The Man Booker prize nets one lucky writer £50,000 and is one of the most respected and coveted literary awards in the world.
The Lulu Blooker prize for fiction and non-fiction, which is worth $4,000 (£2,400) and had its shortlist announced at the weekend, is considerably less well known.
In fact, when I put the word "blook" into the Guardian's internal digital archive of national newspapers it returns just two hits and one of these is a misspelling of "blood".
So what on earth is a blook? It is a book published online on a blog or similar website, or a traditionally printed and bound book which was first published online. The Blooker is awarded to the second kind of blook.
Some blooks are published on blogs like a series with the gradual publication of chapters, not unlike the way Charles Dickens and others wrote serial novels for magazines.
Increasing numbers of modern writers have turned to this kind of self-publishing - some of them after being spurned by traditional publishers - in the hope of winning readers and generating interest. Unsurprising really, after a recent Sunday Times story that can hardly have encouraged budding writers to follow the traditional route via literary agents. The paper sent the first chapter of VS Naipaul's book, In a Free State, which won the 1971 Booker Prize, to 20 agents and all of them rejected it.
The Blooker is obviously a play on words on the Booker and an amalgamation of books and blogs and was created by Lulu, an online self-publishing service based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
One well known example of a blook is the "clandestine diary" written by Salam Pax, the Baghdad blogger, during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003 which later went into print.
Pax's book was on the longlist of the Blooker but did not quite make the final cut for the shortlist.
The shortlist does, however, include another well-known but anonymously written blook - Belle du Jour: The Intimate Adventures of a London Call Girl is one of six nominations in the Blooker Prize's non-fiction category.
The other non-fiction nominations are:
All the President's Spin by Ben Fritz, Bryan Keefer and Brendan Nyhan, which had its genesis on the Spinsanity blog.
Biodiesel Power : The Passion, the People, and the Politics of the Next Renewable Fuel by Lyle Estill, the man behind the Energy Biofuels blog.
Egg Bacon Chips and Beans: 50 Great Cafes and the Stuff That Makes Them Great by Russell Davies, who runs eggsbaconchipsandbeans.com.
Julie and Julia: 365 days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment by Julie Powell, drawing on the Julie/Julia project blog.
Stone Cold Guilty - The People v Scott Lee Peterson by Loretta Dillon, which follows her blog, Observations of a Misfit.
Check out the Blooker website for the fiction prize shortlist. Winners in the categories of fiction, non-fiction and comics, and an overall winner, will be announced on April 3.
The deadline for entries for this year's prize has, alas, already elapsed but you could get writing with an eye on the 2007 award. So get blogging.
