Ark Press $10,000 Book Contest Prize Goes To Traditionally Published Author Established In Libertarian Circles

Publishing contests are one of the oldest marketing tactics in the book, and Ark Press reinvented it by offering a $10,000 advance for a book last year, trying to get aspiring authors to sign up for the Ark Press mailing list, as they would then flood the company with submissions. Now, the prize has been announced, and it’s gone to a long-time traditionally published author, Andrew Fox, while its runner-ups come from another Baen-adjacent press, Raconteur Press.

Ark Press was formed last year by Peter Thiel’s investment company after a reported unsuccessful attempt to buy Baen Books. The company poached Baen’s top author, Larry Correia, along with several of its editors, to form its core as a subsidiary of Passage Press with a focus on science fiction and fantasy.

As a marketing tactic, they announced in July 2025 that they would be having a novel writing contest in promotion of America’s 250th birthday as a semi-patriotic way to try to garner interest from their target demographic of the Baen Books crowd. While hailed as a $10,000 contest, the idea of writing a full novel on spec for their theme for a shot at a publishing contract, where this $10,000 acts as an advance, is quite a bit of work to do for no guarantee, espeically given the contest closed at the beginning of October, only giving a couple of months for authors to write and edit a full novel.

It was advertised: “We’re bringing back the Great American Novel, and we want today’s authors to write it,” said Tony Daniel, editor-in-chief of Ark Press. “America 2076 is a chance for writers to tell a great story with well-realized characters and a well-crafted setting that resonates with our motto: ‘The Humans Win in the End.’”

Months later, Ark Press announced that the prize would go to Andrew Fox, a libertarian author who’s been traditionally published by groups like Del Rey/Ballantine for two decades and has been nominated in those circles for the libertarian Prometheus Award. Whether intentional or not, it gives the public the impression that Ark Press simply gave the award to someone already in their circles.

This further compounds the appearance of nepotism, as two of the three runners-up are authors published by LawDog’s Raconteur Press, which is a longtime friend of Larry Correia and is also in the Baen Books circles.

While this doesn’t necessarily indicate anything negative about the quality of the novels, the idea of an open contest going entirely to established authors and Baen Books' friends casts a strange light on Ark Press.

Their official announcement says the winning book had already been read and praised by another traditional publishing stalwart, Gordon Van Gelder, editor of the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. “Ghostlands has the same sort of wild, anything-goes imaginative freedom that first drew me to science fiction through the works of R. A. Lafferty, Philip K. Dick, and Neal Barrett, Jr.,” said Van Gelder. “It has been years since I’ve encountered anything remotely like Andrew Fox’s novel.”

With so much traditional publishing involvement circling the same people, it appears Ark Press is simply doing more of the same with its company, as Baen Books did in the past. As much as Fox has won awards and accolades from traditional publishing, his most-read book has only 80 reviews on Amazon, which doesn’t indicate strong past sales.

Will Ghostlands break the trend, and does Ark Press have enough of their own following to cover a $10,000 advance? We will see when the book releases in September.

For a great alternative to mainstream publishing, with sci-fi spy thriller action, read The Stars Entwined on Amazon!

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