Women’s Prize Announces Fee
The Women’s Prize for Fiction (until this year known as the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and from 1996-2012 called the Orange Prize for Fiction) has announced a new £1,000 fee for publishers whose works appear on the 16-title longlist, prompting outcry from smallpress publishers. Galley Beggar Press called the change “catastrophic to small publishers,” noting that though one of their authors won the prize years ago, “it would have been near impossible for us to enter” if the fee had been in place then: “£1,000 isn’t small change to us.” There is already a £5,000 fee for novels that make the shortlist. Women’s Prize chair Jo Prior explains that they’ve applied to become a charity and plan to change their name to the Women’s Prize Trust, and calls the new fee “a vital part of the patchwork quilt of funding needed to sustain” the organization. The Women’s Prize says “this stipulation is subject to appeal by a publisher for whom such expenditure would prove prohibitive and may be adjusted or waived at the discretion of the Women’s Prize Trust.”
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