The Wood Beyond The World Forum Amazon Breakthrough Novel Awar..

Hey, y'all,

Some of you may already know this, but for those who don't, there will be a second Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award contest.  They are accepting up to 10,000 entries in all genres from February 2, 2009 through February 8th.

Check it out.

Jeanie

Yep, I've had two other former sufferers let me kow about this already.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't they giving more advance notice of the entry dates this time?

And isn't the actual entry period a bit shorter?

Maybe they hope to get a better quality of manuscript over all by giving more advance notice of the contest. More time for entrants to polish up their babies.

I hope they've tightened up their procedure, made the rules a bit clearer for this round.

Since I don't have a new work ready I'm not planning to enter this time.  I suppose by some miracle I could finish Brothers before February, and it probably wouldn't need a ton of revision, considering how carefully I've been working, but I still don't think I could stand the stress, or to have my manuscript tied up for months. You can't query independently while your entry is still in the running.

I think I'll just plug away at Brothers, maybe post the whole thing at Authonomy when it's finally "ready," and promote it a bit over there. Or maybe just start heavily querying when I think it's good enough. Maybe post Of Two Minds at Authonomy at some point.

I learned a lot in the ABNA contest, met some great people, fell into some interesting opportunities aside from novel-writing, and I wouldn't discourage anyone from entering.  But I don't think it's for me right now.

Yeah, the entry time is definitely shorter, and they've upped the number of entries allowed from 5000 to 10,000.  They've also added a twist.  You have to submit a 300-word "pitch" in addition to your manuscript and your 5,000 word excerpt.  The judges will read the pitch only, and make the first cut to 2000 based only on the pitches.  They won't be reading your excerpt unless you make the first cut based on your pitch, or at least that's the way I read the rules. 

No pressure or anything on that score, huh?  Take your precious baby, boil it down into 300 scintillating words that describe the plot and the characters completely, define the target audience and convey your writing style and make the reader want more.

Sheesh, that's so easy!  Not!

 

Jeanie

 

Well, that's pretty much the ordinary query process. Not a bad idea, but why bother with Amazon in that case?  Why not just query agents and publishers if you think your novel's ready for the market?

 

Well, pretty much why bother period, I suppose, except that the contest provides a bit of a support system, in your fellow contestants and the online forum Amazon provides.

 

Though I like the 300 word pitch better than the 1000 character synopsis.  That was one of the things that tripped me up when I entered last year, because the severe limitation caused me to misrepresent my book -- which caused my reviewers, especially the PW reviewer who read the whole durn thing, to judge the novel differently than they might have.  That's what I tell myself anyway.

 

When we query we will have to follow pretty much this procedure, with everything hanging on the pitch. I'm trying to gear up for that while actually writing. Not sure the skill set's the same for those two tasks.