The Libraro Prize

Is participating more important than winning?

Feb 20, 2026

Cover of my novel *Divine Denouements & Celestial Silhouettes*

I’ve entered the Libraro Prize with my novel Divine Denouements & Celestial Silhouettes. As a reader—you must register there first—you can read sample chapters of all the entries, plus their blurbs and the stories about their stories (what inspired them, how they were created).

Here’s my 400-character pitch:

Astronomer Emuqtu becomes High Priestess of the Temple of Ishtar in Babylon after predicting a solar eclipse. With a little help from her friends she transforms Babylon from a dilapidated city into a mesmerising metropolis, seeking Heaven on Earth. Then she arranges peace betweeen warring Media and Lydia, stabilising King Nebuchadnezzar’s reign, in exchange for her final ambition. Will she get it?

And I’ve even made a septet of haiku about it:

An astronomer

An exquisite observer

of the sky proper

Fights for liberty

Progress, equality

and diversity

Against a dark sky

Burning like a firefly

Babylon on high

From out of the blue

A celestial déjà vu

Enter Emuqtu

Ishtar’s High Priestess

A prophecy, due process

A world in distress

An apocalypse

The battle of the eclipse

All must read her lips

Forces of nature

Intrigues to nurture

A better future

And an imaginary movie poster:

Once you’ve registered, you can read other entries in the genre of your choice. They have three categories: fiction, non-fiction and children. In the fiction category, they have the following genres:

Crime
Thriller
Horror
Mystery & Suspense
Science Fiction
Fantasy
Women’s Fiction
Romance
Saga
Feminist
Spiritual
Literary Fiction
Historical
Adventure
War
Travel
Nature
Young Adult
Humorous
LGBTQ+
Erotica
Classics
Poetry
Short Story
Other

My novel is filed under both “Fantasy” and “Historical”. There are 275 entries under ‘Historical’ alone, and I haven’t even tried to count the ‘Fantasy’ entries (which will be a multitude of that). So it’s going to be hard to befound, let alone read.

Therefore, to entice you, I have a very special offer.

Unfortunately, you will have to create an account at the Libraro Prize first: https://app.libraro.com/create-account (otherwise you won’t be able to access my entry, and all the other entries). This should go fairly quickly.

Then go to my entry of the Libraro Prize (link embedded in the title): DIVINE DENOUEMENTS & CELESTIAL SILHOUETTES and read ‘The Blurb’, ‘Story about Your Story’ and—especially—the ‘Sample Chapters’.

If you leave an honest comment—negative, positive, ‘meh’, whatever, as long as it’s your honest opinion—with your name, then you can contact me here in the Substack comment section or via my email jetse (at) home (dot) nl. Once I confirm that you’ve indeed posted a comment, then I will send you an electronic copy1 of my chapbook Six Degrees of Singularity.

my chapbook *Six Degrees of Singularity*

Finally: spread the word!

The more people partake, the more people read the entries, the better the end result. At least, that’s what I hope. So tell your friends, your family, your acquaintances—the more, the merrier. Who knows, you might discover the next big name, or—failing that—your next favourite writer. May the best one win and happy reading!

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Author’s note: I thought about entering The Three Reflectors of Consensual Reality for this prize, but decided against it because I’ve already published parts of it online on this substack (and I found out about the Libraro Prize after parts of it were already online). It wasn’t strictly forbidden—as far as I can see—but would make it, I suspect, ineligible in the highly unlikely case it wins, because the prize includes a book deal, which is very hard when (parts of) it have already been published.

Also, their rules explicitly forbid entering more than once. So I chose my completed fantasy novel (I could have entered part 2 of the Consensual Reality trilogy—The Transcendence of Consensual Reality—but that also didn’t make much sense. Enter part 2 of a trilogy? Why didn’t I enter part 1 (see above)? Decisions, decisions.

A hearty welcome to new subscribers and followers, and many thanks for reading!

EPUB, PDF or—if you prefer—a Mac Pages version. Or all three. Because the chapbook contains high-res pictures (which I made myself), the file size are quite large: 43.2 MB (EPUB), 32.5 MB (PDF), and 32.7 MB (Pages);

Mar 10

I suspect that the writers who got their novel in early have a geat advantage in visibility, as they have already gained quite a few votes and comments, which will subsequently attract more readers.

I submitted my entry of February 1, and it took until February 21 until it was up, just before the submission closing deadline. I tagged my novel as both “Fantasy” and “Historical”. After the deadline closed, I counted 275 novels in the “Historical” tag alone, and I suspect there may well be more than one thousand entries under the “Fantasy” tag.

According to the latest statistics I saw—today Sunday March 8—there were some 11,039 registered readers, of which 45.95% were (or have been) active. Simple mathematics tells us this means 5072 active readers.

—If there are 1,000 novels in the competition and 5,000 active readers, then theoretically every novel can have 5 reads of their sample chapters—on average.

—If there are 2,000 novels in the competition, this number decreases to 2.5.

However, this is if one reader only reads one set of sample chapters. If they read more, the number goes up.

So it should be possible that every entry eventually gets, say 10 reads (of their sample chapters). However, what I see is that some novels accumulate well above 100 reads, while the majority struggles to get more than 1 or 2. It’s very lopsided.

Also, when I explore the entries, it seems that those with at least 10 comments or more show up on top, while those with 0 only come into view after a lot of scrolling. So once you’re down, you seem to stay down.

So what to do about it in a future Libraro Prize (if that happens)?

I’d propose keep all the blurbs, stories about the story and sample chapters invisible to the readers until all of the entries have been set up.

Then—when everybody’s entry is ready—open it up to readers. Early entrants than have no unfair advantage.

Also, maybe add a rating system—one to five stars, or 1 to 10 points—in there, so that you get not only the most read ones, but also the ones with the highest ratings (as long as a minimum amount of ratings has been reached: one rating is not representative enough).

Finally, only allow comments from readers, not from participating writers (who now try to entice each other to mutually comment), as this gives a false impression of real interest.

Otherwise it’ll become a prize for best networker and self-promoter. We’ll see later in the year.