Help write a book

The AnyBook Award Competition

Can you imagine a machine that prints, binds and trims the book of your choice within 5 minutes? It actually exists! It's called the Espresso Book Machine! And The American Book Center has bought the first machine in the Netherlands and continental Europe!

Enlarge

Espresso Book Machine - source

On Thursday, November 25th, 2010 ABC will launch an exciting new service by cranking up Europe's first Espresso Book Machine for the very first time at their Amsterdam store.

With the Espresso Book Machine, millions of previously unavailable titles are now back in print! It couldn't be simpler: Choose a book from our database of 3 million titles. ABC will get to work, and within a few minutes, your book will pop out of the machine, indistinguishable from all the other books on the shelves. Your high-quality bound paperback book includes black and white illustrations and full-color cover, at no extra cost (approx. eu 12.50)!

ABC's new Espresso Book Machine is not just for books that already exist: Give them a copy of your own formatted text on a flash drive and we’ll turn it into a book! Imagine submitting your manuscript to a publisher already in book form. Or how about having your dissertation, family cookbook, memoirs or poems made into a book for in you in less time than takes to go grab a coffee!

Write ABC's First Espresso Book Machine Book!

Be a part of this printing revolution and help ABC publish a unique book by creating something on the topic Redesign the World (the theme of this year's PICNIC conference). You can write any sort of text, or conjure up any sort of image: they will consider anything and everything as long as it looks good in black and white. (for example: prose, poetry, interview, essay, cartoon, photograph, drawing)

A professional jury will select finalists from all your entries. The final decision will be made by the jury, who will select the best quality entries to be compiled into the first book. You could see your work in print and on sale in our stores by the end of November!

Submission Guidelines:

- Theme: Redesign the World
- Your own words in any form: essay, short story, poem, interview, play
- 1000 word maximum
- Written in English
- Your own graphics (illustrations/cartoons/manga/photographs) on the theme should be suitable for b/w printing
- Scanned artwork should be scanned as grayscale at 300dpi, scaled to appropriate size saved in TIFF format
- Total size of artwork should not exceed size A4

Send your submissions digitally to anybookaward@abc.nl as attachments.
Only Word, PDF and TIFF files are accepted. Be sure to include your full name, address, telephone number and title of your entry.

Deadline for all submissions Monday, October 18th at 9 am CET.

Original authorship must be asserted. There will be no correspondance with the judges. Please do not send submissions by any means other than electronically.

Prizes

First Prize: 100 Euros worth of ABC Gift Vouchers, a weekend writing course with The Amsterdam Writing Workshop and ten copies of the book.
Second Prize: 50 Euros worth of ABC Gift Vouchers and five copies of the book.
Third Prize: 25 Euros worth of ABC Gift Vouchers and five copies of the book.
Public Prize: 100 Euro Voucher to print any book (inclding your own) on the Espresso Book Machine.

The 4 prize winners will all go to lunch together with a leading publisher, and will win free participation in a workshop on "How to Publish Your Own Book". Everyone whose work is selected will get a free copy of the book too.

The first copies will be presented on November 25th, Thanksgiving Day, to Jason Epstein, emminant American publisher, co-founder of The New York Review of Books and the inspirational driving force behind this revolutionary printing machine.