“To have been given a platform as ginormous as the Jaipur Literature Festival, to have been able to meet authors that I admire and idolise, was extraordinarily overwhelming. I feel blessed to have had such an incredible experience on winning the contest,” says Sudha Nair, who had won Amazon’s inaugural Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) Pen to Publish contest last year, jointly with author J. Alchem.
Amazon’s literary contest is back again this year, with greater opportunities for indie authors in India.

An Even Bigger Contest
Celebrating the work of self-published authors across all genres, this year the contest invites entries from Hindi and Tamil authors as well. This will make some of the best stories and storytellers from the subcontinent available to readers across the world. KDP Pen to Publish is now open to entries in short form (between 2,000 and 10,000 words) as well as long form writing, with prizes worth more than ₹15 lakh waiting to be won. Judging the entries will be a panel of best-selling authors, Ashwin Sanghi, Rashmi Bansal, Sundari Venkatraman, Divya Prakash Dubey, Era Murugan and S. Ramakrishnan.

Winners in the short form category, one for each of the three languages, will win ₹50,000 each. All shortlisted finalists across both the short and long form content formats will win a Kindle E-reader as well. However, authors will be eligible to participate in the contest only for their original and new work through Kindle Direct Publishing on Amazon.in from 10th November 2018 to 9th February 2019.
In addition to customer feedback, the entries will be judged on creativity, originality and quality of writing. Up to five finalists will be short-listed for each language and content form combination, before the winner is selected for each individual category. To self-publish their book on amazon.in, participants need to visit kdp.amazon.com and enrol their entry in the KDP Select program.

KDP: Reaching Readers Instantly
Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing is a free and easy way for writers to make their self-published books available to readers in a digital format around the world. While retaining total editorial control over their work, authors can receive up to 70% royalties on the sale of their eBooks. At present, nearly 20% of the top 100 books on the India Kindle Store are self-published through KDP.
“I thought publishing on KDP would be complicated, but when I decided to try it out, it was very easy! A few minutes at my computer and after 14 long years, my first book was out there for the world to read!” says Sundari Venkatraman, best-selling Indie author.
Shares J. Alchem, best-selling author and joint winner of the first KDP Pen to Publish contest, “You get direct feedback on your book from your readers and reviewers. Kindle is also a great platform for spreading your work across geographies, which is very difficult for first-time authors to achieve via traditional publishing methods.”
All eBooks entering the contest will be available on Kindle as well as the free Kindle app for iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, PC and Mac as well as Kindle E-readers. For more information, authors can visit www.amazon.in/pentopublish