We're thrilled to announce that our friends at Blurb have jumped in at this eleventh hour to offer each of this year's Hot Shots a $1,000 Book Prize to go toward the creation of their own photography publication! In addition, Jen Bekman will select one of the five Hot Shots for the opportunity to work with a professional photo book editor and designer to create a printed masterpiece.

Blurb's tools already make it easy for photographers to design and sell their own books—from 20 up to 440 pages—and with this generous book credit each of the Hot Shots will be able to create books and print copies to keep, share, or give as gifts.

If you peruse Blurb, you'll find nearly forty titles created by Hot Shots over the past few years. We've got a bunch of these books on our shelves at JBP HQ, by the likes of Alison Grippo, Kurt Tong and Mike Sinclair (among others) and—to the credit of the photographers and Blurb—I'm always surprised to find that they were self-published. There's something truly wonderful about holding a bound and printed book of photographs in your hands.

Two pages from Farewell in Labrador by Kurt Tong on Blurb

By teaming up with Blurb we hope to empower even more photographers to self-publish books of their work. As an office full of photographers and bibliophiles, we look forward to seeing the books to come from this year's Hot Shots.

We'll have more details (and a Hot Shot bookshop) for you to peruse soon, but in the meantime, take a look at Blurb, then get your five best photos in before our final deadline for entries of the year: Sunday, August 22nd at 8:00 p.m. (EDT)