Last week I wrote about Neoglyphic Entertainment, which responded to criticism of the rules of its Neoverse writing competition by engaging in productive dialogue and ultimately making the rules more author-friendly.

Not everyone in the small press world is so open to change. In my experience, and that of the countless authors who've contacted me about their publisher troubles, small presses are at least as likely to react to critiques of their contracts or business practices with defensiveness and anger. Or even, sometimes, attempts at retaliation.

Case in point: Almond Press, whose short story competition I featured here last July. Essentially, the competition was a way for Almond to gather free material for an anthology--the competition winner received a cash prize but none of the other entrants received any payment other than "exposure." (The anthology lineup can be seen here.) I wrote,

For the past couple of weeks I've been getting inquiries about the Neoverse Short Story Writing Competition, sponsored by Neoglyphic Entertainment.

The competition is free to enter--always a good thing--and offers cash prizes as well as anthology publication for the winners. But there was a problem: the Official Rules, which included a number of author-unfriendly provisions. All entrants were required to grant exclusive publishing rights, even though only the best 20 would be included in the anthology. While the top 10 entrants received cash prizes, entrants 11-20 got no payment at all. And Neoglyphic retained a right of first refusal for entered stories that received other publishing offers--not just an overly sweeping claim, but a conflict with the exclusive grant of rights.

I've devoted a lot of blog space to bad contest terms, but given the lure of writing contests, it's a subject that never goes out of style. I was preparing a post on the Neoverse competition when I received an email from Neoglyphic's co-founder and COO, David Ramadge, introducing himself and his company and asking for feedback. I sent back a list of questions...and to make a long story short, David and his colleagues--who were already working to change things based on advice from other experts--have re-written the rules.