Tournament of Tropes Community Event Signups Open!

The first community event of 2023 is coming soon! Inspired by March Madness and the bracket mania so many people experience at this time of year, we’re conducting our own with the Tournament of Tropes!

What: A tournament of popular tropes / themes / motifs. Entrants will be shuffled into random seeds, then voting begins! There will be two rounds of voting every week. One round will start on Monday and run Mon-Thurs, the other round will start on Friday and run through the weekend. The polls will be posted as news articles on our site.

When: Collecting information from interested parties now. The tournament will start on Monday, February 20th.

Why: This is intended to be more than a simple “vote for the trope you like” bracket. We want to use this opportunity to showcase as many authors using Laterpress as possible. To that end, community participation will help make this event as successful as possible for everyone involved, both in terms of having a nice bracket of options, and working together to promote the event and the stories championed within it.

How to participate: There are two ways to enter.

1 - In the #promotions thread of our discord, post a link to one of your books, and let me know what you consider its primary tropes / themes. Listing multiple tropes is encouraged if you have several! This will make it easier to find a home for you in the bracket.

2 - Send an email to me at Nate at Laterpress dot com, including a link to your book and the primary tropes / themes. Please put "Tournament of Tropes" in the subject line.

I will be building the bracket based on tropes provided by everyone interested in participating first. I’ll consider rounding out the bracket with additional options at the end if needed. Each trope added to the bracket will have a book (or books, depending on the level of interest) assigned to it as its representative. Posts on our site about the tournament will feature polls, as well as “if you like TROPE, check out BOOK” type language showing off user’s books. (I have not determined the final language I’ll use, but the point is your book will be shown off before people vote for a trope.)

We will be featuring this event primarily via posts on our site, but also sharing the news in our newsletter and social media, and would encourage participating authors to share it out to your followers too.

COST: Absolutely none! (Unless you count your time and attention in participating.) We will not be using affiliate links in the event posts or any other promotional material we release connected to it. Any / all sales brought in through this event will be treated like direct sales for the author, where we don’t take a commission.

DEADLINE: 1pm Eastern time on Friday, February 17th. I’ll be finalizing the bracket that afternoon.