1000 refer to possible book distribution or just to periodicals?
ANSWER: Both. The guideline about a work being published refers to all types of publication that could potentially have a distribution of 1000 or more, or works published on a webpage that could receive 1000 or more viewers annually. We have also made a clarifying statement in the rules regarding self-published works, which is that if a book is self-published and either has over 1000 copies sold, printed, or is made available for sale via Amazon or Kindle or Nook or another print-on-demand service, it DOES COUNT as a published work. A thousand copies may not have actually been sold, but with an international market such as the internet and no ability for WVW to account for how many units have truly been sold, we have to err on the side of the potential sale.
The short version, though, is that self-published/print on demand is publication.