Today, we’ll talk about the Nine Dots Prize. Autumn (or fall) in the Northern Hemisphere is the time for talking about awards. In the past few weeks, I’ve talked about some fairly large awards like the Nobel, and of course, the Booker has been ramping up. But there is one huge book prize that flies below the radar. It opened for entries just over a week ago, will stay open until January 27, 2025, has very few entry restrictions (certainly none excluding indies), and offers a $100,000 first prize.
ALLi News Editor, Dan Holloway
What Is the Nine Dots Prize?
The Nine Dots Prize is named after the famous creative thinking puzzle. It is a biennial award, first held in 2016, that bills itself as a creative thinking book prize. Each award cycle, it poses what it believes is one of the key questions facing humanity. This cycle, the question is, “Is data failing us?”
It’s a question I tackle almost every week in this column. It’s a question that fills writers’ forums—not to mention coffee shops, web chats, and Discord servers the world over. If you think you have an original answer that would make a 25,000- to 40,000-word book, check out the prize and consider entering. The actual eligibility criteria are very simple: “All are welcome to submit: the only stipulation is that applicants must be 18 years of age or over. Responses and the resulting book must be in English.” I recommend you look at past winners (all available open access) to get an idea of what appeals.
Amazon’s New Color Kindle
In other news, those of you who spend time on Amazon will have noticed your shopping home page has been subject to a takeover. There is only one product Amazon wants to sell me when I visit, and that’s its new reading toy: the color Kindle. It is far from the first color e-reader, of course, but it does mean that anyone who writes books with color in them might have more success selling them to Kindle readers in the near future.
