JKaiya You keep using the word 'forced' when this entire competition is voluntary. It says in the rules that any new story can, and is, welcome to participate, but in order to receive a prize, you have to be willing to sign the contract.
This implies: if you are willing to participate, you are agreeing to the rules. If you're not going to agree to the rules (and don't want to win,) there's no reason for you to participate.
I'm not saying some selected winners might decide to say 'no,' but that is them taking the rules they chose to follow (voluntarily), and deciding not to follow them. Which makes their entry null.
No author is forced to sign anything. If they are participating and want the prize at the end, they are agreeing to the rules. If they are selected for the winner, that means they are willing to say yes, in order to obtain the prize.
WN is not holding anything an author holds dear hostage, literally or figuratively.
In the end, Jkaiya, if you want the prize, you have to play their game. If you don't, then you don't. Trying to say things like "the contract isn't fair," and "WN is scamming you guys if you win!" is just strange to me. If you don't like the contracts authors are offered (something you have never seen, and have admitted that you've never seen), the easiest thing for you to do is not participate instead of making a thread about this.
All you've shown here is that you felt, personally, like WN's contract is unfair, and if you won, you don't think you'd want to sign it. That's a completely fair and valid moral question to have, but that's not how you've phrased anything here. If you wanted a discussion about that personal moral question, and what it's answer should be, you should have asked it.
You didn't phrase your initial post, pre-edit I mean, like a personal question. Instead you posed a rhetorical question (notice how WN...), and then went on to denounce the Spring Contest, as if it was rigged and unfair. When asked 'Why do you feel this way?' and 'Where did you get this information?' you go on to admit that it was all hearsay. Something you pulled from your shoulders.
You heard from other authors this amount, and then you quickly Googled some Amazon numbers to compare to the WN numbers you clearly don't have. Then you strung them all together into another accusatory world-salad.
Whats crazy here is how confident you were that you were right. With absolutely no information in front of you, you just jump to accusing WN of being dishonest.
What it looked like you were doing, was trying to prop up the few strands of information you had, and mixed them with your negative feelings. Finally trying to pass these feelings off as fact. Maybe next time... just wait for your anger to fall to a simmer before posting.
I'm not saying WN is an honest entity. That they're a hero and should be worshiped blindly. I just don't like baseless claims being thrown because you don't like them. That's dangerous and harmful.
But now that you've had your question answered, I'm glad you've decided to participate. Doesn't hurt to try, and six months from now, you could have an almost complete book!
