Curator’s Awards
The purpose of our Curator’s Choice Awards is to provide a steady flow of stories for SOOP’s curators to review. Curators recommend stories to our Editorial Department to evaluate the quality of your manuscript and offer you a unique publishing opportunity.
Each time a “heat” of 25 qualified submissions is achieved in a specific category or anthology grouping (such as “Speculative Fiction”, or “Chills and Thrills”), the Curator will select one entry to award a $50 cash prize. This award can be issued at any time in the year. The top three entries from each heat move forward to the semi-finals, to be judged by an independent panel of judges, for consideration for additional awards and cash prizes to the authors.
Each genre category must receive at least 25 qualified submissions to guarantee a Curator’s Choice award. A story submission must be fully complete, meet our minimum editorial standards, and receive at least 50 votes to qualify for the prize. SOOP may, at its discretion, issue awards to categories with fewer than the minimum qualified submissions.
Semi-Finals
The writers that advanced to the Semi-Finals will be offered a Publishing Contract for their Qualifying Submission and will be listed on our Website as a Semi-Finalist.
Finals
The top submissions across the 25 Fiction and Non-Fiction categories will advance to the Finals and be announced on our website. Poetry will be judged as a separate category.
Our independent panels of Judges – for Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Poetry – will award the following prizes, on or after November 1st:
- 2 Grand Prizes of $500 for grand winners of Fiction and Non-Fiction.
- 1 Grand Prize of $250 for Poetry.
- 1st prize for each qualifying category – $50 cash prize, plus double royalties for their published submission.
- 2nd prize for each qualifying category – $25 cash prize plus 1.5 times standard royalties for their published submission.
- 3rd prize for each qualifying category – Free copy of a SOOP Anthology, plus standard royalties for their published submission.
